Tablet vs Netbook/Laptop for business use

frank

frank

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Had the chairman of my local club ask me what I think of ASUS Nexus 7 by Google 7 Click Here . This would be given to the secretary of the club for the use of club business only, keeping minutes of meetings on and other pertinent club business relating to the club. It would not be allowed to be used for personal stuff.

To be quite honest I have no experience of these tablet type devices and fail to see how it can be (if it can be) pleasurable to use office type software for example MS Office main parts needed would be Word and Excel. I reckon storage would be a problem, I'm not even sure they could be connected to a portable hard drive.
I reckon a netbook or low end laptop would do the job better.

I know a lot of you younger guys use a lot of these tablet devices so I'd be grateful of any opinions on them please for business use, in particular Excel and Word.
 
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I have a nexus 7. I wouldn't like to type on it (or any other tablet) for any length of time. You can get keyboards for them, but then why not buy a laptop?

Also, you can't run excel/word on them - they are Android devices - you'd need something like the Microsoft Surface to be able to do that...
 
jonneymendoza said:
Use a laptop. Outlook and ms office are the recommended apps needed for a secretary
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Yes indeed. I've got a Nexus 7 and it's great and you can get Office suite Apps, but you wouldn't want to use them for any amount of time.

The best thing about tablets (for me) is being able to sync stuff with my desktop whilst I am on the move. I've just started using Google Keep and for such a simple App it's really useful.

Media browsing/playing is also great, but not what your secretary should need to be using.
 
Depending on budget, I believe there are convertible devices these days, in essence (as I understand it), a tablet with a docking keyboard which turns it into a laptop/netbook. Have to admit that I'm quite tempted by one of these things myself.

In her last job, my wife was given an iPad for minute keeping and some other admin tasks and found it a royal PITA, mainly due to the necessity to change file formats when transfering from the tablet to the main computer (PC rather than Mac). She ended up taking her own netbook to work and using that - apart from the ability to use the same software, it also gave her a "proper" keyboard rather than a touchscreen (she's a touch typist and so finds touchscreens weird! She's very accurate on them but keeps checking what she's typed). The other thing she disliked about the tablet was the lack of USB or card slots (and despite the fact that a USB slot might have made the thing useable for her needs, her employer wouldn't pay for the gizmo that provides one...).
 
What does the club do? Is it photography? What is the probability of wanting to do more with it in the future?

You could look at a laptop with touchscreen (asus do some nice ones which aren't that expensive).

You could use an iPad and Pages or my preferred app for note taking is One Note as it syncs with everything I use.

How old is the person that is going to use it and how IT savvy are they, this will probably decide more than anything else.
 
It's a fishing club Dale, it would be mostly text or excel files only a few lo res pics being kept on it, we have elsewhere to keep pics and have the members trained to use flickr and these sort of place.
Current temporary secretary knows almost zero on computers, I'm the one that looks after their website and forum now but I ain't getting involved in secretary duties. I'd imagine the next one voted in won't be too techy either, I'll need to set things up for them.
 
If they aren't techy, use a laptop.
 
Given all you have said about the requirements of the device Frank, then a laptop is definitely the way to go.

Tablets are brilliant devices and will eventually replace laptops as we know them (they have already made netbooks obsolete), but for now the most cost effective solution which will meet your particular requirements is a laptop.
 
I think your right, I'll try to convince them to go the laptop way. I've sent him all your replies which should help him make up his mind.

Thanks for the input guys.
 
Agree with a laptop but before your club buys MS Office have a look at Open Office -

http://www.openoffice.org/

- it does what MW Office does but is free.

Dave
 
Tringa said:
Agree with a laptop but before your club buys MS Office have a look at Open Office -

http://www.openoffice.org/

- it does what MW Office does but is free.

Dave
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But if you need to swap files between Open and MS, the layout may not be 100% compatible....
 
Thats what I need to watch for , I know a lot of club members use MS Word and if I'm most of them are not too techy with the computer, trying to advise them over the phone how to convert a word doc into something else is going to be frustrating. ;)
 
OpenOffice just opens MS Office docs, no need for conversion or anything special.

I guess you would need to be producing some sophisticated docs to upset the formatting.

You can, in fact, set OpenOffice Writer to always save as Word format, so its pretty transparent to the casual user.
 
john-oh said:
OpenOffice just opens MS Office docs, no need for conversion or anything special.

I guess you would need to be producing some sophisticated docs to upset the formatting.

You can, in fact, set OpenOffice Writer to always save as Word format, so its pretty transparent to the casual user.
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Not 100% and depends on the version of word. Also what is converted often appears different.
 
john-oh said:
I guess you would need to be producing some sophisticated docs to upset the formatting.
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Nope. First document I opened was wrong. The front page (which was essentially a few lines of text) was laid out differently.

That killed OpenOffice for me (I need to share docs with people who use Word...). No point in a WYSIWYG editor that doesn't.
 
arad85 said:
Nope. First document I opened was wrong. The front page (which was essentially a few lines of text) was laid out differently.

That killed OpenOffice for me (I need to share docs with people who use Word...). No point in a WYSIWYG editor that doesn't.
Click to expand...

yes that is correct. it is a bit daft to use any tablet except the MS pro ones for a secretarly. i mean come on think about it. tablets are for web browsing and facebook. not for working
 
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