Tablets versus Laptops

We all know that tablets are becoming increasingly popular devices. They are fairly small, incredibly thin, and usually pretty light; give you touch-screen capabilities; and can be fairly inexpensive. Conversely, laptops, although useful, are much heavier, bulkier, and can be a fairly substantial investment if you want one worth half its salt.

As convenient as many users find tablets for many uses, they have some limitations inherent to their designs or operating systems. Tablets are designed to be media-consuming devices; it is much easier to use your finger to tap on a link and browse through a Website than it is to use the same finger to input an e-mail.

Your device’s compatibility with your work network is likely the most critical limitation. If you have an iPad or an Android tablet and want to view or edit complex Word or Excel documents, you quickly learn how limited “productivity” apps on these platforms can be.

Which Tablet Should You Get?

The tablet you choose should largely depend on what use you want to make of it and what you are already accustomed to using. If you simply want to use a tablet to browse Websites, read e-mails, or display sales material, then just about any tablet will work fine for you. In this case, you might base your purchasing decision on whether you have an iPhone or an Android phone. If you have either phone and like how it operates, buying a tablet on the same platform will simplify your learning curve on your new device.

However, if you want to use a tablet for much of the same work you normally do on a laptop or desktop (modifying Word and Excel files, modifying PDF files, and using Windows applications), you should consider the Microsoft Surface Pro 7.

Microsoft Surface Pro 7

The Surface Pro 7 is a tablet that is similar in size, weight, and cost to an iPad, but it has a full version of Windows 10 as its operating system. This gives it the capability to have the full version of Microsoft Office installed, along with almost any other Windows program you would normally use on your work desktop. This makes it much easier to shift your work back and forth between your tablet and your work desktop without any compatibility issues; this greatly reduces the chances that your work files might become accidentally corrupted, causing you to lose hours if not days of work.

Analytics has seen instances with its own clients where trying to modify a Microsoft Office file on other tablets has resulted in adverse consequences, such as all of the text formatting being lost or the whole file itself being corrupted. This is due to the fact that all productivity apps on iPad or Android tablets are only able to mostly work with Microsoft Office files, which unfortunately means that instances arise where apps’ shortcomings cause loss of data.

When possible, it is always best to use the program that is natively intended to work with the files with which you want to work. In the case of Word and Excel files, this is Microsoft Office, which can only run on a full version of either Microsoft Windows or Apple OSX. At this time, only the Microsoft Surface Pro 2 offers a full version of either of these operating systems and allows you to utilize almost any Windows application you need in your typical workday.