If you have the full version of Microsoft Office, the odds are that you have an application installed that you may have glanced at briefly, but possibly dismissed as an oddity.

If so, and you've bypassed Microsoft OneNote, you're doing both it and yourself a serious disservice. OneNote has the potential to be one of those "killer apps" that the IT media continually talk about. Other examples include the original VisiCalc on the Apple Ile and Tandy TRS80 Model 1, Lotus 1-2-3, Multiplan, Word, dBase II and the latest, perhaps surprisingly, is email. Unlike these, which have a determined purpose, to a very large degree OneNote can be what you want it to be.

At its most basic, OneNote is a computer-based simulation of an A4 pad or a tabbed notebook. It has pages that can be added into sections. These can be colour coded, and entries can be made anywhere on a page - text, images whatever you want. If you have one of those fancy tablet pen notebook tablet PC thingos (that we were all supposed to be using by now), you can write on it and the handwriting will be interpreted into text, auto-tragically.

There are toolbars for all sorts of things: drawing, colours, pen thicknesses, outlining, shapes, audio and video recording and so on. OneNote interacts beautifully with Outlook and other Office apps, Internet Explorer and even the 'Net itself. Anything can be "snapped" and dropped into a OneNote page in a section in a notebook. Getting the idea?

From a OneNote page, you can link entries to just about anything else; for example, in a layout for a project designed on a diary template, a day could contain
the text "Quote" and this could link to an external document of a landscaping quote. A thumbnail under that could in turn link to a hi-res image of the planned job. Simply click the link and the linked document opens in its own host application.

But there's still more. All entries in a OneNote notepad are indexed and can be searched quite simply to find matching entries to an entered criterion. ANYTHING can be searched and indexed that way. Being a bit of a Letters to the Editor tragic for example, I keep scanned images of the letters I've had printed in a scrapbook affair using OneNote.

I also use a page-to-a-day notebook to keep track of the minute-by-minute things that happen during the course of a working day that many would write down on a pad or diary. This way I always have with me any scribbled notes, phone numbers and so on - even when I'm travelling. I used to keep all my A4 pads so I could refer back to them, but this is so much easier, indexable and portable.

OneNote comes with a huge library of suggested templates, ideas and training material, and there's more available to download online.

In next month's PC Update, I'll have a step-by-step tutorial showing how to create a working OneNote scenario and give you an introduction to the power of this amazing application.