One of Microsoft’s hidden gems
7th June 2010
Most people have Microsoft Office installed either through school or through work as we can not get away from it. It’s actually one of the few products that Microsoft makes that is absolutely necessary even in a Microsoft free environment (that’s why you absolutely NEED alternatives like Open Office or even Office for Mac). Everyone is of course familiar with MS Word, MS Excel (god how I dread thee sometimes), and of course Power Point. The one application that secretly got snuck in that NO ONE knows about is Microsoft OneNote. It is perhaps one of the greatest applications created in recent memory that I can not believe people do not use.
The application is very simplistic in nature, you have a virtual notebook with sections in it (remember your 5-Star notebooks in school with subject separation?). Each of these sections can have as many pages as you wish and everything is searchable. When I say everything I mean EVERYTHING. Any text on an image will get OCR’d internally and become searchable. Hand written notes (provided you have a wacom tablet or a tablet pc) are also searchable as internally they get converted to text. The best part about this is the pages are non-bounded. You can literally write, copy and paste, insert, etc any where into the page. OneNote also has hooks into Windows where a Windows Key+S will provide snag-it like functionality. You can also write/type over anything you can import (which pretty much everything is either in PDF, Word, or can be “printed” into OneNote with a virtual printer). In essence this is literally the notebook we use and write in everyday when we take notes during meetings, classes, or “todo” lists.
For a tablet pc this of course is indispensible, most of us write notes everyday. Heck, it’s much easier to write short hand than type generally and god forbid you have to quickly scribble a quick graph or algorithm/formula. Having all of that inside in a searchable format is truly heaven. If any of you are like me, you’ve likely saved your college notes somewhere and wouldn’t it be nice to have them in virtual format as well?
As far as I know, other than EverNote there is no comparison to OneNote. Sadly, OneNote is likely the only program that would keep me from switching over to any other operating system as it is THAT good. There are other programs LIKE OneNote, but nothing remotely compares. When Open Office one day creates an alternative I’ll be the first one to test it out, but that will be unlikely as sadly Microsoft is the only company that offers complete support of tablets.