I’ve been using OneNote for a while now, and I was going through my notes and saw this one (from a class I’m taking) and thought that it was a good example of why I like it. You can take notes using a stylus. You can type. You can drop screenshots into it. It’s all of the ways you probably collect information, and it’s very much like a modern version of an old-school notebook. It looks like one of my college notebooks, but with some typing. I love drawing lines to connect ideas, referring back to something I wrote earlier. There’s some weirdness to the application and it will be hard to move to another tool if I ever decide to. But I was always curious about it since I read an article by James Fallowes.

The next largely mechanical task is saving material you come across in your work, whether it is something unexpected on the Internet or the result of more purposeful research. There are countless tools of this sort; the one I now use is OneNote 2007 from Microsoft. I like it because it can handle almost any kind of information—Web clippings, PDFs, audio or video files, straight text—and index it for quick retrieval. It also has an elegant feature that makes capturing information utterly painless. When something you want to save is on your computer’s screen, you can press a button or two and “print” that blog posting—or photo, or e-mail, or online receipt—to your OneNote file. It’s like storing paper documents in folders, except that it’s faster, easier, and more reliable when you look for the material later on. Microsoft has made other Office programs available for the Mac, but not yet OneNote. Scrivener, a new research and writing application, is what I would try on the Mac.