Author: Andrew Huey

I’m trying to figure out what the big deal is with Microsoft’s OneNote. When it was first previewed, about a year ago, Steve Gillmore went nuts over it, calling it “the new center of the Office universe”. Now, I’m willing to acknowledge that it is kinda cool, but really, it’s just a little application for note-taking. There have got to be a zillion similar applications out there. When I first saw it, I was reminded of Yeah Write, a low-end word processor released by some former WordPerfect employees a few years ago. The interface on OneNote is prettier, but actually quite similar to Yeah Write in some ways. I could see OneNote as a nice freebie program for Tablet PC users, or just as a nice little thing to toss into Office, but a stand-alone app priced at $200? Weird. I have a copy of it at the office, from my MSDN subscription, so I may try using it a bit and see if something amazing happens.

I was just browsing through Jerry Pournelle’s web site, and discovered that he, too, installed Office 2003 this weekend. His main problem thus far seems to be getting to newsgroups through Outlook. I’ve managed to avoid Outlook thus far, sticking with Eudora for the last eight years or so. I’m thinking about switching, but I really don’t have a good reason to do so, except that I just paid for Outlook 2003, so I figure I should do something with it. If I start using Outlook for e-mail, though, I’m going to end up wanting to use it as a PIM too, which means I’ll want to figure out how to sync it with my Palm, which will require spending money on a third-party program. Or I could ditch the Palm and just use my Toshiba Pocket PC. It’s all getting too complicated. Maybe I’ll just stick with my three-year-old version of Eudora and my trusty two-year-old Palm i705.

I upgraded my home computer to Office 2003 today. I haven’t seen anything exciting yet, but at least nothing’s gone wrong — no mysterious crashes, hard disk corruption, blue screens of death, or anything like that. I suppose it was worth the $200 (educational discount), given that the last version of Office I paid for was Office 95.