OneNote 12 (coming in 2006) beta1 is out now...

[vegas]

If you check the developer blog you can see what they have in store for OneNote 12.  I am quite excited myself as I have dabbled with OneNote, but not quite found it to be up my alley until this is released.

Developer blogs:
http://blogs.msdn.com/chris%5Fpratley/
http://blogs.msdn.com/owen_braun/default.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/dolange/default.aspx

Some other links
OneNote Homepage - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX010858031033.aspx
OneNote FAQ - http://www.factplace.com/onenotefaq.htm
OneNote Mini Tutorial - http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=174325&rl=1
Misc. OneNote Powertoys - http://adminid.com/onenote/
Misc. OneNote Related Websites - http://www.ccnote.net/onenote/

[brotherS]

Could you please start a thread in http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?board=42.0 - where you and maybe Carol tell us about "Why you would want MS OneNote?"

I saw a short video about it a year ago but saw nothing spectacular in it - why do you folks like it?

[vegas]

I'm not gonna start a review thread, because as I said I have only dabbled with it.  But I see the potential.  Things I like are the easy ability to clip information from the web and paste it in here then organize it however.  Also how you connect to someone else & work on the project together on the same page.  Things I look forward to is the powerful OCR engines that will be included to make everything searchable, including the ability to search audio for recognized voice.  Once they implement hierarchal notes it will be easier to work with.  But from reading all the features in the above links it looks like they a pulling out all the stops for this baby.

[brotherS]

Things I look forward to is the powerful OCR engines that will be included to make everything searchable, including the ability to search audio for recognized voice.

Hmm, I didn't saw anything about OCR when (speed-)reading those pages, but when would I need that? To get the text out of JPGs?

Ability to search audio sounds great, lets see how that works out

[kfitting]

OCR would be awesome... I would love to be able to take a picture of an interesting paragraph from a book or magazine and archive it.  My biggest problem with OneNote is that it seems rather obtuse.  Granted, I only spent about 10 minutes with it, but it still seemed overly complex.  My second biggest problem is that it's Microsoft... not that I hate Microsoft, but if it's Microsoft it means proprietary file format and that just wont fly for storing data long term.  I NEEDto be able to get my data out easily or import it into another app with as little work as possible.

Kevin

[brotherS]

OCR would be awesome... I would love to be able to take a picture of an interesting paragraph from a book or magazine and archive it.

Then buy a scanner and just do that now already (saving it as pdf with new scanner soft will add searchable text to the document)

My biggest problem with OneNote is that it seems rather obtuse.  Granted, I only spent about 10 minutes with it, but it still seemed overly complex.  My second biggest problem is that it's Microsoft... not that I hate Microsoft, but if it's Microsoft it means proprietary file format and that just wont fly for storing data long term.  I NEEDto be able to get my data out easily or import it into another app with as little work as possible.

Yeah, that's the Microsoft problem - overly complex and you never know how to work with new file formats...

[kfitting]

I have a scanner.  And it's hard to fit that big fat book on there while its scanning.  Then you gotta open the cumbersome OCR software... then proofread it.  It would be much easier to take a pic, upload it and have your note taking program do it for you!!

Kevin

[Edvard]

My second biggest problem is that it's Microsoft... not that I hate Microsoft, but if it's Microsoft it means proprietary file format and that just wont fly for storing data long term

http://www.simpleocr.com/ + Sign the petition.

[kfitting]

Yeah I tried SimpleOCR and never had a good success rate with it.  Especially with pics from a digi cam.

Kevin

[Carol Haynes]

Trouble is there isn't any really good OCR software out there. I used OmniPage for a while - but it never lives up to expectation.

The big problem is that even a small number of errors (say 2% which is better than most acheive) still leaves a lot of close editing work to do.

Speach input is even worse.

Handwriting recognition seems to be getting better but OneNote 2003 only seems to accept handwritten data from a Windows Tablet computer. My copy won't read/interpret stuff I write on a Wacom Tablet. It is an annoyance since the rest of Office XP will do it - why can't they simply import the code ???