Sunday, July 15, 2007

Microsoft OneNote

I wonder how many eyes are rolling now and how many brains are yelling 'LAGGG!' silently, but Microsoft really surprised me with OneNote.

Seems that it didn't come with my previous 2003 installations, or else I never bothered to install it, but I discovered it when I accidentally screen-captured a PDF page into OneNote 2007. At that time I just closed it off irritably, since I was rushing to get work done. But when I chanced upon the user guide and opened it, my breath was taken away. The perfect organizer software (actually it's so much more than organizer) has been sitting under my big bulb of a nose for years and not once did I check it out, or even chance upon it.

For those of you who don't know, don't close this window. This could really change your life. OneNote simply put is the whole concept of a planner/organizer mapped onto a computer screen. You can have notebooks, and in the notebooks you can create tabs, and under these tabs you can create as many pages as you like, and even subpages. You'll find yourself fascinated by things such as the ability to type anywhere on the page, and the consequent ability to move your note portions freely around, or voice recording while typing, or the automatic calculator when you enter equations in a certain format. It's krypto-freaking-nite man, and a brightly glowing one at that.

The key attraction of OneNote lies in its versatility and compatibility, being readily exportable to Word and Powerpoint, and able to accept into its files anything from cutting-pasting a portion of a Word document, to screencapping a portion of a webpage and having page name and URL details automatically recorded for you below the screencap image.

The best part of it all is even with the million and one functions available to you, you don't have to think about saving, since everything is automatically captured the moment you type it in or take it out. This is something which one would yearn for in Word Excel and Powerpoint, except for the practical implications of such a function (forget to Save As... and you die, biatch).

Hopefully for me, OneNote isn't just another passing organizer phase for me, as it was with all my other planners, digital or otherwise. Gosh man you can run your whole bloody life on it.

Just be creative. And then that's where 80% fall. Haha you suck.

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