Customer Reviews

Microsoft OneNote 2003 [Old Version]

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I've been using OneNote for about two months now. I'm a college student and I don't have a tablet pc - I use a normal Toshiba 15.4" wide screen laptop to take notes on. I used to use Microsoft Word or OpenOffice to take all my notes simply because that was all there was. After finding out about OneNote and using the free trial I found it to be very useful for me.

Many people will complain about it's lack of features compared to a normal word processor, but you really have to take OneNote for what it is. It's a note taking program. It's not going to make you do better in your classes, it'll just help you do it faster. And to me, that's really valuable - as I'm sure any college student will tell you.

Organization:

The first thing you will deal with when you open OneNote is setting up how you want your notes to be organized. I decided to make a few folders - one for classes, one for personal, one for home & car maintenance etc. I will only go into detail about the most important one: Classes. In my classes folder I have a new "project file" or tab for each subject. For example, one tab reads Personal Finance M04, another reads Photography 10, you get the idea.

Underneath these tabs I have a blank writing space and another set of tabs on the right hand side. With the tabs on the right hand side I organize my class meetings and subjects we cover. Depending upon the class, I will make a new tab on the right for each subject (example: Investments, Estate Planning, Taxes). In other classes that do not follow a strict subject form I label the tabs with the date of the class.


Actual Note Taking:

OneNote works in a different way to normal word processors. A way which is much better because your notes are usually not printed. They live in your computer - so why leave blank margins on the sides of the page when you can use that space? This is a question OneNote answers brilliantly. I can click anywhere in my blank space to start a new text box. I can write down the main topics in one column on the left hand side and write key points and definitions on the right wherever they are applicable.

You are also able to put in drawings so you can take down diagrams from the white board and you can put in pictures. If you have a microphone built into your laptop or if you bring a small one you can record what the professor is saying and it will show up with play controls right in the notes space.

Of course, the larger the resolution of your laptop's screen the better. Having a widescreen laptop really benefits you when using OneNote because you can take advantage of it by using every part of the screen to write your notes.


Searching:

Probably one of the best features of OneNote is the ability to search through your notes with ease. For example, I can type in the word "estate" in the search box and hit enter. OneNote then instantly searches (and I mean no waiting, it's instant) through all of your notes and highlights every time the word estate is mentioned. If you have mentioned the word estate in multiple areas of your notes then OneNote will also highlight the applicable tabs so you know where and where not to find what you're looking for.

On The Whole:

I think OneNote is an excellent tool for any student, and even if you just want to keep better track of your life without having to setup a complex database. I don't think I could live without OneNote anymore. That said, it's probably not worth getting unless you can pick up a copy for under fifty dollars. If you're a student, try seeing if you can get a copy with your student discount, or if your campus's student store has it for a good price.

This is a very well thought out program, that makes it much easier to stay organized and take notes quickly. I find that I am able to type far quicker than I can write, so taking notes is much easier on the computer. Plus, afterwards, it's a lot easier to reorganize or rearrange digital notes than paper notes. You can click anywhere and start typing, just like you can do in a "real" notebook.

One of the best features (that makes this surpass Word for any type of note-taking situation) is that you do not need to save, EVER. I have accidentally lost power on my PC and not lost any information. It's quick to load, and loads to the last "page" in your notebook that you were using, which makes getting started fast really easy.

The only thing I have trouble with figuring out how to incorporate drawings or mathematical formulae easily, since I do not have a tablet PC. I find that I can do well with a science class like Biology, which isn't all that Math intensive, but for Math I haven't found a good solution. (I'm still using paper and pencil for Calculus.)

All in all, however, this is a sleek program, that runs swiftly and is a great tool for note-taking.

I've been using this program for almost a year and like it. It's simple, well designed and customizable. The best way to explain One Note is to say it's like MS Word and Excel combined... it's a Word Processor with Spreadsheet "tabs".

The main reason I bought One Note was because I had 30-40 seperate word documents that I accessed regularly. It was cumbersome and inefficient. One Note fixed that.

