OneNote 2007

OneNote is Microsoft’s note taking product. The product is a must have for any student and also would integrate well into a law office. Below are some of the features that make life easy for a student and my thoughts on how these would translate into the legal arena.

This wiki entry is on OneNote 2007, which is still in Beta. You can download a free six month trial of OneNote 2003 here.

Obviously, Onenote’s primary feature is its storage of all your notes in one place. The program lets you create multiple notebooks (#1 below) which are then able to be separated into different sections (#2 below) each of which can contain as many pages as you like (#3 below):

This layout lets you see exactly where all of your notes are at a glance, and lets you jump to a specific class by clicking on that classes’ tab rather than scrolling and scrolling in MS Word trying to find the exact part of the Word document corresponding to a specific lecture that I see so many of my classmates doing.

When taking notes in OneNote you can simultaneously record the lecture/meeting/deposition you are attending. When reviewing your notes, you can then play back the audio that corresponds to your written notes. OneNote synchronises your notes to the audio recorded at that moment, meaning that if you are unclear of a point in your notes all you need to do is highlight the portion you are unclear on and click the ‘play’ icon that appears:

As long as a shared drive is chosen as the OneNote file storage location, the files can be accessed simultaneously by any number of people. Similar to this Wiki, any file being edited is locked until the editing is complete.

OneNote also provides for collaboration over the internet. By inviting a person also running OneNote to share a portion of your notebook with you, Microsoft will assign your group an IP address that lets each of you view and contribute to a single page simultaneously:

Finally, OneNote also lets you import any document into a page as images, and then will make the text of the page searchable by performing optical character recognition on it. This is an invaluable feature when doing research, as you are able to save pdfs or any other document that is not copy and pastable right in OneNote, and can search for key terms across all of your research at once: