Microsoft wants to change the way you think about taking notes. At least some of you...

The company's OneNote note-taking platform, available since the introduction of Office 2003, is a useful program for anyone whose work has a heavy research component, or those that spend a lot of time in meetings or lectures.

Microsoft actively markets the application to administrative professionals, business consultants, engineers, lawyers, students and professors. And for anyone who has used the software (generally available for about $99, or $50 for students), it makes perfect sense that this application is marketed to students and professionals whose work has a heavy research component.

For the uninitiated, getting started with OneNote is a breeze. It installs cleanly and quickly. Getting started is as easy as, well, as taking notes in Word. It’s when you start taking a lot of notes that OneNote really starts to make sense.

To its credit, Microsoft has streamlined the mundane aspects of taking notes with OneNote.

Everything you hate to do with your paper notes, OneNote does for you. From organizing notes by date, automatic date and time stamping, spell check, and inclusion of information from other sources such as PowerPoint or even calendar data from Outlook.

It possesses many of the same features as Word (spell check, text formatting), but OneNote goes beyond Word by allowing the user to post informal comments anywhere on the page - almost as if you were writing on a legal pad with a pen. For that reason, the program is popular among tablet PC users, thanks in part to its built-in handwriting recognition, which translates hand written comments (via a digital pen) into text.

Comments gathered from the students and educators below seem to confirm this too.

OneNote also allows you to draw diagrams and pictures in your notes, as well as add web links or pictures. As far as a downside to this software, the complaints are minor. First complaint is it is not Word. Learning a new application and adding a new application to the daily routine takes some effort.

Since the early days of computing, we’ve been taught to save early and save often. OneNote abolishes this with a background auto-save function…which takes some getting used to. In OneNote, as soon as you input text, it is automatically saved to your local hard-drive. This is just a nit, and something you quickly forget. At the same time, for back-up and security, you should copy your OneNote files to a network drive if possible. This is also important if you are utilizing OneNote's audio/video recording functions, which can suck up available memory rather quickly. If you are in a habit of making lists in your notes, then you may be bothered by the automatic bullet feature, at least if you are using OneNote via a keyboard, because OneNote uses the bullet feature in the same way Word does - by automatically placing a new bullet after every line return. If you choose to number a list, OneNote apes the bullet recognition capability of Word by assuming you want to create a numbered list, and it inserts new numbers where you sometimes don't want them. This is a minor point but I believe the program is over-intuitive, or overeager in its effort to be helpful and create lists.

OneNote does have a lot to offer, though, and has changed the way this journalist thinks about taking notes.

CIO PERSPECTIVE - BRIAN VOSS, Chief Information Officer, Louisiana State University

Brian Voss, CIO at Louisiana State University in New Orleans, LA, is a fan of OneNote, though he admits to not being a regular user of the software. "Not being a student, or a teacher, it's not something I make use of in my daily life as a senior university administrator," he said. "What I did do was work with Microsoft to include OneNote into our campus licensing agreement, which has made it broadly available to students, faculty, and staff on the LSU campus.”

Through March 5, Voss said 6,713 copies of OneNote have been downloaded by LSU's 30,000+ member community, which makes it the fourth most popular product (behind Microsoft Office, Symantec Antivirus, and Microsoft WindowsXP) downloaded off the school's intranet . Voss said LSU's Information Technology vision is based upon a concept of "IT abundance." In this model, the school does not have to wait for an overwhelming desire to provide new technology, but instead, based upon existing and potential demand, LSU advances a given technology to a pervasive level. Voss said the enthusiasm of early OneNote adopters, funneled through student government channels, of OneNote at LSU helped motivate the school's IT department to include OneNote in the school's new Campus License Agreement.

"As CIO, my goal in working with students, faculty, and campus administration is to improve the overall IT infrastructure at LSU. A key component of this is to increase accessibility to information technology. Software that supports the various activities of the users in the LSU community is a very important piece of that infrastructure." "It is a relatively new product and while there was some use of the product on campus, wider distribution was being inhibited by the normal adoption curve for any new product," Voss said. "Now, no one has to worry about how they'd fund the software, they can just download it and start using it. And to see use rise from a few hundred scattered users to now several thousand, that indicates how well the philosophy works, and is an endorsement to the value of OneNote."

CIO PERSPECTIVE II - Dennis Trinkle, Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and CIO, DePauw University

Dennis Trinkle, associate vice president for academic affairs and CIO at DePauw University in Greencastle, IN, first started using OneNote in 2004. At the start of the 2005-06 academic year, he began using the program regularly when he moved to an IBM X41 tablet PC. "I travel a lot, so it's useful for what I do," Trinkle said. "I use OneNote to facilitate meetings, to record notes at meetings, and after the fact, I use character recognition to turn my notes into meeting minutes." In fact, the handwriting-to-text conversion function is the only big thing Trinkle thinks needs significant improvement, even though he deems the capability effective. One aspect of the program he finds most useful is the ability to sketch diagrams directly into his notes. "Sometimes you need to draw a picture in order to illustrate an idea for people, and I can do that on my tablet and immediately share it with others in a meeting by emailing it to them or saving it to a shared network drive (via a wireless Internet connection)."

"This is the 'year of the crane' at DePauw, with a lot of construction projects going on that I'm involved with. It has been very convenient for me to have architectural blueprints in meetings (on his tablet PC), and this was enabled by OneNote," he said. "For instance, two weeks ago, while reviewing an initial design of our new performing arts center, we were able to look at the blueprints on my tablet PC and make decisions on the fly about changes, and share them immediately with the builder."

