Well, I’ve been using the Microsoft Surface for pretty much everything lately and I have to say; Microsoft has hit the nail on the head for business users on a tablet.
If anyone has to choose between an iPad or a Surface Pro, 100% confident that the Surface Pro is a much better investment for one reason (actually two but they’re closely related): Inking and Office.
Anyone who has used inking in Office will instantly know what I’m talking about. The digitizer on the Surface Pro is amazing! It has pinpoint accuracy, and is pressure sensitive. I’ll go into detail about some of the great ways this can be used with Office applications.
OneNote
OneNote is amazing on the Surface Pro! Because the Windows can tell the “difference” between a stylus, a finger and the mouse you can do really cool things to take notes efficiently in OneNote. Need more paper? Just drag your finger anywhere to pan to some empty spot, and continue to use stylus to draw.
PowerPoint
Anyone who has to give PowerPoint presentations would greatly benefit from using the stylus on the Surface. You can simply press CTRL+P and start to draw right on the PowerPoint! Notice a mistake? Just ink your correction and PowerPoint will save the inking you make during your presentation as annotations (you know exactly where to go back and edit!).
I find it especially helpful when you have a tough question from an audience member and need a whiteboard. Just press the “W” key and bam, you have an instance whiteboard to answer the questions.
Word
As a part-time instructor grading paper submissions usually causes a large amount of physical “dead” trees. Even “paperless” submissions will result in printing of the submissions only to hand back physical copies to the students.
This semester I went completely paperless. My students submitted their labs as Word documents to our Learning Management System (LMS) where I could download the submission, turn the submission to a PDF and re-upload my feedback! No paper, and the students loved getting a digital copy of their assignment.
Closing Thoughts
In closing, I’d have to say the best investment ever made was incorporating the Surface Pro and Office into my daily routine at work. It has now replaced my laptop and tablet; one device for all my use cases. Because it runs a full copy of Windows, I can use all my windows apps including Visual Studio, and Hyper-V (many people are amazed when I run a VM on a tablet).
Will I buy a Surface Pro 2? Although the 512 GB SSD with 8 GB of RAM is tempting, I’ll stick to my original model Surface Pro until I have to upgrade.