Tuesday 9 September 2008

The documentation tool I was looking for ?

On my very first blog post I wrote "I found myself in a bit of a quandary about as to the best way to document [the roundtable]".

Well I don't think it's the final answer but I have to admit to be grudgingly impressed with Microsoft's OneNote. Having seen many blog posts talking about it, I finally downloaded a trial version to play with. Microsoft gives you 60 days after which you have to pay. Well I've got about 50 days left, but I'm already thinking I might just have to bite the bullet and contribute to Redmond's profit line.

So what is it that has impressed me ?

Basically, it's the ability to mix and match text, pictures, screen clippings; drag them around and position them in a non-linear way and create what looks quite a bit like a web page with very little hassle. And then you can output in various formats.
I've just used it to do a write-up of KIN's latest roundtable / masterclass and was able to incorporate pictures taken at the event with screen clippings of bits of presentations and annotate with bits of text in a nice free-form way.
I've tried generating a .mht web page which looks pretty but is way too big and consequently takes too long to load. (I'm probably doing something wrong here). I also generated a .pdf file which comes out very well (a couple of glitches, but not too bad at all).

KIN members can see the results of my efforts here.

I will continue to experiment and let you know how I get on. In the meantime, are there any other 'Onenote' users out there that would like to share their experiences. Also, are there any alternatives I should be considering ? Here is a post comparing Evernote and Onenote.