What’s new in Office 2010: OneNote

You’ve never heard of OneNote? Unfortunately that is the case for too many of our clients and yet everyone who uses it can’t imagine what they did without it. It is the best kept secret of the Office suite. If you haven’t used it before then you might want to skip to the bottom of this post and click on the links there to learn more about how you use it.

This is one of many posts on Office 2010. If you missed the others please visit our blog to read them.

What’s new in OneNote?

Improved access to information - OneNote provides virtually uninterrupted access to notes by allowing you to view and use your notebook files anywhere — at work, home, or in transit.

· Sync to Windows Live   You can access notebooks from any computer. You can also synchronize notebooks by using shared folders, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, and USB drives.

· Microsoft OneNote Web App   You can access and edit notebooks from a Web browser, even on computers on which the full version of OneNote is not installed.

· Microsoft OneNote Mobile 2010   By using a compact version of OneNote on a Windows Mobile-based smartphone, you can access and edit your notebooks stored on Windows Live and SharePoint.

Improved search, which can find information on either the current page, within selected sections or notebooks, or within notebooks. Search improvements allow for rapid search and navigation within the search results. For example, by typing the first few letters of a title, users can quickly jump to recently visited pages, or repeat a previous search.

Outlook integration improvements:

· Create Outlook tasks from OneNote.

· Improved organization and search features:

· Section and page tab improvements.

The ability to easily add links to content within other content — for example, pages, sections, or section groups — and to quickly navigate through these links. This enables you to create Wiki-like notebooks.

Quick Filing feature, which lets you choose where in your notebook you want to send information (such as mails from Outlook, pages from Internet Explorer, and so on).

Quick Styles for creating and applying headings.

Support for mathematical equations.

Formatting improvements for bulleted lists.

Mini Translator, which lets you use your mouse to point to a foreign word or phrase and see a translation into your native language in a small window (you can also use the Play button to hear the pronunciation of the word or phrase, and use a Copy button to paste the translation elsewhere in your notebook).

Linked note-taking to Web page URLs, Microsoft Word 2010, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2010.

Automatic text wrapping.

Sharing and collaboration features -OneNote supports simultaneous editing of notebooks by multiple users. For example, a group of users can work on a notebook at the same time, or a single user can work on the same notebook from different computers simultaneously, all without locking the file.

The changes are as follows:

· New content is automatically highlighted.

· Author information for any added or shared content is identified by a color-coded bar and the author’s initials.

· Version support lets users see when and by whom changes were made to a notebook. Changes relative to earlier versions of the notebook are automatically highlighted.

· Faster synchronization of pages so that changes are displayed to all authors in near real time.

· Display recently added content (by last day, week, month, and so on). You can also get an overview of what specific users changed on specific days.

· Merge feature allows merging two sections of a shared notebook.

Support for touch-enabled computers -OneNote provides support for computers that run touch-enabled operating systems such as Windows 7. The features include the following:

· Panning and auto-switching   On compatible computers that run Windows 7, the user can scroll and pan around any page in OneNote 2010 by using a finger and, depending on the input device, OneNote automatically switches between pen, pan, and selection.

· Zooming   On multitouch devices, such as a computer that runs a touch-compatible or multitouch-compatible operating system such as Windows 7, using a pinch gesture with the fingers allows a user to zoom in or out of a notebook page in OneNote to customize the page view.

· Improved navigation   Several navigational enhancements have been added to OneNote 2010 for users who have computers that run touch-enabled operating systems.

 

But if you’ve never used OneNote before than that’s probably all gibberish, so here’s how you can learn more about OneNote:

Make the switch to OneNote 2010 (about 30 minutes)

Doing basic tasks in OneNote (document)