I was an early adopter of Microsoft’s OneNote and started using it in February of 2004 and have never stopped. I love it for the simplicity of use and ease of collaborating with a team. Team collaboration with Microsoft OneNote is a huge productivity gain and one of the main reasons I’m still a fan.
When our team needs to collaborate on an idea our first thing to do is to setup a new page, section, folder or even a new notebook. Whether we are in the same office or across the world, the content updates as they are made, keeping everyone – anywhere, up to date with the latest version.
To do basic editing, there is no learning curve as it’s so similar to word or other similar text editing tools. Even before Microsoft Office had screen clipping, OneNote had it. As far back as I can recall, A feature I’ve used a lot has been the screen clipping. Having one spot to capture and notate images has come in handy over the years for things such as designing a new data model, web or UI design, among other things.
For times when you need to capture video and/or audio, OneNote is equipped natively (assuming you have the camera and mic). During many brainstorming or strategy sessions, we’ve setup a laptop to record and capture the recording right within OneNote. Each person involved can then have immediate access to these recordings for future reference. Best of all, it sync’s notes that you take to the timeline in the recording. So you can jump to and replay what was being discussed for each of your notes you took.
OneNote is available for PC’s, Mac and mobile devices that run Android and IoS. It’s been a great tool and has increased not only my productivity but all of my teams as well.
Do you use OneNote? If so, what is the feature you use most?