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Microsoft OneNote 2007

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tomos:
great review John!

You can tag notes, and tags are customisable. You can create a synced Outlook task from a note. You can send a note as an email, or publish it to PDF. There is power under the bonnet.
--- End quote ---

is tagging easy -
i.e. can you use shortcuts in particular - & is it easy then to display only stuff with XXX or YYY Tag

Does tagging work across various "Notebooks" or is it limited?

thanks,
tom

zridling:
John, I would add that one poor "feature" of the 2007 version is the autosave function. When using it in conjunction with the clipboard it can wreak havoc and lead to saving unintended mistakes. Microsoft does not explain their autosave feature in the Help file, so it's disconcerting for new users. Also, if you cut and OneNote fails to paste in another app, when you return to OneNote, the data you "cut" is gone (unless you revert to your last 24-hour backup file). There is no way to undo it, especially if you move to any other page inside OneNote, since it creates a different Undo stack for every page. Use the copy command instead. Cutting something in OneNote is telling it you don't want it anymore.

However, the liberating thing about OneNote (also check out Zoho Office Notebook app online which is a near clone) is that it provides a canvas for a mind-dump. I now use a text editor for the same purpose and while not as good, I could no longer trust Microsoft to "do the right thing" by its customers anymore (for example, mac folks love this app, but surprisingly, Microsoft does not offer a mac version!). Also, OneNote is the only new Office app that Microsoft has debuted in more than a decade. Thanks for the review!!

Carol Haynes:
You can get more details on the changes here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/HA100325701033.aspx
-johnk (May 31, 2007, 07:32 PM)
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Thanks, that is really useful.

The one thing I would like MS to do is remove the link for handwriting and the tablet PC. I understand why it is there but they are trying to sell product rather than support users. They must know that there are loads of other tablets out there that people use daily!

johnk:
is tagging easy -
i.e. can you use shortcuts in particular - & is it easy then to display only stuff with XXX or YYY Tag

Does tagging work across various "Notebooks" or is it limited?-tomos (June 01, 2007, 02:07 AM)
--- End quote ---

I don't think you can modify the built-in shortcuts for standard tags, although I may be wrong. If there is such a feature it's buried.

You filter by tags by selecting the "show all tagged notes" feature and then sorting tags by one of a number of options:

Jimdoria:
Thanks for this review, John. I'd been considering writing it myself but you beat me to the punch. I downloaded the trial of OneNote 2003 and although I really liked it, I decided it wasn't quite what I wanted. When they released ON2007 I got the trial again, and almost immediately bought the program. I feel like they've gotten it just about perfect, at least by my criteria.

What has changed? In a word: TABLES! ON2003 didn't really handle them, but ON2007 has them, and although it's no Excel or even Word, I think the implementation is good enough. No support for tabular data was a deal-breaker for me in 2003.

Zaine, thanks for the note about the "cut doom" problem. I hadn't noticed that  - I mostly put stuff into ON, & haven't done really been taking stuff out yet. Autosave is definitely a double-edged sword, but one that I happen to like. Not having to press the "Save" button every few minutes is a leap in usability as far as I'm concerned.

Tags are in OneNote, but the implementation is a little weird. You can have as many tags as you want, but you can't create them on the fly by just typing in keywords (which to me is the "right" way to do tags.) Instead, there is a task pane and a toolbar that are used to manage tags.

A tag consists of a keyword(s) combined with an icon and optional formatting options such as "red background, yellow text, underlined." The icon appears in a toolbar, and clicking it will apply the tag to the currently selected item or the item where the cursor is currently positioned. The tag's icon then appears in the margin next to the tagged item, and any tag formatting is applied to the text. The up side to this approach is that tags are not page-based, they are more like paragraph-based, which lets you tag info at a pretty fine level of detail.

You can modify the built-in tags, as well as create new ones, re-order them, etc. Ordering is kind of important, as the first nine tags in your list automatically get assigned non-configurable hotkeys. There's no way that I can see to assign hotkeys to any other tags than the first nine. If you have too many tags to fit on the toolbar, you'll need to keep the task pane open to apply them. Another task pane lets you view all the items in the notebook grouped by tag.

I always liked the free-form nature of OneNote and the ability to effortlessly mix and match different types of content on a single page. Although this is still not as seamless as it could be, and there is occasionally some funkiness when trying to combine text and graphics, I think OneNote does this more successfully than any of the other PIMs I've looked at.

I also find the ability to integrate OneNote to-do items with Outlook Tasks surprisingly useful. OneNote's linking capabilities are pretty terrific, too. I even have a shortcut on my desktop that links directly to a frequently-used OneNote page.

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