The Start of My Addiction

As a Microsoft Partner, with a subscription to the most awesome Action Pack, I recently (a few weeks ago) went ahead and upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007. I had seen earlier references to OneNote, but this was the first time it was automatically installed with Office, so I figured it was time to start checking it out.

Mind you, in my work, I'm often trying to organize large amounts of information. I remember Microsoft used to have something called Binder, which allowed you to organize various Office files. I tried it out, but wasn't very compelled to continue using it. Only recently, I was thinking of searching for it to see if I could still use it, and to see if it would be a benefit for me.

Fortunately, I didn't waste any time on that before I started looking at OneNote. One very helpful feature of OneNote is that it comes installed with a Notebook called, "OneNote 2007 Guide." It has a section for Getting Started, and a section for "More Cool Features." This provided a great overview of the features so I could quickly determine if it was something for me.

One feature that really piqued my interest was the fact that you could share notebooks. They have a way for you to collaborate with other users, but more importantly for me, they have a way for you to access your OneNote notebooks from multiple computers. They even completely take care of any synchronization! Just create a notebook on a shared drive, then open it from any computer. It saves your work locally as you go, and if you have access to the shared drive, it automatically updates that version about every minute. What's really nice for me is that I can work on my notebooks from my desktop or laptop computer whenever I want. If I'm going to be away from my office, I just make sure I open OneNote, let it synchronize, then I'm off. If I'm not 100% confident that it has synchronized, I can manually trigger the Synchronize Now function, but I've found that to be completely unnecessary.

Since I upgraded Office and started using OneNote, I've created 6 note books for Personal Information, Content Planning for a major site, Project notes for two major projects, and a notebook each for maintaining notes on customer and smaller non-customer sites. In the last two, I can always create unique notebooks for sites as they're needed, or I can create section groups for more in-depth organization (which I will get to later.)

I'm so enamored with OneNote (the only time Microsoft got me truly excited before was with ASP.Net) that I actually registered the domain name www.ILoveOneNote.com. For now, there's nothing there, but I do plan on making this blog available there along with adding community features to share information and bask in OneNote-goodness with my fellow fans.

So you see now why I've started this blog. Yes, I have some other motives, and I will let them out of the bag when the time is right, but for now, I really want to share my thoughts and excitement for OneNote. This blog will be dedicated to my sharing of the things I learn about OneNote, how it can truly help one to organize boat loads of information, and shedding light on what I think are some of the coolest features.

Hooray for OneNote!