MS Word.

In MS Word, you can make ink annotations on top of any document, and you can add ink comments in marginal boxes (similar to the ones Word provides for typed comments). Mac users: MS Word for Mac 2004 has some great features that don’t exist in Word for PC, including a tabbed “notebook” view and a handy scrapbook feature; the linked Word for Mac site has details. Click here for a short help video.

The Snipping Tool.

The Snipping Tool, included in the MS Tablet PC Experience Pack, allows you to use your stylus to select, annotate, and snip any area of the screen. Once you snip it, you can save it, copy-and-paste it into another document, save it, or edit it. Click here for a short help video.

MS Windows Journal.

Windows Journal is, by default, the key inking program on a Tablet PC (though some users of OneNote tend to abandon Windows Journal and do most of their inking and annotating in OneNote). What you need to know to get started is that anything you can print, you can send to Windows Journal, just by going to the print dialogue and selecting "Journal Note Writer" as your printer. The Tablet PC Tutorials installed with the Tablet PC edition of Windows XP include a lot of help for using Windows Journal, and you should take a few minutes to look at them (Start --> All Programs --> Tablet PC --> Tablet PC Tutorials). Remember that the tutorials run best in Internet Explorer. If you've selected a different default browser, you may need to copy the URL, open IE, paste the URL into the navigation bar, and do the tutorials there.  

MS OneNote.

OneNote provides a note-taking and document organizing environment which is in many ways more useful for writers and scholars than are traditional word-processing and text-editing programs like MS Word. Word is a kind of glorified typewriter, designed for typing and document-making, but not so much for writing and thinking, in that it doesn’t provide easy ways to link documents and ideas together. OneNote, in contrast, is a crazy hybrid of a filing cabinet, a scrapbook, a notebook, a database, and a personal search engine. Tabs across the top of the OneNote screen allow you to create different filing areas (say, ENG 103, ENG 104, Teaching Ideas, Personal Lists, and so on), and you can create subsections within each of those top areas. Each section in OneNote can contain a series of related documents which are tabbed along the right side of the screen. Four more things: it’s fully searchable, it’s compatible with inking, it saves automatically every 30 seconds, and the Send to OneNote function (added to your list of printers) allows you to print any document into it, just as you can to Windows Journal. 

The following paragraphs are full of links to info about OneNote, but I recommend, more than anything, that you pop the program open and spend half an hour playing with it. It’s not everything anyone could dream of for a virtual note-taking environment, but if you poke at it a bit, you may quickly find some ways that it can be helpful to you, especially as a planning and note-taking environment. (The word on the street, by the way, is that OneNote 2007 will improve on the current version a great deal.) (Mac users: There is no OneNote for Mac.   However, if you’re interested in note-taking and organizing applications, check out VoodooPad Lite and the notebook view in Word for Mac 2004. VoodooPad is a particularly slick little app, and you can learn to use it in just a few minutes; Word 2004’s notebook view is less functional, but it’s even easier to understand and use.)

For help in understanding OneNote, the first place to turn is a 45-minute MS video by Chris Bertelson (which is posted online in a way that will really only work well on PCs running Windows, because MS resources are like that). Bertelson’s intro to OneNote is friendly, well-organized, and easy to follow. 

Chris Pratley, one the designers of OneNote, keeps a blog here, where he talks about practical ways to take advantage of the program; here’s a post he wrote about how difficult it is to explain why OneNote is so useful.  Microsoft’s OneNote training page links to some useful A/V (and written) material on OneNote. Darren Strange, MS’s 2007 Office Product Manager in the UK, has posted a screencast demo of OneNote 2007; he goes a little deeper into the rabbit hole than most folks will want to follow him, but the first few minutes of the demo will give you a sense of what MS is doing with OneNote. (Strange has also posted screencasts demoing other aspects of the developing new MS interface, if you’re interested in what MS is planning to do to us for us in the near future.) The Student Tablet PC blog, run by a few enterprising and interesting undergraduate students, features occasional postings on OneNote, which you can view here; they also tend to post more generally on note-taking strategies and applications. GottaBeMobile is an excellent mobile tech site; here’s a link to posts they’ve done that mention OneNote.   OneNote2006 is a blog devoted to passing on OneNote news and tricks.  And, finally, this OneNote FAQ isn’t wonderfully written, but it’s fairly useful.