Loading ...Office OneNote
January 28th, 2008Man, what a cool program this is. I discovered it when a customer of mine asked me about it. I did some research and realized that it was a program I’ve been wanting for a long time. It is essentially a computerized notebook. Not a word processor with it’s endless progression of text, but a flexible piece of paper I could add clippings and images to, organize, scribble in, just like a real notebook. The biggest difference between OneNote and a real notebook is that OneNote weighs more to lug around, and I can read my writing in it.
Office 2007 Home and Student contains OneNote.
I’ve started writing my blog posts in it. It’s really easy to grab pictures for inclusion, add to and edit. I have a page for separate topics, and can choose which to throw into a post on the blog. I don’t need to worry about uploading the pictures to my site while I compose, I can just throw them into OneNote and pull them out later. Same things for websites I want to mention, just Windows Key + S, drag a box over something on my screen, and boom, it’s in OneNote. If I want the whole page, copy and paste will work well. If you use IE, it’ll even note what the website you borrowed the information from, in case you need to return. No more reading some interesting fact, but forgetting where you saw it.
Unfortunately, despite it’s awesomeness, not many people will get access to this program. Not only is it part of the expensive MS Office Suite, but it’s only available in… Wait, scratch that. It’s available in the cheapest version of Office 2007. I was running Professional Plus 2007, which doesn’t have it. I assumed that it was only available in a higher version, so installed Ultimate (MSDN subscriptions rock). Well, that makes this post a lot more useful for people. If you already have Office 2007 on a home computer, you probably already have OneNote.
Research
Although I’ll definitely be using OneNote in place of Word for composition, I see the real strength of OneNote for me, and other wargamers, is as a research tool. It is very easy to write down quick notes in a central, searchable location. You can even search the text of images, assuming the text is legible to the built in OCR, very cool.
Composing Blog Posts in OneNote is easy
Since the program breaks your notes into Notebooks, then Sections, then Pages, it’s very easy to keep things organized and accessible , especially compared with having multiple word documents within a folder. It’s going to make tracking research notes so easy I’m actually looking for projects that require me to take notes. This is also encouraging me to paint some more miniatures and get my numerous projects moving again.
The only downside for me now is that I’m still waiting to get a notebook, so all my research with Onenote will be tied to my desktop. However, OneNote will be one of the first things I install on the notebook once I receive it. Maybe next pay…
Tyler
January 28th, 2008 at 1:51 am
This is funny. I was going to do a review of Evernote, a program similar to OneNote. I’ll ship you a message when I get mine done!
January 30th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Great, I would love to read it. OneNote is a great tool for wargamers, rpg GMs and writers, that if there’s another program that does a similar job for less, that means it’s more accessible.
Of course, I have an MSDN subscription through work, so money wasn’t an object
March 28th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
You don’t need an entire MS Office suite to get OneNote. It’s also available as a standalone product at a reasonable price. I bought my sealed product from an eBay dealer.