OneNote is part of Microsoft office suit (2003 and 2007). It is included in the student suite and the ultimate suite. It is one of the few things Microsoft did it right but it does not enjoy the popularity of other products.
OneNote contains notebooks similar to Excel worksheets but this is more visually and logically organized. Notebooks contains sections, sections contains pages and pages contain clips.
Pages are of expandable in all directions and can take any number of clips. Clips can be text clips, web clips, audio clips, outlook tasks and calendars.
One great thing about OneNote is you need not keep it opened at all times, whenever you think that something is to be noted you can clip it to onenote, clipping can be done with IE, Firefox, of course word and other office documents. All these notes go to a section called unfiled notes. As the name suggests, this section contains notes from different contents, at the end of day we can organize them into sections, create sections etc.
Another great thing in OneNote is print as onenote document. Anything that can be printed using a printer can be printed as a one note document. The documents comes as a kind of image that we play with.
This page is a print from a book, see how I can make notes, write on it, highlight, add tags and do anything just like a blank page. This is great thing for anyone who wants to have editable notes on their pages.
OneNote also allows you to record and place that clips on your notes, the same goes with documents, you can attach documents to your page like email attachments. Also you can clip a part or the whole screen and keep it in your notes.
In fact there are several other cool features in onenote that a user will learn with experience, one note has been designed with a great respect for usability, features are made explicit and once we know how to use something it stays with us. And key board shortcuts are great. For instance WIN+S can be used to clips screen.
I can't finish this article without mentioning the coolest feature of onenote, sharing. Yeah, so two people or more people can share and work on a same document They can edit, write, paste do whatever and the instantaneously others can see the changes. Think how this would help remote teams and school projects.
But OneNote is not free except if you are a student, Evernote is software which can be used freely and aimed to compete with onenote. It is light weight software, with some cool features. Similar to OneNote notes can be organized but through tags or categories(instead of sections).
Categories can contain other categories and so on. This model is of great use to have notes with several categories. Creating categories is very easy and we can organize them at will.
Ever note also has a universal clipper which can take screenshots, web clips or anyother documents, plugins are available for IE and Firefox.
Recently evernote release a mobile version through which we can clip content even while browsing through mobile. It sends clips as email messages and later we can organize them on the PC This blog explains all this clearly.
Like always both of these software have their positives and negatives and it depends largely on the person using it that has to make the choice. Personally, I think OneNote is better because of its extensive features but hey evernote is evolving at a great pace.