Also, One Note has a good search tool, and also I like the formating options. I only gave it four stars because I wish that they included Excel tables with some basic calculating capabilities.

If you need a program to take notes, consolidate various documents and get organized, I'd recommend it.

I'm in grad school, which means long classes, long lecturs, and extensive note-taking. I started taking a laptop to classes last year to give my hand a break, and I decided to try OneNote. My primary motivation was that I absolutely abhor Word's auto-formatting - I spend more time wrestling with its ideas than taking the important class notes. OneNote COMPLETELY solves that problem. You can click anywhere on the screen and start typing. You can search throughout all your notes for a particular word or phrase. You can use the "pen" feature to copy your prof's lame diagrams right in to your notes! You can make sections and folders and subpages, color-coding them as you wish. You can flag certain items (like exam tips or assignment deadlines) and OneNote will create a list of your flagged items from everything in your notes, so you can see the important stuff all on one screen. You never have to worry about saving your work - it's automatically saved. It's easy to navigate.

As you can tell, I am a HUGE fan. I seriously don't know what I would do without OneNote. I don't even use its really crazy features, like the tablet PC ability or the ability to plug in a microphone and synch your notes with the recording (some of my friends do it, though, and it's wicked cool!). Whatever they are charging for it, if you are a student, buy it. It is well worth the price.

This is a definitely a Microsoft product -- good and bad. It has enough features in it that makes it worth the purchase, but Microsoft definitely did not take the time to get out all of the kinks.

On the good side, if you are in a situation where you need to write a lot of notes (aka very small documents) and want a way to organize them beyond the file/folder organization of the standard operating system, then this is a great product. I am personally using this to organize my notes for my son's homeschooling.

On the other hand, as with any Microsoft product, there are many areas where the features are lacking.

Stationary / Templates
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There is no way to organize your templates. They are automatically added to the first "template section" and there is no way to rename or organize them into other sections -- logically. You can open the templates as OneNote files and move stationary pages from one section to another -- which is a major pain. The sections are also not presented in any logical order. They are not alphabetical, they are not by date, and they are not by size. The only logic that I found was that the personal ones are displayed first and then the system ones. So if you only have one personal stationary section, at least you know your personal stationary templates will be added there.

Publishing
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If you have plain text notes, this feature works fine. But if you have ANY type of formatting, (eg. using a tab to create columns) the formatting is completly lost when you try to publish. This is true for ALL publishing types (MS Word, Mail, and HTML).

Send To OneNote from IE
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First, the icon is missing in IE. You just see a blank area and when you move your mouse over it you see the "One Note" tool text. Second, you have no control of where the notes are sent. They are sent to a section labeled "Web Clippings". That is not too bad, because you can just move the pages to another section. Third, you have to select text to send. You can't just send a whole page.

Tables
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I agree with the other reviewers. Although you can create some type of formatting with columns, it would have been nice to be able to have grid lines. I make very very large lists. My longest list so far has been 180 items. It would be nice to be able to have some type of gridlines to help keep the table lined up.

Ruler background
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The ruler background is based on standard paper rulers (wide, college ruled, grid, etc.) There should really be a ruler paper for typed text. Have the lines based on the text (single line of text, double line of text, triple line of text -- or what would work best for me is every 5 or 10 lines. This would make not having tables less important, because I would be able to line things up based on the page rulers.

Overall
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I personally found this product to be worth the money when compared to what else in the market. Although, if I was a student on a fixed budget, I might feel diferently. Although, if I was a student, as apposed to an administrator / teacher my needs in the product would be different.

I reviewed PHPBB, PHPNuke, and PHPNuke derivatives. For the needs that I have, Microsoft One Note, met them the best. Although, not being able to publish is going to be a major drawback for me. I hope that either Microsoft or somebody in the opensource community takes to initiative to solve this problem.

This is an outstanding product. If you check out the Microsoft Office site, you'll see a tremendous amount of support and information.

It does what is promised. You can take virtually any kind of information, arrange it any way you want to, and come back to it later, finding precisely what you're looking for. One of the best feature is Side Note; it stays open with any other application, letting you take notes or paste information. There is even an Explorer add-on that lets you paste whole web pages, or selected material to your notebook, citing where the information came from.

You can move information anywhere you want to, instantly e-mail it from Outlook, or create a Word document from it.

I don't understand the reviewer who says that you can do this with Word and "special" folders. You could do try to do it with a pen and paper, too, but the product is all about efficiency and organization.

In my opinion, this is one of the best MS Office products--maybe they'll include this in the standard edition next time.

I assume that most computer users have a word processor -- most likely Microsoft Word. Thus, the first question that the potential buyers of OneNote should ask is: "Why do I need to buy OneNote product when I already have a full-function word processor?"

There are a few advantages in using OneNote instead of MS Word:
(1) Most importantly, it provides a better organization of notes you made. This certainly beats having hundreds of folders of thousands Word files.
(2) It is fun to use OneNote for note-taking because it provides attractive interface.

However, this is where the usefulness of OneNote ends. While it offers basic note-taking functions, it does not offer other useful functions that Words (or other Word processors) have. For example, OneNote does not support "TABLES," which is commonly used to organize information. This is a huge drawback for me because I use tables to organize my notes all the time. Additionally, it does not have the Equation Editor, and has very limited ability to record mathematical/scientific expressions. Thus, you have to create these items in another program (Word, Excel, etc.), and import them into OneNote as a picture.

This lack of useful functions really kills the whole purpose of having a supposed-to-be conveient note-taking software. These short-comings are quite serious, and, in my humble opinion, more than offset the benefits of using OneNote.

I believe Microsoft deliverately left out some of the functions in order to differentiate OneNote from Word -- very typical Microsoft that concerns their power/profit before their customers.

In sum, I do NOT recommend OneNote to someone who needs functions that go beyond jotting down simple notes. Save your money, and stick with folders and Word files until Microsoft releases an improved version.

Some of the reviews listed various complaints about the software. Some of those complaints may have been solved with the release of Microsoft's Service Packs 1 & 2.

Microsoft knowledgebase article ID: 887619

Think of this as a tabbed notepad program that can take input from just about any source, index all the words and allow you to search them. (though searching could be beefed up - with that improvement, it could blow away infoSelect or AskSam)

The tabbing has two levels. Across the top are the tabs for different projects. down the side are different pages for each project.

For instance, I am studying for the Teradata Physical Implementation certification test. I created a project tab for the test. I created page tabs for each chapter of the study guide. on each page, I type the learning goals for each chapter (posed as questions) and answer them. I scan in any diagrams that I feel are important. with my Wacom graphics tablet, I write notes and impressions on the charts. I also scan in the chapter test questions and then answer them. for me this has been a very productive study method.

I know it got off to a troubled start, but the 2003 version is VERY good, so don't let old impressions steer your buying decisions.

First of all, I am not a big fan of most microsoft software. I do like their operating systems but I feel that almost every other microsoft program has a superior and cheaper competitive software package. However, they have really done something with One Note.

One Note is a program designed for taking notes. I think microsoft had students in mind because as a student, I got a copy for free. So, I thought I would try it. I never thought taking notes on the computer would be so easy and so helpful. I don't actaully use it for class (prefer a notebook), but I use it all the time for other computer related items.

One Note has an infrastructure to allow a complicated system of organized notes, if you want. Or, if you just want to jot a bunch of information down in one place on your computer without worrying about margins, printing and formatting, then it easily does that too.

I use it for internet shopping and research. As you browse the web, you can easily copy text and screen clippings with One Note. If you are going on a trip, and have flights, hotels, car rentals, meeting agendas, maps, directions etc - One note is a wonderful place to consolidate all that information in one place organized however you want it to be.

My favorite thing about One Note is that you can format the information however you want without the program trying to format it in the way it wants (Other microsoft programs are notorious for this). Anywhere you click on the workspace you can add information to that very spot.

In conclusion: This is a program for taking personal notes. It is not good at formatting, printing, or publishing in any form. However, it is very good at letting you organize in your own unique and personal way. If that is what you need, this program is a good choice for you.