OneNote 2003, the great notetaking program, is getting some improvements in an upcoming Service Pack 1.
OneNote 2003, the great notetaking program, is getting some improvements in an upcoming Service Pack 1.
While other parts of Microsoft mess around with their products, the OneNote team continues to show the way with an innovative product and an open, forthright attitude to their customers.
We’ve been using the SP1 beta version and it seems stable with some handy additions to the program.
There’s a link to Pocket PC notes, albeit a one-way affair. PPC notes are copied to a section of OneNote where you can copy them from there to any other OneNote page or elsewhere.
Any part of your screen can be copied to OneNote using Insert | Screen Clipping. This lets you grab a snapshot of a web page or anything else on your display and paste it into OneNote as an image.
You can now record and annotate video notes as well as audio notes. Pictures can now be imported into OneNote directly (instead of via some clipboard kludge).
Meetings in Outlook can be imported, a useful addition given OneNote’s ability to handle note taking and agendas for meetings.
OneNote pages can be published to Word documents – the team seems to have recognized that OneNote is being used to draft documents.
A OneNote session can be shared in real-time with others – so members of a group could make notes on the same OneNote page even though they are in different locations.
There’s a OneNote API exposed in SP1 so we can look forward to some third-party tools to provide extra features.
The Microsoft marketing people have been their usual over-enthusiastic selves when promoting the Preview, for we’ve seen some existing OneNote features being touted as ‘new’ SP1 features. OneNote is a good product and doesn’t need this type of misleading hype.
What stands out for me in this list is the practicality of the new features. This is not a list of gee whiz extras that sound impressive but have little daily use. The OneNote team have again shown a remarkable ability (for Microsoft) to actually listen and learn from their customers – not based on the false and misleading environment of usability labs.
One sad omission from SP1 is proper table support, copying some sections of web pages into OneNote still turns into a mess because it can’t properly render the cells. A pity this wasn’t given a higher priority because it is the one problem that makes OneNote unsuitable for some research tasks.
