Why OneNote?

On my blog and site, I mainly talk about customizing Office 2007. In the public newsgroups, I mainly reply to general Office, OneNote and Outlook questions as well as some PowerPoint and Word ones. In the private beta newsgroups, I am also somewhat active in the Access and Excel groups, and essentially read all client-related ones (with occassional replies). Yet, in my website update post, I announced that I will also focus on OneNote 2007 on this site and blog in the future. So…why OneNote?

• I simply love OneNote. It’s a great program.
• I always have three programs open on my computer: Outlook 2007, OneNote 2007 and Trillian (instant messaging client).
• There are lots of great sites dedicated to Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word, but hardly any dedicated to OneNote. The best resource for OneNote 2007 at this point is the OneNote team member blogs.
• OneNote 2007 is a much more complex application than OneNote 2003. The new synchronization mechanism alone has increased the complexity by a lot, and I have been spending lots of time simply explaining it in the public OneNote group.
• Without OneNote, I would have never ended up in the official Office 2007 beta and this site and blog would have never come into existence: Chris Pratley, the person in charge of OneNote, posted a message in a TabletPC forum asking for TabletPC users interested in beta testing the next version of OneNote. The first, and actually only time, that I decided to spend some time finding cool add-ons for OneNote 2003 and my TabletPC in general was shortly after he posted that message. I stumbled on it and sent an email saying I am interested to the posted address. I got an email back from Daniel Escapa, a OneNote program manager, that asked for some information about myself (address, email, phone number basically) and also told me that the OneNote 12 beta was part of the overall Office 12 beta. As a Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science who had watched an MSDN video not too long before that about the new Ribbon UI, I got very excited at that point in time. Two weeks later, I received the official email telling me that I got into the Office 12 beta, and believe me, I could not wait to get my hands on it
• A few hours after posting this, I received an email telling me that I am now a OneNote MVP. That would be another reason for this list

To summarize, OneNote 2007 is a great program that I use all the time and there is not too much information about it out there. I already had this site and post a lot in the OneNote public newsgroup, which made the decision to dedicate a part of my site and blog to it fairly easy.

A quick overview

OneNote 2007 is the one-stop location for all your notes, ideas, research and random stuff that would otherwise just end up somewhere on your hard drive. You can get content from any program directly into OneNote. Either via special add-ins that take content from a particular program and transfer it to OneNote (e.g. Outlook, IE, FireFox) or just by using the “Send to OneNote 2007″ printer. All content in OneNote is fully searchable (including text in pictures and printed content) with a fast instant search feature.

You organize your notes in as many notebooks as you want. Notebooks can be on your local hard drive, on a server, on a SharePoint server or a USB stick and OneNote 2007 has a great synching mechanism that will keep all those notes for all users nicely in sync, even if two users are editing the same page at the same time.

If you have a TabletPC, then you can make extensive use of your tablet pen everywhere in OneNote. You can also link your notes together via hyperlinks. And to top it off, you can convert anything in OneNote into a post on your blog with a few mouse clicks.

More on OneNote 2007 later…