Note Talkers

I have been playing with OneNote 12 for a few weeks now and these are the new features I like so far.

1) Lasso Tool: a much needed feature missing from OneNote 2003. I don’t know why it was never included in the OneNote 2003, especially when Windows Journal had it. The lasso tool works great for any sort of ink selection you can think of. Now, when I need to move hand-drawn graphs, I can just use the lasso tool and circle the entire graph, thus selecting all of the different ink parts. Before I had to use the selection tool which only selected some of the ink and not others.

To better illustrate my point, I have posted some screen shots. The first screen shot shows the selection tool in OneNote 2003. Notice that everything does not get selected. The second screenshot shows the lasso tool from OneNote 12 in action.

2) Export to PDF: Office 12 will have PDF support, meaning you can save your files in pdf now. They files won’t be editable by Office once you save them as PDF but this will work wonders for collaboration. In fact, i have already started sending notes to my friends in PDF. The old method was too cumbersome. I couldn’t send them OneNote files because they didn’t have them. No luck with Outlook because they didn’t use it. So, i had to make it into a .mht file which was some weird picture file format readable by Internet Explorer.

I have attached some screen shots showing the “save as pdf” option. The second screen shot is of the PDF file opened in Acrobat Reader.

3) Automatic Page Extend: No more pressing the little button on the bottom right to get more writing space! When you reach near the bottom of the page, OneNote 12 automatically creates more space! Now, when I am taking notes, I don’t have to stop to create more space. I can just keep writing. There is one thing I would like to see though. I generally like to write at the top to middle of “the page” instead of the bottom. The reason for this is so my had can rest comfortably on the computer. But, the Page Extend feature doesn’t kick in until you are towards the bottom. There should be an option for a user-specified level where the Page Extend kicks in.