Review of OneNote 2007: For All of Your Office Organizational Needs

If you answered, "YES!" to any of these questions, it's time for you to discover OneNote 2007. Once used primarily by students with tablet PCs, OneNote is steadily gaining ground as a one-stop shop for all of your office organizational needs. As a computer trainer, I love to try every new piece of software as it's released, but rarely do I feel as evangelical about a product as I've come to be about OneNote 2007.

With Office OneNote 2007, you can store, organize and reuse your notes. The only downside is that once you start using OneNote 2007, much like a good Day Planner, you won't be able to stop. And, with its seamless integration with other Microsoft® Office applications and Internet Explorer, you'll soon be taking notes, recording audio cues, and copying screen shots - all within OneNote.

Before OneNote, I was a random note-taker. I'd take a phone call, grab the nearest piece of paper that didn't appear important and jot down a reminder, fully intending to take action the moment I hung up the phone. Then, I'd see an important e-mail - and, not wanting to forget the contents, I'd print it out. Thank heavens, because when I needed to remember something else that print-out gave me another random place to write down yet another reminder. Then, I'd move to research. It seems as though I'm forever researching something and the Internet has become nearly a one-stop shop for all of my researching needs. But, trying to remember where I found something on the Internet was becoming as difficult as remembering where I had written down a remdiner. And, for all the things I didn't write down, I relied on the classic standby - my memory. A trait that seems to fail me from time to time with each passing year.

Well, all of this chaos changed with OneNote 2007. I'm now a certified note-taking junkie. The best part? I can actually FIND all of the notes I'm taking. Not only are they in OneNote, but they're organized, as well. Organized!

I can find any note, any random thought I've jotted down, any related website, any important piece of text at a moment's notice because it's ALL in OneNote. And, the nice thing is that it doesn't take any longer to place a note in OneNote than it would ordinarily take you to write it down. In fact, if you like writing, you can even use a graphics tabley to enter notes into this extremely versatile program.

It doesn't take long to use OneNote to organize everything. From research notes on that book you've always wanted to write to your shopping list and everything in between, OneNote tracks it all.

But, better than paper, with OneNote, you can quickly and easily move, edit and delete notes that you've already entered. Plus, notes can be organized into categories, then subcategories and even shared with others. This is like the Holy Grail of notebooks.

And, it's so flexible, you can use OneNote in whatever way works best for you. With OneNote, you won't be forced to conform to some universal standard of note-taking. You can take your current practice (arcane as it may be - mine certainly was) and use OneNote to keep track of everything you need to remember and/or recall.

Even better is OneNote's integration with other Microsoft® Office products, especially Outlook. You can use OneNote to synchronize appointments and tasks. This way, you can easily track what needs to get done and when. Unbelievable as it may be, your desk will finally be clear of all the clutter.

The OneNote environment provides ONE place to store everything that doesn't logically fit somewhere else, and even those things that do. In its simplest use, OneNote acts like a notebook with section dividers, allowing you to nearly organize notes related to specific topics. But, on a grander scale, OneNote can be used for team project collaboration and as a total information organizer.

How you use OneNote and to what extent is completely up to you. And, for the reasonable price of $99, this is a product that offers tremendous possibilities. If you're anything like me, once you start, you won't be able to stop.