Introduced as "a Microsoft Office family application," OneNote seems likely to be part of the summer suite upgrade known unofficially as Office 11, though Microsoft hasn't yet confirmed which versions of Office will include it; whether it'll also be sold separately; or at what price.
The program will let users take free-form notes as they would in a paper notebook by clicking and typing (or, with a Tablet PC, writing) anywhere on a page, while delivering the fast, easy organizing and searching abilities of digital technology. If you're used to carrying paper notebooks and folders, OneNote's tabbed interface and infinite supply of pages can be organized into multiple notebooks and project folders within notebooks.
If you're addicted to Post-It notes, a "Quick Notes" function lets you pop up a floating window to type a reminder -- capturing some info from a phone call, for instance -- while working in another application. If you're forever making outlines, OneNote lets you create and rearrange bulleted lists. The program always launches or opens to your most recent page of notes, while an auto-save function reduces fussing with filenames.
Let's Get Ephemeral
Microsoft says OneNote will be a boon for all kinds of times when using Word or Excel would be too cumbersome, or when your ideas aren't yet ready for PowerPoint -- for capturing personal or "ephemeral" information that may never make it into a finished document, but that you'd like to save and reuse instead of (as all too often happens) scribbling and promptly losing.
Of course, info that is destined to become part of a "real" document can be pasted from OneNote into Word, PowerPoint, or wherever, just as stuff you find while researching or browsing Web pages can be saved in OneNote. You can click an e-mail icon and type one or more recipients' names to send a note as an Outlook message, or mark notes as to-do or action items which become Outlook tasks.
More info:
http://www.microsoft.com/office/onenote/
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