OneNote: Preliminary Thoughts

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2177

Posted by zeoli
2004-09-04 17:44:23

I’ve been using OneNote for about 48 hours now; plenty of experience to venture an opinion about it.

First impression: This is an odd program, like none other I’ve seen. It has some very powerful features, while other basic features are absent.

Essentially, it is a collection of information building blocks. This paragraph, for instance, would be a basic information item. It can stand alone or be clustered with other paragraphs that form a larger note. In this way, it resembles BrainStorm. Each item can be moved with relative ease, or flagged for further categorization.

These items or clusters of items reside on notebook pages, which make in turn reside in tabbed sections. Tabbed sections can be further categorized by residing in folders.

Here are some of the strengths of OneNote, as I see them:

A. Outlining ability is surprisingly nimble. It is not NoteMap by any means, but more powerful than the outliner in Word. What is especially nice is that you can create multiple outlines within each page. As the notebook structure itself—with folders and subfolders (the tabbed sections)—is a mega-outline of your data, you are essentially creating outlines that are themselves part of an outline.

B. Acceptable information capture. Pop open what they call a side note and drag any text or graphics into it. It’s stored in a special section called SideNotes. Later, you open OneNote and move the new information pages to the sections you desire. It has a screen clip feature, that I thought would be kind of useless, but which I’ve discovered is pretty handy for quickly capturing material from forms or complex web pages and saving them to side notes. This info is not, of course, editable or searchable. However, you can flag it for later retrieval (see next feature).

C. Note flags allow you to add an extra layer of categorization to individual items. You can mark an item as a To Do, for instance, and then see a list of all To Do items throughout your notes. Flags can be customized to provide you with iconic bullets that visually mark the text and with special highlighting.

The weaknesses:

A. It appears that OneNote lacks the ability to import OLE objects—I think Stephen Diamond might have commented on this a while ago, come to think of it. What an odd omission for Microsoft!

B. The editing power is a bit limited as well. There is no extended selection when you double click on a word and swipe forward.

C. Moving items around is a little awkward… some move operations allow you to use drag and drop and with others you have to use a navigator dialog box.

D. No facility to create tables in your notes. I think it is clear that MS didn’t want to give too much editing power to OneNote, because it might become a substitute for Word.

My mid-term grade: B- but with potential. I’d be interested in other opinions.

Steve Z.

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