The Beta Undercover Reporter explores OneNote 2007
Given the prevalence of notebook computers and other mobile devices, it is surprising how often you see people using a notepad and pencil – particularly when you consider how inadequate that technology actually is for editing, sorting, searching, structuring or sharing your notes. Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 was the company’s first attempt to address these issues, and now we have Office OneNote 2007 currently in Beta as part of the 2007 Microsoft Office system.
Office OneNote is designed specifically to help you capture, collate and display any type of digital information – not just text but handwriting, hand-drawn diagrams, recorded interviews or telephone calls, and even video. If you are using a Tablet PC then you can have your handwriting converted to text, in which case the text is stored alongside the originating ink data.
One of the great things about Office OneNote is the way that it makes use of screen space. Sections are accessed through coloured tabs across the top of the main notes area while the pages and sub-pages within a section appear as tabs down the right-hand side. You can drag any item from one page to another page in a different section, and you don’t have to scroll up or down a ‘document’ – it’s all right there in front of you.
Application integration
Office OneNote 2007 brings significant improvements in its integration with other applications in the 2007 Microsoft Office system. For example, once Office OneNote 2007 is installed, a new option appears in Office Outlook 2007 entitled ‘Notes About This Item’. Select a meeting from your Outlook calendar, for example, click this button and Office OneNote 2007 will open a new page ready for you to take notes, and already containing the subject, date and location of the meeting together with a link back to the appointment in Office Outlook. Notes created in this way are stored in a new ‘Unfiled Notes’ area from where they can be moved to any page in any notebook you want without breaking the link.
Not only that, but you will find that Office OneNote 2007 now boasts an option allowing you set flags that appear in the To-Do Bar of Office Outlook 2007. Change the state of the flag in one application and the change is automatically reflected in the other application. You can also manage flags from within Office OneNote 2007 through the new Note Flags Summary task pane.
Integration extends to other applications such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, where you will find a new ‘Send to OneNote’ button. Click on this and the page you are viewing is saved to a new page in Office OneNote 2007, complete with all the formatting and links. You can insert files from other applications, such as Office Word 2007 or Office Excel 2007, either as a link, as an embedded file, or as printout so that you can annotate it. This last can be done directly from the application through the new Microsoft OneNote Import printer, a particularly useful feature in Office Word 2007 as it allows you to insert just the relevant pages from a long report.
Other useful additions include the ability to hyperlink from one page to another, so adding another dimension to notebook navigation. Hitting the Tab key while typing a note automatically creates a table. There is a built in calculator, so type ‘25*70=’, hit the Enter key and Office OneNote 2007 automatically inserts ‘1,750’. Another feature that has often been requested is the Lasso which allows you to draw around a set of objects and have them grouped as a single item. Then there are the new drawing tools that make it much easier to create diagrams.
With all the different types of information that you can store, one feature you definitely need is a powerful search facility. In Office OneNote 2007, the search facility takes advantage of the new optical character recognition facilities which means that searches can encompass not just text but also words embedded within an image, such as a scan of a document or a photo. Search will even find text in audio and video files, thanks to voice recognition in eight languages.
Working together
Office OneNote 2007 extends the structural capabilities of OneNote by allowing more than one notebook. In keeping with the original screen layout, these appear as tabs down the left-hand side of the notes area and there is an ‘explorer’ facility so that you can quickly navigate your notebooks, folders and sections.
When you create a new notebook you can select from a number of templates, creating a notebook suitable for a student, for a large project or for legal information, for example. Doing this ensures you start off with a suitable set of folders, sections and pages which you can then modify and extend, perhaps saving the result as a new template. You can also select to have a new notebook only available on your computer, available on multiple computers (such as a desktop and a laptop), or stored on a server or in a shared folder so that your colleagues can work with it as well.
Shared notebooks are automatically kept synchronised and participants can work with them off-line in which case they receive and transmit updates when they reconnect. Sharing becomes even more powerful when the notebook is stored on a Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) site.
All in all this new version of Office OneNote introduces many new features that make it easier for you to work with a wide variety of information and collaborate with your colleagues. Why not download the Beta of Office OneNote 2007 now!
