A first look at OneNote 2010

  The latest version of Microsoft OneNote is currently going through beta testing so we thought we’d download it and take a look.  The first thing you notice about OneNote 2010 is the similarity to previous versions.  On the surface it doesn’t look much different to the 2007 version. However, there are lots of subtle differences which will help to get things done quicker.  We give the run down of the best new features.

Basic Aesthetics

The first thing you notice is Office-type “Orb” at the top left of the menu bar has not been adopted and the original “File” menu is still available.  The Orb has always been a mystery so we’re glad it’s not used here.

Page organisation is much more versatile and addresses some of the annoyances in the 2007 version.  For example, you can now change a page into a Sub Page, or promote it to a main page, which was a much needed feature.  It was only a one way affair in 2007.

The Dock to Desktop feature allows you to dock the OneNote Window to the right of your screen.  This gives you a compact view of your note book, allowing you to always have access to your notes. However, it does only show the current page,  and you have to maximise the view if you need to change page.

Key New Features

Document Linking features are much more rich in OneNote 2010, and very similar to those you would expect to see in Word.  The new features allow you to highlight a word or paragraph and create a link to another part of your note book – very similar to how a wiki works.  This allows you to quickly jump between different areas of your notebook which was always quite cumbersome in previous versions.

OneNote 2010 also now has right-click in-line formatting, as has been fairly prevalent across the rest of the Office suite for quite some time.

The search facility is much improved in OneNote 2010,  and provides active search capability so it displays the results to you as you type. So, you can quickly modify your search terms if you’re searching for that lost memo. In addition, OneNote also highlights in real time any words which match your search terms.

Document Sharing

Document sharing with OneNote 2007 was always a hit and miss affair.  We’ve had some success using DropBox for hosting of shared OneNote files,  but this often leads to conflicting updates,  which always take time to resolve. With OneNote 2010 you can share on the web or network, and OneNote 2010 also allows you to share via your SkyDrive account. OneNote also now supports Author marking do you can see who made the changes to a document.

Overall

In general,  this isn’t a massive step forward for OneNote 2010.   If we’re honest,  the lack of simple web integration we’ve come to expect from other tools such as Evernote, is something of a disappointment.   We were also hoping the Yellow-Stickies would be simplified to something more like a basic Post-It note, so it would take up less space on the desktop.    We had to check the Microsoft web site to see what we were missing,   but we couldn’t find anything we hadn’t already spotted.

This article is based on the beta test version of OneNote 2010.  You can download it here.