OneNote rocks
Ok I'm prepared for this post to be construed as definitive proof that I am part of The Borg, but in the spirit of sharing useful tips a la LifeHacker and a desire to GTD, I thought I'd pimp two Microsoft products that I've only recently started using: OneNote and Groove.
I'll start with OneNote, since that's the one I'm liking most and which has swayed me away from scribbling my thoughts on wiki pages and text files, and more importantly convinced me to do away with a paper notebook altogether.
Essentially, you get an on-screen representation of a paper notebook, with coloured tabs for organising by subject on top, and tabs for individual pages down the right hand side. You can click to type anywhere on the "page". If you have a tablet PC, you can handwrite on the page. Microsoft gives me a tablet, but I much prefer just to type. Of course, you can freely drag and drop your blocks of text anywhere on the page. I'm liking the freeform nature of it, and you get access to all the usual fancy formatting like bold, italics, colours, fonts. You can insert links to files and pictures by dragging and dropping. You can insert hyperlinks to web pages, other pages within your notebook, even other paragraphs within pages of your notebook. If you are taking notes about a meeting, you can insert the meeting details from your Outlook calendar.
But the fancy content is not the killer feature (although they are sufficiently rich and easy to use that I don't secretly pine for wiki markup like I used to). What's killer are the sharing capabilities; specifically in three areas:
- Between computers: I take my laptop to meetings, but it's obviously much more comfortable typing on my desktop (where I have a lot more screen real estate not to mention an ultra-comfy keyboard). So I keep copies of OneNote open on my desktop and laptop, set my notebook to be shared between computers, and it automatically keeps in sync between the two in near-real-time.
- Between colleagues: instead of a wiki page, we can share a notebook that's stored on a SharePoint site. We can work on the notebook offline, and when we're online it periodically syncs to the server, marking who made what changes as we go.
- Live sharing: in a meeting, if we want to collaborate on note-taking, one of us just has to mark their notebook for live sharing, then sends each of us (e.g. via IM or e-mail) their IP and some password they make up. We connect to their machine and voila! real-time collaborative editing of the full-featured notebook!
I'm sure there are other tools out there that do similar things like note-taking (Google Notebook), or realtime collaborative editing (SubEthaEdit), but I was impressed that one cohesive package Just Worked. To me, it's a prime example of where Microsoft should be focusing its energies: rich desktop applications that are no longer tied to one machine -- it is now a relatively painless experience to share information between people in different places, or among people at the same time, or with machines in different locations. It's this kind of freedom that, once you get used to it, you cannot imagine ever having lived without.
Which brings me to Groove, with which I have much less experience and take advantage of far fewer of its features. In fact, I use just one: folder synchronisation. This is an area in which I'm sure there are plenty of competitors also, but in this case I use it simply to keep my Projects folder in sync between my laptop and desktop, so the fact that I stored a set of slides, or some screenshots, or some design spec on one machine means I will always be able to access it from the other. Why is it better than other similar products? Don't know. I just know it works and I haven't had to invest much brainpower to get it to work.
End of infomercial. But seriously, give OneNote a try. I dismissed it once as overkill, but now I believe this is a product that deserves its "wow".
Update: discovered another nifty feature -- Insert Printout; e.g. I can drag and drop a mail item from Outlook, and I have the option of inserting a link to the item, a copy or a printout. The latter sends the item to a printer driver so you get a virtual printout embedded in your doc onto which you can add notes etc. No details on how OneNote does this in its help file, but it's probably XPS format.
