OneNote includes a screen capture tool that allows you to capture any part of the screen and paste it into a note (or anywhere else, for that matter…as it simply copies the screen shot to the clipboard). Once you have pasted a graphic image into OneNote, you can right-click on the image, and if the image has text in it, OneNote will extract the text, and place the text on the clipboard.

So, as a slightly esoteric example…today I’m working on trying to understand the structure of a particular database. I have a table open in Access’ design view. This shows the structure of the data table. I want to copy this structure into OneNote. Here are the steps.

1. I click the ‘clip’ button in OneNote. This causes the screen to change to a grayed out version of the underlying application (in this case Access).

2. I draw from corner to corner, the section of the screen that I want to place in one note. When I click, OneNote copies the selected image to the clipboard, brings back OneNote, and pastes the image within my OneNote page.

Here is the image:

Here is how it looks in OneNote

It even contains a caption saying when the clipping was made.

Now to extract the text, I right-click on the image in OneNote and select ‘Copy Text from Image’. Here is the menu:

And when I’m done, I can paste the just the text.

Field Name Data Type
occupation_skill_id Number
name Text

OneNote appears to be a program which strikes a balance between capability and complexity. It passes the ‘five minute test’, in other words, you can become productive with it almost immediately. But it has considerable depth and capability. Worth a look. The beta version of OneNote 2007 is available for free downloading at www.microsoft.com/downloads as part of the Office 2007 beta program.