Yesterday my copy of OneNote 2007 arrived. I’ve mentioned before that it’s the main tool I use for creating notes and content in all forms. It uses a page and folder structure like a ring binder, only you can very easily cut and paste, move things around, tag them for action or find them with search. The new product has quite a few additions over OneNote 2003, and upgrading went without a hitch. Here are the first seven that jumped out at me that are really great:
- Multiple notebooks - They’ve redesigned the underlying database so that you now have multiple notebooks down the left of the page, sections and groups of sections across the page, and individual listed down the right. You have to upgrade your old notebook, and then move stuff around. This extra notebook “dimension” definitely helps with organisation.
- Tables - You can now create tables, and really easily too. Type a number and then tab - the system rightly assumes you are creating a table.
- Drawing tools - You’ve actually got a reasonable drawing toolbar that covers all the basics of lines, arrows, basic shapes and axes for a graph. You can easily move things around and rotate things, but no curves yet.
- Recognition of text in pictures - This is a big one. Any sort of graphic you’ve clipped in from anywhere and the text is picked up by search, and you can cut and paste the text out to use it in your content. This is really, really useful.
- Clipping from or sending web pages to OneNote - You could do some of this before, but now it’s much easier.
- Calculator - This is great for when you are in meetings. Type 6*1.175= hit space bar and hey presto. It does all of the regular functions, and scientific stuff too.
- Audio search - I haven’t tried this, but if you’ve got stored audio files, apparently the words are recognized in the new search mechanism too.
So I’ve only had this thing for a day, and I’m very impressed. I did hit a minor, weird bug where I couldn’t delete empty section groups, but MS support are looking in to that.
The full list of new features in OneNote 2007 over 2003 is:
- Multiple notebooks
- Multiple computer support
- Shared notebooks
- Notebook synchronization and merging
- Outlook integration
- Outlook task synchronization
- Notes linked to Outlook items
- Send Outlook e-mails to OneNote
- Send Web pages to OneNote
- Hyperlinks between notes
- Insert files as printouts
- Notebook templates
- File attachments on pages
- Recognition of text in pictures
- Tables
- Drawing tools
- Lasso Select
- Calculator
- Faster search
- Audio search
- Full page view
- OneNote Mobile for mobile devices
- Programmability import/export APIs
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