Microsoft Office Live and OneNote (reprise) and Live Mesh

Well, I think I've managed to mix myself up again. How unusual...

I blogged back in January about how great Office Live is but how I wish it would handle OneNote files.

Exploring further, I found that Office Live isn't everything I'd thought / hoped and have probably gotten mixed up with what it does now and what is forthcoming when the new version of Office is released (probably late this year or early next year).

For now, Office Live will allow you to edit Notes online but you can only view Word docs (I'm not sure about Excel or PowerPoint files as I hardly use either).

Not having the ability to handle OneNote files isn't a real concern at present as I am not sharing with other people. For me, I only use Office Live to save documents for my own use.

To be able to share OneNote files, I'm using Live Mesh. The thing that really impresses me about Live Mesh is that a copy of a folder that is part of my mesh is kept on my local machine - very handy for when I'm disconnected from the Internet. The sync is pretty easy too and means that files I create at home can be used at work as well.

I'm using Mesh extensively with my new ASUS netbook as it affords me some cheap backup in the event of failure or theft. Mesh also means I can use EndNote (bibliographic software - I study part time) on several machines and keep my databases in a Mesh folder, so I now get the same databases no matter which machine I'm using.

As for Office Live - I say bring on full online authoring capabilities! It will leave Google Apps for dead as far as I'm concerned. While Google Apps is great for online document editing, it doesn't integrate well with Office and doesn't have any sort of OneNote like functionality. While I do also use EverNote (yep - another product name ending in "NOTE" and I've mentioned all three of them in this post) I use this for other note taking like tasks such as recording receipts. OneNote doesn't really fit this bill and I mainly use it for professional / study tasks.

Microsoft Office Live and OneNote

At the Microsoft PDC in 2008, the boffins at Microsoft demonstrated OneNote working with Office Live (officelive.com) For those who don't know, Office live is Microsoft's improvement on Google Apps. It provides you with many of the components of Microsoft Office (eg. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and some Event, Task and Contact items (Outlook items) so that you can work without requiring Microsoft office on your PC.

Interoperability with Microsoft Office is outstanding (of course) as you're working with Office format documents. You can install a plug-in into Microsoft Office that will allow you to open from and save directly into Office live which is great.

You gain file sharing capabilities, which (although I haven't tried it) allow several people to edit a document collaboratively. Sharing a document is easy and is basically like writing an email.

On the downside, there's no support for OneNote (boo hoo!). This is a real pain because I'm in love with OneNote. I tend to use it as a free-form database, being able to file tid bits of info including photos, typed text, scanned items and (if I ever get a tablet or digital pen) handwritten text. Like EverNote, it's able to search pictures for text items which is a great ability. As I said, this was demonstrated at Microsoft PDC in 2008, so I'm waiting with baited breath. Hopefully it will be released soon (ie this year).

The only other annoyance I've discovered so far is that I can't deliver my items directly to my blog as I can with Word 2007. I use Live Writer but I'd love to have Office live be able to do this for when I'm not on my normal PC... OK make that PCs (plural). :) The writer built into Blogger is a poor second place.