My elementary school kids use PowerPoint and Word (via Mac Office 2008
), and their mother uses Word 2007
to write college reports. Away from work, I am not a frequent Office user. It is installed on my home computers, upgraded to the latest versions, but only because I get an employee discount. In my "tech support" role at home it is easier to have the same version I use at work. Office feeds my family, so it is painful to admit that it has become less and less relevant to me through the years I've worked on it.
), and their mother uses Word 2007 to write college reports. Away from work, I am not a frequent Office user. It is installed on my home computers, upgraded to the latest versions, but only because I get an employee discount. In my "tech support" role at home it is easier to have the same version I use at work. Office feeds my family, so it is painful to admit that it has become less and less relevant to me through the years I've worked on it.One Office application I've wanted to use at home is OneNote
. It's a cool app nobody seems to know about that first shipped in Office 2003. Among other things it captures free-form notes, screenshots, and web clippings in a single notebook file that can be easily searched and organized into sections and tabs. Hard to explain until you've played with it.
. It's a cool app nobody seems to know about that first shipped in Office 2003. Among other things it captures free-form notes, screenshots, and web clippings in a single notebook file that can be easily searched and organized into sections and tabs. Hard to explain until you've played with it.On our Microsoft intranet we have the ability to keep the OneNote file on a server, automatically synced back into the OneNote client on multiple computers. I work on several computers, so having my notes available on all of them without any special steps (and the bonus of my notes automatically backed up) is great. The downside has been that you have to have the OneNote client software installed, and I can't do that on some of my work computers.
I haven't used OneNote at home because I want my personal notes to roam seamlessly between multiple computers just like my work notes. I want my notes on my home PCs (Windows and Mac) and I want the same notes available up on my work computers. I am not willing to tinker around with Sync This or Mesh That to accomplish this. I could have accomplished a less-slick form of this via Google Docs, honestly, but I like the rich client; it's still a slicker way to edit, especially when dealing with images and other non-textual material.
Now for the infomercial part of our program. Office-2010 includes online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote (yay!): the Office Web Apps.
A big part of this is to compete with Google Docs and other "good enough" productivity suites, but unlike Google, it also lets you work in the client applications or the web applications. For OneNote, this gives me (almost) exactly what I want. I can create a Notebook online, and view or edit it either in a web browser on PC or Mac, or I can use the OneNote 2010 client and sync the online notebook the same way I do on my corporate network. Sweet. I've created my new personal online notebook, and no doubt the FBI will be adding it to their watch list almost immediately. I'm not a privacy nut, I air my crazy out in plain sight for all to see, so the hosted aspect of it doesn't worry me a whole lot.
My only sad part is still no rich OneNote client for the Mac (or iPad or iPhone or iWhatever for all you mobile hipsters out there).
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