Insomniac geeking

Lately I've been having a little problem sleeping, so tonight I had some fun checking out the newest features of OneNote 2007.

Ever since the public beta for the new MS Office became available, I've been playing with it at home, and I have to say that I've been impressed. It's true, that as a Microsoft Office User Specialist (MOUS)-certified geek, it can be frustrating when my favorite keyboard shortcuts or advanced menus have changed, but the new functionality has been pretty impressive. One thing for certain, I'll definitely be using the new version of Office from now on.

Of all the office betas, however, my favorite has been OneNote.

As a Tablet PC user, I've used the OneNote 2003 fairly often, especially in my MBA classes. With the new version, I've even started transferring my extensive recipe collection into the new version of One Note, because the search functionality and improved UI work exceedingly better than my old method (of using Word documents in folders).

However, tonight I decided that I'd actually RTFM and look at the handy "One Note Guide Beta 2" built into the 2007 version. WOW! Now I'm convinced that OneNote will be my "Getting Things Done" tool of the future. I am extraordinarily impressed with the way they've integrated this application's functionality with Outlook (even the 2003 version!!). Plus, the shared notebook features (which function within any shared folder or on a file server) will bring an incredibly useful simplicity to workgroup project management, especially for our marketing teams, for whom wikis and SharePoint (up until this point) have been too technically difficult to master.

If you're not testing the Office 2007 beta, then look at the Office 2007 preview site, especially the one for OneNote 2007.