Thinking About Trying Microsoft OneNote 2003
During the implementation of the Operation Gadget website, I took about 30 pages of notes. I wrote those notes into a "planning pad", a notebook of 8 1/2 by 11 inch pages of quad-lined paper that is bound at the top. This sort of note taking is a great habit to develop if you are an consultant or a system administrator, because you can jump back to a point in time in your notes and see what you did and how you did it.
The problem with this approach is the serial nature of each planning pad. If I try to go back to something I did last year, it helps to first remember the approximate date that I did something. If I can't do that, I have to grab my pads off the shelf and start browsing through them.
Microsoft has developed a product that may improve the process of locating and cross-referencing notes dramatically. The product is called Microsoft One Note 2003 and it was released in October.
Walter Mossberg did a very good review of OneNote for his Personal Technology column in the Wall Street Journal. In it, he said:
OneNote was developed to help people jot down and collect all kinds of ideas and notes too random to fit easily into a traditional word-processor document or spreadsheet. These are the kinds of notes people might scrawl on a napkin, even if they are computer users. In fact, the code-name for OneNote was "Scribbler"....
Unlike a word processor, OneNote arranges pages into tabbed sections, labeled by topic. Each section can have many subsections and note pages. The pages can have blank backgrounds, or look like ruled notepad paper or grid paper. Whole sections can be color-coded....
Overall, I like OneNote. It's a good idea well executed, especially for a first effort at Microsoft....
I can see this sort of thing being useful to me. When I build out a web server, I often have to do two of them: one for testing and one for actual use. It would be great to be able to search on "MySQL" and see all of the notes that I have taken recently about that product.
The issue with OneNote, for me, is how well does it integrate with other applications? I am a Handspring Treo user, so I wonder if I could develop a way to easily move information back and forth between OneNote and the Palm OS applications? Maybe not today, but a solution will probably arise someday.
I think Microsoft OneNote 2003 was really designed to be a killer app for Tablet PCs. But, it sounds like it could be useful to people who are in the note-taking habit. I'd like to try it. Now, all I need is to spend enough time in front of a Wintel PC in order to do justice to an evaluation.
Comments
Not only that, could you export the notes to your blog? I like the idea of Tinderbox from Eastgate software for this reason, but right now it is Mac-only, and I'm not sure I could use it in conjunction with my existing blog software or if I would have to make a decision to make Tinderbox my blogging platform, which is kind of a big step.
Eventually I would like a piece of software that allows me to merge the functions of a blog and a Wiki, and be able to switch back and forth between views of my notes chronologically, by topic/hierarchy tree, and perhaps visually, showing a map of links and connections.
Posted by: Lisa Williams | November 20, 2003 1:43 AM
I wasn't even thinking about pulling thoughts out of my notes to include in one of my weblogs. I haven't felt the need for that, surprisingly.
I'll have to think about it more because my last comment must sound incredibly weird, based on what you see me producing here and in places like CTDATA.com.
Posted by: Dave Aiello | November 20, 2003 2:41 AM
Well, even if it's not front-of-mind to you right now, I think we could both get behind the idea of a package that will let us display content in as many different styles and contexts as possible -- and then having the ability to have press-button publishing of that structure to the web.
Posted by: Lisa Williams | November 20, 2003 9:49 AM
I use OneNote since one month, I can't live without now. Forget about txt files, you'll always find what you thought and wrote in a blink.
Posted by: feeloow | November 20, 2003 12:14 PM