Josey Puliyenthuruthel: Organise that jotting with OneNote

GIZMO GALLERY

Microsoft has its desktop applications sitting on more than nine out 10 computers worldwide. For such a huge share of the market "" in fact, some would say, precisely because of the market dominance "" the company has not quite come up with products that wow customers like garage-bred image-viewer IrfanView, CD-writing software Nero, tiny virtual network computing software or even Adobe's PhotoShop.

This is obviously a subjective view, but very many people out there have found little they would consider innovative from the Redmond Godzilla.

Of late, though, that is changing. For instance, I've heard users talk with respect for some features of Microsoft Outlook even if it probably runs on a couple of million lines of not so elegant code. One such new product from the Microsoft stable is OneNote 2003.

OneNote is a new Microsoft application that lets users organise and reuse notes electronically on laptops, desktops or tablet PCs. Information typed in or hand written on a tablet PC can all be the subject of this nifty utility.

Think about the benefits especially if you are a lawyer, journalist, doctor, researcher or personal assistant. Sure, any word processor allows you to take notes, but OneNote makes organising the notes, notebooks and folders according to event or category a breeze.

The OneNote interface comes with a degree of familiarity, perhaps because it comes with menus and supports familiar keyboard shortcuts embedded in other Microsoft Office applications. There are some salient differences in the program to give it a look-and-feel of a notebook.

Clicking anywhere on the screen, for instance, creates a blue box wherein you can type, draw a chart, or scrawl a note (if you are using a tablet PC). In fact, the utility and value of OneNote will be more for tablet PC users.

It gives tablet PC users the ability to convert handwriting to text. But, given that tablet PCs have not quite caught on as expected and many users type faster than they write, this may not be as useful as planned when the application was designed.

Information retrieval is also easy because the program opens at the page and notebook you last worked. According to Microsoft, everything you work on is automatically saved; so, no fears of losing data. Further, you can search your notes quickly and find what you need without having to know in which notebook, folder, or file you saved that information.

This is useful to retrieve some nugget of information "" say, you're a M&A adviser to an Indian rubber company restructuring itself and you're looking for the sale price of a rubber asset in Malaysia that you jotted down during your research "" you vaguely remember but can't pinpoint where you recorded.

Other features include being able to flag notes according to priority and the ability to rearrange notes time and again as such priorities change. OneNote allows users to associate information in different formats or media with a single topic or subject.

The application can be used to record audio notes that can be synchronised with typed notes. This is quite a thoughtful feature "" imagine sitting through a fast-paced, info-packed lecture or a training seminar. Many people prefer to take truncated notes and back it up with an audio recording so that they can concentrate on the talk. Rather cleverly, you can time-stamp portions of your notes to correspond to parts of the recording.

Similarly, information "" text, pictures, graphics or even whole webpages "" can be click-and-dragged to pages in your OneNote notebook or folder. The program notes the URL of the webpage allowing the user to reference sources later "" clearly a useful tool for researchers.

A clear verdict on OneNote, that retails at Rs 4,500 in India and about 60 per cent abroad, is difficult. As a concept, it is very intuitive, but it will take a bit getting used to. Having said that, I think it may be worth spending the time, if nothing for organising important notes. At least, that is the view from a not-so- organised hack.

(Josey Puliyenthuruthel can be contacted at josey@vsnl.net)