Recently, I've become aware of OneNote, Microsoft's note-taking and organizing software. I've just begun looking at it for writing in-house documentation at work, and it seems to have a LOT of promise.
Currently, we use MS Word as our default in-house documentation tool. We have a wiki, but it's not generally used outside of IT. In fact, we've had a policy against putting process documentation in the wiki (don't ask me why).
To my mind, Word leaves a lot to be desired as a tool for writing in-house process documentation. One thing in particular that Word lacks is tabs - an easy visual way to divide documents into sections.
Happily, when we upgraded to Office 2010 last year, OneNote was included. OneNote has tabs - and much more. For one thing, it appears to be much more flexible than Word when it comes to integrating pictures and other visuals.
I wanted to find a quick overview of OneNote, something I could use to help convince my boss and coworkers to use this tool instead of Word. Today, it occurred to me to Google "onenote" for stories or reviews on this tool. I came across a couple of stories on Lifehacker that are worth coming back to later.
Five Best Outlining Tools describes the top five results from a survey of Lifehacker readers. OneNote came in first place, ahead of OmniOutliner (Mac OS X), MS Word, and two free alternatives. The fifth-place entry was a Java-based desktop program called FreeMind, which was actually designed for mind mapping.
FreeMind came out on top of an earlier Lifehacker survey of Five Best Mind Mapping Applications. There are a couple of other free tools in that review that look very interesting, but FreeMind was the most popular among Lifehacker users.
Besides outlining, OneNote starred in an article titled Getting Things Done with Microsoft OneNote. By "Getting Things Done" (GTD), the article's author is referring to the productivity system made famous by David Allen. Of course, this is far from the only article about GTD on Lifehacker.com.
For a quick overview of the program (which is what I was originally looking for, after all!), I turned up Microsoft OneNote is a Note-Taking Power Tool. It's a snapshot of the basics and some of the advanced features, and whets my appetite to learn more.
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