OneNote – the ultimate digital note-taking tool

Microsoft OneNote 2010 is one of the best note-taking tools you can take with you to college or university. Part of Office 2010, OneNote lets you take notes in your lectures and then easily sync them with Word, PowerPoint or Internet Explorer, automatically saving what you write without you having to make a single click.

Sharing lecture notes
Not only that, you can also use OneNote to co-author notes with your course mates, using the Linked Notes button on the Review tab. Linked Notes lets you and your friends research a project, drag and drop text and pictures from Internet Explorer and then easily link through to those pages.

Linked Notes in OneNote also makes it easier to do research, as the software automatically links what you are looking at in Internet Explorer, in Word documents, in PowerPoint presentations, or on another OneNote page in any of your notebooks. This means that you can always return to your source material with ease.

OneNote also helps you to brainstorm ideas and work collaboratively with others on essays or projects, allowing multiple authors access and edit a shared notebook at the same time.

To share notes in OneNote simply go to File > New > Store Notebook On, and choose whether you wish to store your notes on the web or on a local network. You and your colleagues will need to sign up for a Windows Live account, if you don't already have one, to share notes over the web. Then head to File > Share > Select Notebook to share that notebook with other people or access it on different computers.

Adding multimedia to your essays
OneNote also lets you record audio while you make notes, tagging sentences with "Important", "To-Do", "Question", or other reminders to yourself.

As well as auto-saving your notes as you write them, OneNote also lets you insert your own multimedia creations as clickable icons in your lecture notes, which could be invaluable, whether you're studying music, media or medicine. Whether you are taking notes for your own use at a later date or working with friends on collaborative projects, OneNote on your PC or smartphone is an essential educational tool.

Microsoft OneNote is a central feature of Microsoft Office for Windows Phone 7 and also works well with Windows Live Mesh and Windows Live SkyDrive, which gives you the option of cloud-based (online) storage and synchronisation of OneNote files by multiple users.