The first chapter of this book is a very nice, approximately 50-year historical summary of the many pieces of software that can be used for taking notes, ranging from the earliest text editors, word processing programs, and presentation programs, all the way to personal digital assistants (PDAs), collaboration software, and e-readers. For older people like me, this chapter was very interesting and enjoyable. However, for youngsters (those below 30), most of this may seem irrelevant and unnecessary.

The rest of the book may be useful to users of OneNote, a note-taking program, if they have the patience to bear with it and keep on reading. The book starts with a 25-page introduction, a 32-page chapter 1 (mentioned above), and a detailed and suspenseful 38-page chapter 2, on installation. The reader’s first experience with actual note-taking in this over 400-page book starts about 100 pages after the contents page; if you want a quick guide to using OneNote, this isn’t your book. If you want a reference book with a cutesy style and lots of screen shots with handwritten notes, scribblings, and smiling faces, and have the perseverance to plow through pages and pages to find what you are looking for, you may find this book useful. Let me quickly add that the book, true to form, has a 20-page index. So, if you like using indices to find what you are looking for, you may find your way through this tome more easily. Others have reported that some of the examples in the book do not work, and that the book is “heavily padded.” I have not had a chance to try the examples, but would agree with the latter.

I would also argue that some of the points made against the current set of desktop tools are exaggerated and unfair. For example: the business about the “wall of toolbars on page 10” (who uses so many toolbars on the screen at the same time?), and the comparison of creating lists using OneNote and Word (page 91), which is indeed easy. Further, comparing a note-taking program like OneNote with a Web site preparation language, like Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), for ease of note-taking (page 91) is totally misguided.

The book says OneNote is for all types of personal computers (PCs)—desktop, notebook, and tablet—but hastens to add that the product doesn’t work on PDAs as of the time of writing. There is, however, a strong emphasis in the book on recognizing handwriting. Strangely enough, the author states that he wasn’t very successful in getting OneNote to recognize his handwriting, somewhat dampening my enthusiasm to use the product for this purpose. The text stresses that this is only version 1.0 of the product, and that we can expect bigger and better things in following versions.

It appears to me that OneNote is slanted toward on-the-go tablet PC users. Users using full-fledged desktops may not find enough added value in this software to add it to their permanent bag of tools. If you are a heavy tablet PC user who likes reading and digging to find what you are looking for, and don’t mind the size and price of this book, you may find it useful.