system.reflecti0n.net

I bought the cheapie home edition of Office 2007 last spring and with it the option to load up OneNote. I figured it was worth a look.

Frankly, I did what probably everybody else did when they opened OneNote… I yawned. Nothing special to see there. I closed it and forgot all about it for months.

Then a couple days ago I was sifting through a really long blog posting about programming and found a piece of it that I wanted to remember. The blog being so long though meant if I was going to post is to delicious.com would mean I'd probably lose track of what peice I wanted to re-read later.

Then I noticed the little "N" in my system tray and the light-bulb went on…. I copied the text of the piece I wanted to reference, double clicked on the "N" and pasted in my clipping. Even better, I included a hyperlinked footnote to the original blog-- and I clipped it from a Firefox window so I was duly impressed by this. That is, I get to keep my little nugget of info AND track where it came from. Sweet.

So now I get it. OneNote is better than a complicated version of Word. I've got a handy little tool for gathering small pieces of info into one place. I recall it said something like that on the box-- shame they can't really show you how handy it is on the back of the box.

It's early days yet, this may only be a little fad for me. But I'll keep trying. Now I'm already wondering if I can get his installed at work and organize clippings of useful code in the same way. If OneNote could actually do code colourization I'd really be impressed… I'll leave that for another day, but soon.

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