Office's Undervalued Prospect: Microsoft OneNote
If you use Outlook, Word and Excel frequently, there is a good chance you actually have the entire Microsoft Office suite, which includes some well known applications, like PowerPoint and some not so well known ones, such as Microsoft's OneNote. OneNote has been around since 2003 (the year and MS Office version), but I only started using it when I installed Office 2007.
OneNote is, as the name suggests, primarily a note taking application. Free form pages are organized by the note taker into notebooks. Notes are not just text, they can be images, links, sounds and videos. Notes and notebooks can be published as PDF documents and shared with other OneNote users. This may not sound like the most exciting application, but I've found it to be a surprisingly effective way to keep information organized.
I use OneNote (in addition to a paper journal) to organize ideas and research for blog posts. I use it at home with my dual monitor setup to take notes while watching screencasts and working my way through programming books. At work, I'm experimenting with using it to organize the many small notes to myself I make about projects that usually end up on notepads and then in the recycling bin.
OneNote's interface features tabs across the top for notebook sections, with tabs down the side for pages within the notebook, making it natural and quick to create a nested structure for the information. OneNote also includes its own screenshot tool to facilitate capturing snaps into notes.
Finally, when I open up OneNote it doesn't come with the heavy mental baggage that Word does. I've used Word for years and years, so when I open it up, I think of essays, reports, specs; pretty much all more formal documents. OneNote encourages me to be informal, which is what these notes should be. OneNote also fights against me far less often than Word does; so far I've yet to encounter the frustrating Word behavior where Word just won't let you type in anything until you adjust your formatting.
Long time readers of this blog will remember that I once discussed my somewhat unique diet of more, but smaller meals during the day. The book that explained this relies heavily on sports analogies, one of which is the "undervalued prospect", used in the book to highlight certain foods which lacked the reputation for being healthy, but were actually great things to have in your diet. I think the undervalued prospect is a good analogy for OneNote's place within Office. I never really see it get hyped, but if you take the time to get to know it, OneNote has a lot to offer.