UltraRecal vs. MyInfo

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 14, 2007 at 05:43 PM

Bob Mackreth wrote:
>Would it be too much to ask for you to provide a
>similarly thorough explanation of what has caused you to decide Onenote is more
>useful? I’d be very appreciative… on my first few experiments, I found Onenote to be
>a bit mystifying.
>

Bob,

I’ll be glad to, though I suspect there are folks on this forum who have a greater understanding of OneNote 2007 than I do at this point, and may be able to add some thoughts, but here are my reasons for switching:

1. OneNote does pretty much all that MyInfo does, with the exception of the metadata functions that MyInfo has, so I’m not losing much functionality in switching, but gaining more.

2. I like the notebook metaphore that OneNote uses. It feels intuitive to me. I like how I can combine various bits of data on one page: a table, photo, text snippet.

3. OneNote has a rudimentary, but useful outlining capability within each note, which is helpful.

4. OneNote allows you to affix a “flag” to any paragraph. Flags can include check boxes (useful for creating todo lists), or questions to follow up, or projects… virtually anything. And flags can be searched for across all pages and notebooks. That can be pretty handy.

5. OneNote 2007 includes a print driver, which allows you to save to ON virtually any document that you can print. So there is almost nothing that can’t be saved to OneNote.

6. ON includes opitical character recognition, so that any image with text in it can still be searched for. Also, you can extract the text in one quick operation.

7. I like how handy OneNote is, sitting in the system tray. You can pop up a “side note” at any time to jot or capture information quickly.

8. I find the screen capture utility to be very handy… especially combined with the OCR capability.

This all said, OneNote still has some glaring weaknesses. The two most obvjous to me are: It still does not seem to handle OLE objects, which is almost inconceivable. Second, its web capture feature works fine, but you don’t get a nice clean web page in ON, but it kind of just runs out straight. This last is compensated some by the handy screen-capture function.

So that’s why I’m jumping to OneNote. I admire and like MyInfo very much, but I can do more with ON and I’m really trying to reduce the CRIMP effect on my workload.

Steve Z.