Product Reviews

The prime business task that Microsoft Office never properly provided for was the most simple one: note taking. In an effort to remedy this, the company brought out OneNote last year, which quickly became perhaps the most misunderstood application that Microsoft has ever released.

Unfortunately, the product got caught up in the hype surrounding tablet PCs, something that masked the fact that it could be used perfectly well with a regular laptop or desktop machine. And even those users that were attracted by the idea of a single place to store all their notes and clippings were baffled by its features, which took time to get to grips with.

With the release of OneNote Service Pack 1 (SP 1), Microsoft has taken the opportunity to add features that take OneNote up to another level of usefulness, and genuinely make it something that should be on every PC user's machine. Don't be fooled by the Service Pack designation: Microsoft could easily have launched this as OneNote 2 and no-one would have thought it unusual, thanks to the number of new features that have been added.

OneNote continues to use a simple notepad metaphor for its user interface, with tabs along the top for sections and left or right sides for pages. The aim of the product is to make note taking as easy and natural as possible, and to that end there's no ability to save documents: your open notebooks are saved automatically in the background as you go along. To take notes, you simply put your cursor anywhere on the page and either type (on a regular machine) or write (on a tablet PC).

For many users, top of the list of new features will be integration with the Notes application on Pocket PC or Windows Smartphone. Connect a Pocket PC when OneNote is open, and you can automatically copy over all the notes on it into a section in OneNote, including text, ink and audio notes. You can then use the handwriting recognition in OneNote to convert any ink notes, if you wish. However, what you can't do is amend notes and copy them back onto the Pocket PC, or send notes authored in OneNote to the Pocket PC - this is effectively one-way synchronisation. However, it means that the Pocket PC becomes

OneNote has always had the useful ability to record audio notes while you write, and SP 1 adds the ability to record video notes as well. Plug in a DV camcorder or webcam, press the Record Video button in the toolbar, and a video note will be inserted on the page you're looking at. As with audio notes, you can write as you go along and the video will be synchronised to your written notes, so that written notes are highlighted at the point they were taken in the video as you watch it.

The third major new feature is live sharing of notebooks, so that you can work collaboratively on a set of notes with others over a network. To share a notepad, you simply use the Share With Others taskbar and email invitations to anyone you want to invite. Any invited user can then add notes to the page you're viewing at the same time, effectively turning OneNote into a combined notebook and whiteboard. The potential for collaborative notes is vast, and the ability to publish your completed notes to either a website or SharePoint service means that teams can effectively build an archive of notes taken during meetings.

The first version of OneNote was technically a member of the Office family, yet had few links to any other Office applications. Microsoft has added better integration with SP 1; for example, it can automatically insert details of a meeting from Outlook and use those as the basis of the 'Meeting' note. You can also send notes directly to Word, which makes transforming a set of notes into a document much simpler. And you can insert any document as a picture in your notes from the Insert menu, allowing you to use the pen and note-taking tools in OneNote to effectively mark up a static version of a document. This works with any document, not just those created by Office.

Along with these major changes, Microsoft has taken the opportunity to tweak other aspects of OneNote. It's now easier to move pages around, there's password protection for individual sections, and it's added the ability to capture a region of the screen and automatically paste it into your notebook.

Overall, OneNote has matured from a product that showed a lot of potential to one that should be a standard part of the Office installation on any machine. And this is our main complaint about the program: you still have to pay extra for it, as it isn't bundled with any version of Office. This is a shame, as it's one of those applications that users would benefit from playing with, and finding out what it can do for them. Nevertheless, with this update OneNote moves from being an interesting curiosity to a serious business application.