I am a very committed note-taker*, and I despise paper. So I
take all my notes on the PC. I view the laptop as an over-sized
PDA, and I un-dock it and haul it to most meetings, if I think
there is any chance I can benefit from having it, most likely
to take notes, possibly to reference other information. I am
firmly convinced this is a best-practice. I am surprised that
so few people do likewise.
I use one big, fat Word doc to produce the electronic equivalent
of those bound composition books that organized, conventional
business note-takers tend to carry around. Besides the fact that
I type SOOOO much faster than I scrawl, having notes in electronic
forms has two other compelling advantages. One, I can send out
ad-hoc meeting notes with negligible incremental effort (copy,
paste into email, possibly super-light edit, and send). Two,
I have an electronically searchable archive—always a killer benefit.
So when my boss passed on some info about MS OneNote, I was curious.
OneNote is a new member of the Office 2003 “family”, and is targeted
at note-taking. Its core audience is Tablet PC users. I think
they are hoping this is a killer-app for Tablet PCs. I don’t
have a Tablet PC, but it is also purportedly useful even on non-Tablet
PCs, so I went ahead with the 60-day trialware.
I gave it a quick spin. It seemed mildly interesting. I think
it would be more appealing for a tablet user. But even if I had
a tablet, I’m not sure I’d be a convert. I see it appealing more
to the (vast majority) of people who haven’t converted to PC-based
note-taking. But maybe I’ll try it out during a real meeting.
*It is a bit ironic that I am a note-taking enthusiast now, because
back in high school and college—where extensive note-taking was
normative—I was at the other extreme. I thought it was better
to focus on listening to the lecture, than to become a transcriptionist,
especially since most of the material was in the book. Actually,
my theory was that lecturers should pass out a copy of their
lecture notes. Of course, the very, very, very best practice
was to pre-read, so when a point was being covered that wasn’t
in the book, you would know to carefully annotate it. Not that
I did that very often!
7:20:39 AM 
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