SciITech
The Battalion
Page 6A • Thursday, April 10,
Note-taking goes high tech
Cutting-edge technologies have applications inside and outside the classroon
By Adam Reed
THE BATTALION
According to Microsoft’s
research, more than 90 percent
of the population takes notes
regularly. From students to pro
fessors, journalists to doctors,
everyone uses some form of
note-taking for professional and
personal use.
Current methods for note
taking often prove inefficient.
Students strain to keep pace
with paper and pen while fast-
talking professors race through
course material. Journalists
scribble notes in portable
notepads, hoping to catch all the
facts. And as students enter col
lege each year with more
advanced skills, laptops have
become a common occurrence
in the classroom. Most software,
however, limits students to a sin
gle style for their writing.
Enter Microsoft’s newest
addition to its Office series of
products: OneNote. With
OneNote, Microsoft offers a
software suite that is “created to
fit everyone’s note-taking style,”
company representative and
product manager Bobby Moore
said. Moore approached stu
dents and faculty, a target group
of note-takers, for OneNote’s
premiere demonstration at Texas
A&M on this week.
A major feature of OneNote
is what Moore calls a flexible
two-dimensional page surface.
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Top Left: Microsoft Office OneNote 2003
screen shot
tines such as Inking.”
Inking is part of a new tec:
nology in which tablet use:
operate a pen-input device:
write directly on a tablet PC
screen. This includes handwn
ing simple text or adding pi,
tures to new and existing doci
ments. The common seaid
function can also be employi
in freehand text instead
being limited to typed ten
allowing users to seatci
through pages of handwrii
notes for the first time.
OneNote operates on Windcs
2000 or Windows XP. Howeve
OneNote uses other prograrr
such as Outlook, part of fe
Office suite, to share notes by
mail as HTML files that ar
computer can read.
rittr
With Microsoft’s latest adi f str ° n 8 er sens
Above: Toshiba Portege 3500
($2,299 - $2,499)
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Left: Gateway Tablet PC
( $2,799)
Graphic by Ruben Dei.una • THE BATTALION
Photos courtesy Microsoft, Toshiba and Gateway
This means users can click
anywhere on the digital page
and begin to type without
inserting spaces or carriage
returns to tediously place the
cursor. Each section of text
can then be dragged and
dropped without restraint to a
new position on the page.
Computer users can also
record “audio notes” using
OneNote. With the click of a
button, audio is recorded by the
computer’s microphone, like a
conventional tape recorder. The
audio is in sync with the text
typed during the recording, so
the user can click on any line of
text and the audio will play back
from the specific point when
that text was typed. This feature
allows for effortless outlining of
lecture notes for review without
having to fast forward through
long audio files.
While these and other fea
tures are available to all users,
some of the program's innova
tions are reserved for users of
Tablet PCs, a new market of
portable computers that are
slightly smaller than laptops.
“It’s a good, better, best situ
ation,” Moore said. “Users will
be able to employ many features
with their desktop computers,
and these become even more
useful with a laptop. However,
with a Tablet PC, they will also
be able to take advantage of fea-
tion to the software arena. Si
door is left open for other cor
panics to take their productse
the next level as the conci
found in OneNote stretch Si
boundaries of software design
Current advances in techno
ogy have produced cell phoiB
that double as cameras and els
tronic organizers that browseik
Web. Microsoft’s new softwr;
has similarly coupled antiqut:
to the gaping
? Cuba
notebook paper with cutte defended its
edge computer technology.
Microsoft’s OneNote
undergoing beta-testing and
expected to be released as
stand-alone application aloit maintained t
with Office 2003 in the sm
mer of 2003.
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