Tuesday, March 18, 2014

I loved OneNote; and now One Note is free!

Wow! OneNote is one of my favorite pieces of software. It is now free from Microsoft - see http://www.onenote.com for details. And better yet, there are a lot of apps featured as well at http://www.onenote.com/apps.

A minute of pause here: why do I like OneNote? Why would I want to share more information?

I like OneNote, because it is simple and easy to use. It has powerful search functionality. It connects well on the internet and enables shared notebook access. I can house my notebook on the internet and reconnect to it from any machine. BEST of all, I do not have to keep pressing 'save button' anytime. And of course it rarely crashes. OneNote to me is the best piece of software that tells me more about what a 21st century software can be.

Certainly OneNote is not a panacea for all problems I have :) There are many features I desire that it makes it easy for me
a) Scan documents - coming soon. I need to try the Office Lens with OneNote.
b) Write blogs - I have not find the magic connector for me to use OneNote and have a copy of the messages posted as blog to my favorite blog site
c) Auto-compressor - often I get OneNote notebooks from others that are big and long. I would like to see a compressor that do its magic to show me the relevant parts, to reduce the time it takes to wade thru all details
d) Separate note creation from note walk through. Again to consume other's post it is useful to separate what is the input detail from the output detail.
e) Heatmap of the content in OneNote, so I can manage out old notes. Often it is easy to accumulate turds and I do not go back and clean up old notes. Having a heat map can help me to weed thru the old stuff that is not relevant
f) An integrated change log that can show me changes to various Notebooks that I am connected with (one can turn this into a form of feed engine)
etc.

There are plenty of app opportunities atop OneNote. For now it is great that this is free that more users can enjoy. Nice!

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