Microsoft OneNote 2007
Interface
One of the first things you'll notice about the new OneNote is some differences in the interface. Firstly there is now a navigation bar on the left side that makes it easy for you to navigate multiple notebooks and sections. There's a handy double-arrow so you can minimize it out of your way but when you need it you can quickly access the different sections and folders. I use this almost exclusively to navigate my extensive collections of notebooks and sections now.Does OneNote 2007 get the new Ribbon that pervades the rest (almost) of the Office Family? No. The Ribbon is not in OneNote 2007. Why? Two reasons:
1. OneNote just doesn't have that many menu items. The design decision for the ribbon evolved from the exploding number of toolbars and task panes that other office products, like Word, were seeing. Of the top 10 feature requests from Word 2003, several of them were already in the product but most people didn't know how to find them! OneNote doesn't suffer from that problem (yet) since it doesn't have as many commands and toolbars. A ribbon for OneNote might look fairly sparse.
2. As explained to me by Chris Pratley -- they only had so many resources and they had to prioritize. We could have internal hyperlinks, a super fast search capability and powerful shared notebooks or we could have a new ribbon UI. Given the choice I would much rather have all of the great new features and skip the UI until a future build.
Shared Notebook
The shared notebook capability has gotten much more powerful and now easily allows for multiple computers to share, in almost real time, the same notebook. In our organization we have three large shared notebooks, one of them quite large, which reside on a shared directory on our server. The OneNote shared notebook feature synchronizes a local copy of the file to your local hard drive so that you can access As we're out roaming around we VPN back to the office pretty regularly and OneNote automatically syncs our local copy of the shared notebook back to the server. It sends our changes and fetches any changes other users have made. Very powerful stuff.Hyperlinks
My #1 feature request for the next version is a reality. Internal hyperlinks not just on a page level but right down to an individual note level. You can now create some text on one page that contains a hyperlink to a note on a totally different page; even in a totally different notebook. That hyperlink can be anything you want, by the way, so it could also be a link to web content or potentially other content on a system or drive.Oh, and yes, you can create hyperlinks on text. So that instead of seeing http://www.factplace.com as the hyperlink you can see this is the FactPlace hyperlink.
Drawing Tools
This has been a very popular request from users and OneNote has gotten a nifty set of drawing tools. One of the cleverest aspects of these tools is that the shapes they draw are actually just ink lines which means you could draw a rectangle...then use the eraser and just erase a small section of one line -- to represent a door, for example. The tools work very much like the tools you're used to in Word. You also will be getting tools that let you create Axes for graphs very easily, you can rotate drawing objects and quickly reuse the same object over and over again with a "repeat" type of button.Real Tables
OneNote 2007 includes much more robust tables with gridlines and everything. It's not Excel - you're not going to do complex computations in OneNote - but it is a much nicer looking and more manageable table than what you got with OneNote 2003.Lasso
Users who are familiar with the Tablet PC application Journal have long asked for OneNote to include the Lasso feature -- so you can effectively circle a word, drawing or block of text in order to select it so that you can move it. OneNote 2007 has the Lasso capability and it works very well.Search
Search is vastly improved. Like most of the Office 2007 suite the data is constantly indexed in the background -- similar to how MSN or Google Desktop works -- and so searching is against a pre-made index and is thus extremely fast. You can search across multiple notebooks.OCR of Imported Images
In OneNote 2007 you can import a picture from your camera phone or drag an image from a webpage and OneNote will OCR it for you, automatically recognizing text in the picture. That makes the picture content searchable. Naturally there are limitations -- a fuzzy picture of a distant sign in a difficult font probably won't OCR very well. But you could take a nice close-up picture of a business card, place that image on a page and the text from that image will be searchable (assuming it's clear enough).There are some wonderful possibilities with this feature. If your writing is clear enough you could take a picture of a white-board from a meeting and have the text from that recognized. (again - it's not perfect and is largely dependent upon the quality of the picture and clarity of the writing).
Automatic Addition of Writing Space
In OneNote 2003 you had to explicitly request more writing space when you got to the bottom of the page. OneNote 2007 will just keep adding space to the bottom as you get to the bottom. It works very well for long notes.OneNote Mobile
The long-requested version of OneNote for the SmartPhone is in the works. One of the intended scenarios is that you can take a picture in a meeting, of a white board, of a business card or other document, then place that right into OneNote. OneNote Mobile will two-way sync with OneNote on the PC. At present it's only officially announced as available for SmartPhones but there is a movement to get it released for PPC as well. I'll let you know what comes out of that discussion when I can.Save as PDF
Same as the rest of the Office 2007 suite OneNote 2007 can now save to Adobe PDF without any third-party software.Napkin Math
Write 2+2= and OneNote will insert the answer. Gives you effectively a scribble calculator that you can use from anywhere within OneNote. Very handy stuff.NOTE: Only works with typed numbers, not handwritten. Apparently handwritten numbers are harder to pull this off with technically, but I'm hopeful that a future version will resolve this.
Multiple Notebooks
I alluded to it above, but OneNote now easily supports multiple Notebooks. They're actually trying to move away from the multiple "Folder" scenario and replace that with multiple Notebooks. The Notebooks can be color-coded so you can find them more easily and you can share individual notebooks.Minimal UI Mode
In OneNote 2007 you can turn off most of the toolbars and other interface items in order to get maximum screen real estate for taking notes. Yes, OneNote 2003 had minimal UI mode too, but only when the screen was fairly small -- as a SideNote (or QuickNote). In 2007 you can do it in full screen mode too.What's NOT in the New Version?
- Sorting of pages or sections - a popular request is to be able to automatically do an alpha-sort of the pages and sections. Sorry, that didn't make it into the current build. There is, however, a powertoy to do it.
- OLE Support - The ability to embed "live" spreadsheets or documents which you can edit/change in OneNote and have those changes reflected back into the original. Or vice-versa.
- Deleted Pages Folder - There are about 3 of you out there who are going to say "But that was in OneNote 2003?!?" Yes, it was. And only you 3 ever clicked on it. (the usage numbers on it actually were staggeringly low. Almost un-measurably low.) So it's been removed from OneNote 2007.