June 1, 2009

Product Review: Papershow

by Meryl Evans

If you don’t have a  Tablet PC to write directly on your slides during a BBP presentation, you can always use a whiteboard as a companion to your screen.  But if you want even more flexibility to write from other places in the room, or to let your audience write on the screen, try Papershow, a more portable solution that works around the shortcomings of white boards and it works with imported PowerPoint presentations.

What Comes in the Package

The Papershow package consists of a dongle (like a USB stick), pen and pad. The pen uses the readily available AAA battery. These don’t add much weight to a briefcase or laptop bag. The set up, however, takes a bit of work on one computer and breezes on another. In plugging the dongle, nothing happens on the computer. It recognizes new hardware, but the built-in application never pops up. Just open Papershow’s dongle files through Windows Explorer like you would a CD or DVD as the next photo shows.

The pen is about the size of a whiteboard marker that’s a little longer. The pad has several pen thickness and color options so you can change them to suit your needs. The pen can transmit from six meters, almost 20 feet, away from the dongle. Papershow saves all work on the 256MB USB, so you can borrow someone’s computer and not worry about leaving any files behind.

Starting Papershow

The other computer knows exactly what to do as the application pops up asking to open the pen so the dongle can find it. Once done, the software is ready to go to work as a white board or a presentation. When Papershow starts up correctly, it’s an easy set up. The next image shows the start up window.

Playing with Papershow

In opening a presentation that I had already converted to Papershow, the application tells me I am not using the right paper (the A4 paper that comes in the kit), but I am. It turns out that I selected the wrong paper in using Paper Show for the first time. I picked A4 paper because that’s the size of the included big tablet. U.S. customers need to pick letterhead despite using the A4 tablet (it works with both). Papershow needs to have these instructions in its Quick Start package otherwise it’s hard to fix the problem.

The kit comes with printer paper for printing your slides before the presentation. You can change ink color, draw perfect squares and circles, move forward and back a slide, change the pen thickness and undo the last move. This part works beautifully and I feel like a kid playing in a sandbox — fun!

A presenter can create an interactive presentation using Papershow. For instance, post a blank slide and use it as an opportunity to ask the audience a question. Pass around the pen and pad for the audience to fill in their answers or walk around the room capturing the answers or creating drawings to emphasize a point. While PowerPoint has a feature that lets you add notes, it keeps you tied to your computer or keyboard. Papershow adds portability fiddling with anything.

The next two images show the notes and how they look on the screen. Ignore the extra notes about brainstorms — that was more experimenting.

You can print an imported PowerPoint presentation on Papershow paper (one or four slides per page) and the slides correspond with their presentation counterpart. If you tap on slide two with the pen, slide two also appears on the computer screen. The following image shows the previous presentation printed and with added notes.

Papershow can export files into PowerPoint, send as an email and create an Adobe PDF formatted file. These features work fine and give you a way to share your work with others.

Final Thoughts

Despite the application’s inconsistent cooperation (I did check the web site for troubleshooting and found no answers); it works great when it plays nice. Canson, the company behind the product, might want to consider adding features to the software that allow users to use the mouse and keyboard to interact with the Papershow document.

Papershow retails for $199.99 and you can find it at Staples. Additional notepads sell for $14.99 and 200 pages of printer paper for $19.99.

Good: Many features on special paper including shapes and lines. No installing software on computer. Bluetooth dongle works well. Printed slides’ interaction with imported PowerPoint slides. Works with most color printers.

Bad: Requires buying paper refills. Can’t use mouse or keyboard. Can’t change paper size on dongle.