Much has been said about the new Office 2007 that will be launched very soon - 60 day trials are available for us Aussies at australia.trymicrosoftoffice.com (the main Office Online site hasn't been updated yet at the time of writing), or at www.trymicrosoftoffice.com for the rest of the world. The biggest change is the new UI, which is very, very cool and a big improvement over the old one. I can't really comment much on most of the new features in Office 2007 as I haven't used it enough, but one part that I have used and am using right now is OneNote 2007.

Its the dark horse because its a new concept - this is an office application specifically designed for notetaking, not like your basic post-it note program, or Windows notepad. Yes it has been around for a couple of years already in the form of OneNote 2003, but it never got much exposure as Microsoft didn't bundle it with Office 2003 very well, and it gained a reputation that it was only for Tablet PCs (which it isn't - I'm using it right now on my desktop). Microsoft has learnt from its mistakes and now OneNote is bundled with cheaper editions including the Student & Teacher edition. People who have used OneNote can't live without it; people who haven't have no idea what they're talking about.

I have a tablet PC (Toshiba M200), so I use it to take my uni notes, including maths equations, accounting lecture slides and annotations, electrical diagrams and MATLAB code. It recognises my handwriting pretty well (and that's my scribbly notetaking handwriting too), so I can them search through all of it in a couple of seconds. Various bits are tagged too to make it easier to find things later, along with keeping track of things to do. A neat screen-capturing function can capture certain parts of your screen so you can annotate on or keep as record, and there's a neat sidenote function that you can use without opening up the whole OneNote program. The new OneNote 2007 also has the ability to search the text in my lecture slides (images), and to create tables among other things.

Right now though, I'm using it to take note of anything interesting I come across on the net for this blog, as well drafting some of the posts. Its great for copying and pasting quotes because it automatically copys the URL too from Firefox or IE. I'm also using it as my ideas notebook, jotting down any random, wacky ideas I have. I have it syncing with my desktop too, so the notes I collect on that are available on my tablet PC and vice-versa.

How is this different to Microsoft Word? Unlike the concept of a document, OneNote is focused around the concept of a notebook, so you can have multiple notebooks, each with different sections, many pages as well as subpages. It saves automatically - in fact, there's no save button at all. You can also type/write anywhere on the page, without it moving your text around to fit the page, plus you can add more space anywhere, even between note scribbles on a page. After all, notetaking is often about taking random thoughts, not organised and structured documents.

If you want to check out what my notes from last semester look like, here are some examples from my computing, maths and electrical engineering units.

Give it a go, and get rid of all those pieces of paper you have lying around with scribbles on it that you probably can't find when you need them anyway.