One Note Valuable?

[MS]

I have Microsoft Office 2003 Professional. It didn't come with OneNote. I'm
wondering if OneNote would be worthwhile to buy.

I think part of the functionality of OneNote is for Tablet PC. I do have a
Pocket PC (IPAQ 2210), as well as two notebook computers. (There is no
OneNote for Pocket PC, is there? I have seen posts here of people asking
about syncing OneNote to their PPC via ActiveSync. How would it sync to a
PPC, since PPCs cannot run OneNote?)

What does OneNote do, that other Office products don't? How does it differ
from the "Notes" applet in Outlook? How does it interface with the other
Office products? In what ways do people (especially non-tablet users) find
OneNote helpful to them?

Just curious about it, whether it might be something useful to buy or not.

 

[Erik Sojka]

There is a lot of marketing and product overview
information about OneNote on Microsoft's site:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/onenote

OneNote is intended to be a notetaking and organizing
tool. It has some limited formatting features but is not
intended to be used as a word processor nor to create
finished/polished documents.

It works much better (IMO) with a Tablet PC due to its
native Ink capabilities but all of the features work
extremely well with just mouse/kb entry. I have a Tablet
but use the kb for a lot of meetings, etc.

I use it for work meetings and organization, school (both
as a teacher and as a student) and for organizing some
personal things as well. Its flexibility and hooks into
Outlook are among its top features.

If you purchase ON and then immediately install SP1 you
can perform a one-time, one-way copy of items from your
PPC Notes into a specially designated section of your
OneNote hierarchy. It will not perform a true sync.
there is no version of ON for the Pocket PC.

Whether or not it is for you: There is a free trial
available from MS' website (link above).

 

[MS]

There is a lot of marketing and product overview
information about OneNote on Microsoft's site:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/onenote

OneNote is intended to be a notetaking and organizing
tool. It has some limited formatting features but is not
intended to be used as a word processor nor to create
finished/polished documents.

It works much better (IMO) with a Tablet PC due to its
native Ink capabilities but all of the features work
extremely well with just mouse/kb entry. I have a Tablet
but use the kb for a lot of meetings, etc.

I use it for work meetings and organization, school (both
as a teacher and as a student) and for organizing some
personal things as well. Its flexibility and hooks into
Outlook are among its top features.

But for use with a keyboard/mouse, in what way is it better than using the
Notes and Calendar sections of Outlook for note-taking and organizing?

 

[MS]

But compared to the Notes feature of Outlook, how is OneNote better for
taking notes?

 

[rbtrader]

I'm not that familiar with the Outlook Notes feature. I can say that
OneNotes is very flexible and it has a great amount of organizing features
that are easy to use. I recommend you download the trial.

 

[Steve Banks]

But compared to the Notes feature of Outlook, how is OneNote better for
taking notes?

The Notes feature in Outlook 2003 and previous versions are exactly like 3M
Post-It notes. Plain simple to the point. MS OneNote is more like Post-It
notes on steroids.

I use Outlook 2003 as my everything PIM (Personal Information Manager) and I
sync the contents to my iPAQ Pocket PC. The PPC only operates a one way sync
of Outlook notes to OneNote. Not very useful really. I use OneNote on my
regular PC using the mouse and keyboard. Yes I would LOVE to have a tablet
PC for OneNote, but I'm happy using it this way too. Again as mentioned
before, I too tried the trial version and ended up liking it so much I
bought the product.

What I like about OneNote is the freeform approach to getting ideas down and
organizing them. In essence it is like a "Scrapbook" for my creativeness.
Where in Outlook Notes I would use "categories," in OneNote I use folders
for the organization. The features I like, they came out with two PowerToys.
One for sending Outlook info to OneNote and the other to send IE info to a
OneNote. These two PowerToys simply copy and paste the respective
information into new sheets in ON. Cool tools though.

So is ON better than Outlooks note feature? That's a matter of opinion, and
in my opinion they differ greatly with ON having more visual and
organizational Wizz... Bang!

Hope this helps,
Steve Banks