The most powerful yet least known tool in the Microsoft Office Suite is definitely OneNote. The concept is simple - it's a virtual electronic notebook. I've used OneNote 2003 and OneNote 2007 and it's become a tool that I can't live without. Part of the reason why it's not as popular as it should be is because it's difficult to explain the appeal and usefulness of the application to someone who's never used it. I'll attempt to shed some light on OneNote 2007 in this article.
What is it and what does it do?
Basically, OneNote provides pages where you can write down notes and information. Well that's not so special right? You can do that in Microsoft Word. However, it's the flexibility and interface in which you can organize this information that sets it apart. First of all the paradigm is that of a notebook. The pages are automatically divided into notebooks, sections, pages, and sub pages, just like a physical notebook. So, as soon as you start the application, you are on a page of a section in a notebook. This natural hierarchy lends itself to easy organization and more importantly reorganization of important information. People tend not to immediately plan out an entire structure of how they want to organize all the information and documents that encompass all aspects of their lives. That would be a full time job in and of itself. Instead, we tend to think and work on a micro level and along the way, a structure and hierarchy naturally forms by itself.
For example, say you want to start a todo list of things to get done today. You'd probably start writing things down on a scrap of paper. Later, you might decide that you need a separate shopping list. So you get another piece of paper and make another list. Still later you figure out that within your shopping list, you have a whole bunch of things you need to buy at the grocery store and other things at the hardware store. In OneNote, you don't have to plan out the whole layout and of how to organize your lists before hand.
As you create them, you'll realize that you might need a notebook of lists, and within the notebook you might need separate sections for different types of lists. In this case, maybe you'd make a section for things to do, and another section for shopping. Within the shopping section, you'll naturally conclude, that you would like to have a page exclusively for things to buy at the grocery store and another for the hardware store. This is a much more natural way of working compared to, sitting down and planning out all the possible lists that might come up in your life and figuring out how to organize them. OneNote can change and adapt to your needs because the interface is very well thought out and is very flexible.
To take the example a little further, one of the things on your todo list might be to renovate the basement of your house. Now, this sounds like a big project. Maybe you need an entire page to write down ideas for tiling the floor in the basement. One page where you can think about and plan out how much money you want to spend, what materials you need etc… You can make a subpage to your todo list that will include details about this specific todo item. So, as you work, you can see that things can easily stay organized without much planning beforehand.
OneNote is designed in such a way that you can add free form text anywhere on a page. Just as if you were writing on a real notebook. It includes other really handy features such as automatic OCR scanning of text in any image that is pasted onto a OneNote page. The text is immediately searchable and the function works surprisingly well. You can insert files or links to files, you can password protect individual pages, and OneNote has excellent synchronization and collaboration features. You can share notebooks such that changes made by one computer will be synchronized with all the computers that are sharing the notebook. You can also do a Live Sharing Session where OneNote acts as a virtual white board among multiple computers. When one person starts typing or drawing on a page, the other users see it in real time.
There are a lot of other useful features not covered here, so if you have Microsoft Office, give OneNote a try. If you're like me, once you start using it, you'll never stop.
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