Opinions on Microsoft's OneNote

[johns259]

I have heard mixed reviews on OneNote, but overall it seems like a good program. Is it as handy as it sounds for law school and does anyone know of a place to find it for less than a hundred bucks?

[Strong]

In my opinion it is worth the money.

Dell has it for $89.95, but with tax and free shipping you are at $97.

I think you can download it, and microsoft has it for $99.95.

I would check e-bay or related sites, list price of $24 with COA.

[Felsen]

About a month ago, I was able to download a One Note 2003 demo from the Microsoft site.  It lets you play around with it for a month or so.  I wasn't impressed.  It looks like a potentially good product, but suffered from a non-intuitive User Interface.  In a one hour test drive, it lost all the notes I had prepared for a certain class.  It suffered other problems as well.  If they can fix those interface issues, it will be a wonderful product.

Maybe they'll get a few things better in the 2007 version.  I'm waiting for that before trying it again.  Until then, I'll just use a standard word processing program.

[jacy85]

In a one hour test drive, it lost all the notes I had prepared for a certain class.  It suffered other problems as well. 

How'd it lose the notes?  It saves everything automatically as you type, and after a year of use, I've never lost anything.

[Flinstone]

In a one hour test drive, it lost all the notes I had prepared for a certain class.  It suffered other problems as well. 

How'd it lose the notes?  It saves everything automatically as you type, and after a year of use, I've never lost anything.

I have been playing around with MS One Note and have generally liked it, although it seems a little bare. If it were as complete as MS Word with the functionality of One Note, then you would have a great product (for MS at least). I haven't figured out how to use everything though.

Jacy85, how do you set up your One Note Outlines and what features do you use that you find the most useful?? If you've been using it a year, you probably are pretty familiar with the ends and outs of One Note. Thanks for any tips you can give.

Ryan

[jacy85]

I have a folder for each subject (torts, contracts), and within each folder, I have 3 sections:  syllabus, notes, outlines.

I type up my syllabus in that section so I don't have to worry about losing it.  The outline section is obvious; outlining in OneNote is SO much better than in Word.  I hate Word's autoformating.  It sucks.

For notes, I have a a page for each class day, with the topic of the day.  I have a brief for all my cases (which I copy from Lexis), and I put a note flag on each case heading, so I can search for them all.

Having all my notes in one place, where I don't have to look in a documents folder or anything is awesome.  I've had several classmates comment on how they with they could access everything so easily with Word.  Searching is better, IMO, and backing up is really easy.  (Tools -> Options -> Backup)

The only big annoyance can be printing, with the scale issue (hard to explain, but if you've tried to print anything long, you probably have encountered it).  It can be gotten around, but I hope they fix it in the 2007 edition.

[CUA09]

I downloaded onenote 2007 beta from microsoft's webpage.  I'm not sure how I will like using it in class, but I am amazed at its features and ease of use.

[Felsen]

In a one hour test drive, it lost all the notes I had prepared for a certain class.  It suffered other problems as well. 

How'd it lose the notes?  It saves everything automatically as you type, and after a year of use, I've never lost anything.

I don't really know how it lost the notes.  After I had typed them out I decided to close the folder.  Little did I know that it basically deletes the folder from your views at that point.  Yes, it does appear to typically save back-ups, that's why whenever I added a folder back to a view, I would have to rename it from Backup-NameIReallyWanted.  It wasn't that hard to find the actual files it saved them to in the directory structure, but one of the folders I closed was permanently lost.

They really need to change that aspect of the interface.  I was needing something similar to a minimize option.  I wanted it to not show up in the tabs at the top, but remain in the folder.  Instead, they made it dead simple to accidentally delete it from the folder, and a pain in the rear to re-add it (re-insert from the back-up and then rename it).

Most of the time, it would have the back-up around with a little searching, but on one of the 10 or so notes it was permanently lost.

[jacy85]

Hmm...not sure why there'd be a need to "close" a folder; they don't really get in the way at all, and I've never done it in the year I've used it.

Good to know in the future though, so I don't decide to try it out on something important.

[lawschoolmama]

I love it - but you do have to type in a bigger font because printing it out in 12 point hurts your eyes when you read it - you have to try it to see what I am talking about

I found it on Ebay for $15 - this was a year ago.  It made my life much simpler, and everyone uses it, so it is easy to trade notes with classmates.

HTH