Trinkle said that even if people he works with do not have OneNote, the program's easy ability to save as a Word document or graphic file and be emailed allows him to easily share his notes. He also enjoys OneNote's ability to record audio. "Occasionally I will record notes to share with my leadership team. I think that capability works really well. Sometimes it is easier to describe something verbally, and some people prefer a verbal description to an email. And sometimes you can accomplish more in 30 seconds of dialogue than you can in 10 pages of text." Trinkle will also use OneNote to help him organize his research as he searches for a new home on the opposite end of the state, as he’ll be changing zip codes after this academic year at DePauw is completed to take over as CIO at Valparaiso University.

PROFESSOR PERSPECTIVE - Les Ball, Northeastern University Les Ball is co-director of Northeastern University's Center for Information Systems Deployment (CISD) and a senior executive professor at this Boston-based university. He and his colleagues at the CISD started using OneNote about two months before it was available to public, and he claims he and his colleagues are devout users. "I use it as my electronic notebook (via a tablet PC); it gives me the capability to search all my notes and have all my notes with me at any given time," he said. "I find that to be just incredible." "I used it in a meeting this afternoon,” Ball said. “One advantage is I can email notes to anyone in the meeting, or print them out and share them right away with others involved in a project. That is a critical feature for me." Ball also enjoys being able to compartmentalize and organize his notes in the automatic folders and subfolders that OneNote creates on the fly. "If I know I'm having a series of meetings on the same topic, I can set up a tab and organize my notes more easily. "One of our faculty members is a researcher and he develops a lot of case studies. He gathers a huge amount of data before he begins writing. He told me that before he started using OneNote, he would gather up to 500 pages worth of research before culling that down to about 20. With OneNote, he's culled that data gathering process down to about 50 pages from 500." Overall, there are only a few changes Ball would like to see made to OneNote. "Cutting and pasting into docs is difficult. For instance, moving part of a doc down in my notes, I find it is not very easy to do. The software is not as intuitive to do that; when compared to Word." Ball qualifies himself a solid supporter of the platform, and he has gladly recommended it to his students.

STUDENT PERSPECTIVES - Nadim Jarudi of Northeastern University and Erin Arnold of Dartmouth College Nadim Jarudi is a senior at Northeastern University in Boston, majoring in Entrepreneurship and Marketing. He discovered OneNote while doing a project for his market research class. As part of his project, he wanted to demonstrate a tablet PC to his class. Jarudi knew that NEU had a partnership with Toshiba, and that Professor (Les) Ball was the staff representative for Toshiba, so he contacted him to find out if there was any extra Toshiba hardware available. "Professor Ball had two tablet PCs and loaned me one, and that's how I was introduced to OneNote," Jarudi said. Jarudi claims other students are envious when they see how OneNote has lightened his physical load around campus. Instead of carrying a backpack full of books, he only lugs his tablet PC to class. "It's nice to be able to carry a computer instead of books for all my classes," Jarudi said. "I bring it everywhere I go. I feel everything for me is on demand with my tablet, and I'm just loving it right now."

In fact, Jarudi is also doing an independent study with Professor Ball in which they hope to develop a case study that proves it is possible to conduct a business course with a paperless classroom in which all participants use tablet PCs and programs such as OneNote.

Erin Arnold, a senior psychological and brain sciences major at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, also uses OneNote in class on her laptop computer. "I used to take notes in Word, but I started using OneNote after getting a free copy of the software at a Microsoft booth when they came to campus at the start of the school year," Arnold said. "I didn't think it would be that great, but I've found it to be really useful."

Arnold enjoys the ability to sort and categorize her notes by date and topic. "Before, I had to scroll through 15-20 page-long Word documents, and it was difficult to track down notes. Now I can easily identify what I'm looking for by reading the labeled tabs. Also, the Search feature in OneNote makes it so easy to find an exact word or phrase because it searches all of my note sections at once and compiles clips of each time that word or phrase appears." Jarudi said the audio recording capability has given him a leg up in his Financial Management course.

"After two weeks in this class, I felt like I wasn't able to take as many notes as I thought I should be, since the professor doesn't like to use the black board, so I started recording the lectures," he said. "And it's really made a big difference for me. I would go back to my room and listen to the lectures again later in the night, and was surprised at how much more I was getting out of the class."

Jarudi said it takes about 3.5 MB of memory on his computer to record a one hour lecture on the lowest sound quality (8 kbps), so he can't save all the lectures he attends over an entire semester, but says the ability to review recent lectures and bolster existing lecture notes has been extremely helpful.

Arnold, who plans to attend graduate school at UCSD/San Diego State after earning her degree this spring, loves OneNotes' Note Flag function, which is like an online post-it note. "The Note Flags allow me to be more efficient with my school work because I can check-off to do lists and even search through multiple check lists," she said. "Before I used this, my notebooks and text books would be covered in post-its that were impossible to sort through. I used the check-box feature to help me organize my search for post-grad programs too."

Arnold's honors thesis project is also putting OneNote to use. "When I do research online, I find it impossible to immediately review the 60-to-70 different notations that I may uncover, so it is more efficient for me to copy and paste links to interesting research right into different sections of my notes. It's much less daunting than having multiple documents to review."

When asked if she would pay for the software she got for free, she quickly answered in the affirmative. "It has been incredibly useful for me," Arnold said. "I feel more efficient and am better prepared when I go to class. When a professor is talking about something that was discussed in a previous lecture, I can immediately click open a tab from a previous lecture and go right to those notes. It's organized for me already."