Office Tweaks

OneNote 12 collects data from anywhere

by Jason on January 11th, 2006

Are we really in a digital age? I don’t think so, and here’s why. I look around my desk and I still see non-digital information around me. There’s the little post-it note reminding me of something on my monitor, there’s a handful of little steno pads sitting on my desk, there’s my checkbook and a pen sitting next to me, a stack of papers in various folders and sorting trays and of course a stack of business cards as well.

If it were truly a digital age, wouldn’t all of this information be completely housed and accessible via my computer or other electronic devices that connect to the computer or network itself?

OneNote 12 pushes the envelope further into collecting this type of information more easily for users. And not just collecting it, but allowing it to be searchable. What types of data you ask?

• Printed documents: anything printed to OneNote via a driver is automatically stored as well as the text being searhable. This doesn’t just include original Microsoft documents, but literally any document that could be printed.
• Scanned documents: similar to printed documents above, but anything that’s scanned optically, throught the capabilities of OCR, now become searchable as well
• Photos of documents: think about it this way, I take a picture of a billboard, and OneNote can recognize the text on it and make that text searchable. I see this as a handy way to collect information you need with say a camera phone, and use it later. A digital photographic memory!
• Screen clippings: grab a screen shot of something you’re viewing on your monitor and have OneNotes OCR (one of 4 included) grab the text and make it searchable.
• Audio/Video: you’ve got to be kidding me? I can save an audio/video file to OneNote and it uses phonetic matching from the audio to allow me to search for specific words used in a presentation. I’m curious as to just how well this will work, but if it does…AWESOME!

I can’t wait to get my hands on that beta! Should be downloading and installing later today.

Source: Unifying the analog and the digital with OneNote by Chris Pratley

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POSTED IN: OneNote