OneNote Office 12
I use OneNote now and then and have never really become convinced about its utility as a universal Note Taking solution, for the following main reasons:
- Layout controls are limited
- Nervousness about use on two or more machines
- Difficulty sharing notes with other people who don’t use OneNote
I am not sure these issues are solved for me by the next version, however here they are make up your own mind:
- Support for multiple Notebooks
- Drag and drop everywhere, (re-arranging your notebook used to be much more complicated via menu options)
- OCR of images pasted into OneNote, the demo’s of this were good, for example taking a photo of a business card and then importing into OneNote, it was then possible to find a person via the OCR of the text on the business card. Even better the text that matched on the business card was highlighted!
- A SmartPhone (windows) client was available that allowed content to be captured and uploaded to OneNote. The main use I saw for this was to upload images from your camera phone that would then be OCRed and available for searching
- Support for multi-user editing without locks, ie you could store a file on a file share and multiple people could edit the file concurrently, this was pretty impressive
- Improved integration with Outlook, for example the ability to link OneNote content to Outlook contacts
- Automatic off-line working, I think this means (don’t remember the details) that OneNote has an Outlook 2003 like Offline working experience
- 2 way synchronisation with Outlook tasks
- Very easy to construct tables, just using tabs
- Drawing tools, but I don’t think these included automatic shape recognition
- Lasso select – like Journal
- Faster searching
