Well, I was fairly amazed with OneNote a few weeks ago when I was playing around on a Gateway Tablet at work.  It seems to be a very good idea for a note taking application, and I was sorta jealous that there wasn’t anything for Mac like that, at least that I knew of.  I was talking with a friend and he informed me that Word 2004 for Mac has something like that called a Notebook.

So, being the good user that I am, I decided to use this as my only way of taking notes for the class that I’m taking this summer.  So, I set down and tried to learn a little about it right before I headed off for my first class and was pleasantly surprised.  After using it for three days (counting time I’ve spent studying and outlining at home, that equals about 18 hours in this one document….) I’m very happy with this view of Word.

I exclusively use Pages for everything that I do word processing wise, but after using this view, I think I’ll be firing up Word a little more.  Basically, you have a document that has a title at the top.  The page scrolls underneath that title, so that it’s always visible.  The paper itself looks like notebook paper, and you can add and rename tabs on the right hand side, just like you would have divider tabs in a real notebook.  So, this is a nice way to organize indeed.  Add in the fact that you can record audio (haven’t tried this in class yet) right into the document on certain lines, you have highlighting and markup tools at your fingertips, and it’s easy to outline with and you’ve got a very powerful note-taking app indeed.  It’s always nice to find a new application to brag about (though I never thought MS Word would be the one).