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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="OneNote in action"]<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Microsoft_Office_OneNote_2007.png"><img title="Microsoft Office OneNote Screenshot" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/2/2c/Microsoft_Office_OneNote_2007.png/300px-Microsoft_Office_OneNote_2007.png" alt="Microsoft Office OneNote Screenshot" width="300" height="210" /></a>[/caption]

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A friend of mine asked me over the weekend, ‘So are you sticking with this Windows thing? I mean <em>really</em> giving up on the Mac after all those years?’

Yup, I said.

There was an email sigh and she gasped, ‘I sometimes wonder if I ever really knew you.’

Trust me, when the Mac provided what I wanted as a writer I was the first to shout its praise from the rooftop. When something else better comes along I’m over the fence in a flash. I do this for a living. No time for sentiment. I want the <em>best</em> tools around because the best will save me time and effort. And the best right now, for the way I work, isn’t the Mac. It’s Windows with Office 2010.

I switched four months ago and there’s not a day when I’m tempted to go back. Word 2010 may not be Scrivener but it’s close enough to make the other parts of the equation – being able to choose the computer I want, not the one Steve Jobs wants to sell me – closers on the deal.

And then there’s the odd piece of software called <a class="zem_slink" title="Microsoft OneNote" rel="homepage" href="http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/FX100487701033.aspx">OneNote</a> 2010, something most Office buyers get and probably ignore, as I did in the beginning. Here’s the truth: OneNote is a tough thing to understand when you first see it. You can’t decide whether it’s too simple for words or too complex to be worth the trouble. In a way it’s both and much, much more. It’s taken me a while to understand this but OneNote is the Aladdin’s Cave for someone like me, a lone wolf, constantly dealing with a stream of information, possibilities, ideas and tedious everyday documents.

Now I’ve wrestled this thing to the ground I simply don’t know how I managed without it. Here’s why.<!--more-->

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/one2.jpg"><img class="wlDisabledImage" style="display:inline;border:0;" title="one2" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/one2_thumb.jpg" border="0" alt="one2" width="489" height="367" /></a>

This my OneNote – click to see it bigger. There’s more going on here than meets the eye but some of the things I have in OneNote are a bit secret which is why they’re either blanked out here or disappeared altogether.

OneNote is a filing cabinet. You have notebooks – think of them as different cabinets – sections and tabs, the latter two being sub-divisions of an individual cabinet. I have a general personal notebook that handles over all ideas, documents for events and travel, recipes I’ve picked up, anything I’ve collected over the web. Then I have separate notebooks for different writing projects, each broken down into sensible sections – locations, characters, outlines, research and the book diary I keep for each.

Here’s the key to OneNote. You keep <em>everything</em> there. Even stuff you don’t think you need. It’s a filing cabinet, right? A digital one too. You can find stuff very easily simply by searching on a word. So why throw something away?

The section you see here is the one I created to do research for the Venetian masks paper I published here yesterday. Dead simple to understand. Each of those pages addresses a specific topic. Sometimes the notes are original. Sometimes they’re from books  or the web. You get material from the web straight into OneNote either by printing directly to it or, if you use IE, hitting the ‘send to OneNote’ button. If you want to grab stuff really quickly just hit Windows-key S while OneNote is running. You can then screen grab any part of the screen in front of you and store that in OneNote too. It won’t just be a screen grab though – OneNote will ‘read’ the text so you can find it by searching very easily too.

Now I’ve got the hang of this thing I make a point of storing every last item I can think of there. If a travel document comes in the thing no longer stays just in email. A copy gets bunged in the travel folder too. Event engagements, briefing notes, all that practical stuff gets stored here. Basic book outlines, character notes, snatches of possible dialogue, names, places, photos… They all go in.

Does this look too complicated? That’s probably because I have a lot of notebooks open. No need. You can just close the others and work with one alone. It does take a while to comprehend what this thing is capable of. But once it gets you you’re hooked (and the fact there will be no OneNote for the next version of Office for Mac is one more reason for me not to return to Windows).

And then there are the tools for monitoring writing and revision, which are simply amazing. But I’ll save them for another day.

Here’s the final clincher. You can store all this material and share it between your different computers without a second thought. All your notebooks can be stored in a single folder. Install the <a href="http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta" target="_blank">free Live Sync service</a> that comes with a Windows Live account. Set up that folder to sync between your PCs and (though there is a 2 gb limit on this) to back up to your <a class="zem_slink" title="Windows Live SkyDrive" rel="homepage" href="http://skydrive.live.com/">Skydrive</a> too.

From now on your computers stay in sync with the same OneNote notebooks <em>and</em> you keep a secure backup copy on the web too.

I’ve been messing with information tools trying to achieve all this for years, from Devonthink to Together, <a class="zem_slink" title="Evernote" rel="homepage" href="http://www.evernote.com">Evernote</a> to all manner of stuff. Nothing comes close to OneNote. Consider me sold.