OneNote 2007 downloadable trial available

As Dan mentioned on his blog, those of you waiting to try out the final code (everyone currently using beta for sure!) can now download a 60-day trial of OneNote 2007 here. There is a full trial of Office 2007 Professional as well which of course is worht giving a spin too - and it shows off OneNote at its best with the full Outlook integration, blogging support through Word2007, etc. This trial version will last until after retail boxes are available in stores, and of course you can always convert the trial to a full version on-line.

For those of you not familiar with how the trial works, it is the *exact same code* as the final full release - not a lower functionality version. The difference with the full version is that the trial is set to "expire" after 60 days, meaning that the data in it becomes read-only at that point. You can remove the expiration at any time by activating it with a key that you buy over the net or in a store. So if you do decide to get the retail boxed version of OneNote in January or later, you don't have to uninstall and reinstall, just use the product key that came with the version you purchased.

You should *definitely* move to the trial if you are currently a beta user. The trial can read your beta or beta 2 tech refresh notes just fine. Uninstalling the beta and installing the trial will not cause any hiccup for you.

If you have Vista final release code, you need the trial (or MSDN full version) since beta versions of OneNote 2007 are not compatible with the final release of Vista.

The final version (in trial form or otherwise) has a number of fixes in it for stability, performance, search, and syncing of shared notebooks since b2tr, and of course hundreds of other fixes you may or may not have noticed in the beta.

Edit: if you have been running b2tr of OneNote or Office, bear in mind that final versions of any of these products cannot co-exist with b2tr versions of any of them. So the 2007 trial version of OneNote does not work with Office 2007 b2tr. 2007 trial version of OneNote cannot be installed when any fragment of b2tr is left installed, and that includes the b2tr version of the PDF add-in or the office file compatibility pack. Remove any and all trace of anything b2tr before installing the trial. There is a trial version of Office 2007 available at the same URL above so you can install that to replace b2tr - they expire at about the same time (the trial will last longer depending on when you start the 60-day clock by installing and running it) so you might as well run final code!

Enjoy!

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2006
  Hey, I can't seem to d/l this without supplying a US address. What's up with that? Any idea how, or if, this is available to overseas beta users?

• Anonymous
  December 03, 2006
  I just want to echo David's comments... I'm in Australia and the trial doesn't seem to be available to me. Do you know when Australians will officially be able to download this?

• Anonymous
  December 04, 2006
  Is there a changelog posted anywhere?

• Anonymous
  December 04, 2006
  Chris, Please take a look at connect bug 84706 (https://connect.microsoft.com/onenote/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=84706) Since nobody responded to this bug, I thought that it was resolved.  However, I have had to repair this problem on three different computers over the weekend.  This only happens when the user upgrades from 2003 to 2007 and has audio file that is on multiple pages in the same section (a user that started a recording, and then jumped from one page to another while it was recording).   Their hard drives fill up, and I have to go in and delete the cache folder.   Also, every user that has the Send to OneNote 2003 with the Microsoft Education Pack has a failed installation of the ON 2007 print driver.  I had hoped this would be solved, too. Just some thoughts on some bugs that are sure to cause headache among upgraders...

• Anonymous
  December 04, 2006
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• Anonymous
  December 04, 2006
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• Anonymous
  December 04, 2006
  Is it possible to go back to OneNote 2003 after trying OneNote 2007?

• Anonymous
  December 04, 2006
  I'm trying to install the Trial after uninstalling the B2TR, but it keeps on telling me uninstall the B2TR...has anyone else been having this problem?

• Anonymous
  December 04, 2006
  Hi Chris, Is Connect the place to submit bugs for ON 2007 RTM? There isn't a category there for RTM, so I just submitted one (items missing on Tag Summary) under B2TR. Thanks.

• Anonymous
  December 04, 2006
  Jason: if you think you might go back to 2003, archive your notes before you install 2007 trial. (Onenote does this for you, but might as well be safe). Any notes you create in 2007 can not be read in 2003, so if you do need to move notes back to 2003, your options will be to send them through an intermediate format such as a Word doc. Benson: be sure to remove every last trace of the beta. that includes the PDF and XPS add-in as well as the office compatibility pack for Word/Excel/PPT. Then install the trial again. Blair: for now that's fine - mention in your bug report that the problem is in the final code. I think the team will likely create the RTM 2007 site shortly.

• Anonymous
  December 04, 2006
  How much does post-beta 2007 cost? Is there to be an upgrade price (i.e. discount) for those of us who bought OneNote 2003 and have  helped swat the bugs in the beta stage of 2007?

• Anonymous
  December 04, 2006
  Chris, Thanks for your reply! And I am contemplating how OneNote can make future life much better for the academia also: We read and publish technical articles in journals with varied formatting requirements for the references, and we are sticking to application like "EndNote" to

1. import / export the article databases from library systems and article providers
2. while writting an article, cite ("with ease") the reference in required format e.g. IEEE, APA, in the body text and at the reference section at the end with a more detailed formatting style required
3. keep a repository of articles and ideas, mark-ups, and whatever files related to each article. I currently use adobe acrobat to mark up on it... that's a pain I think 1 & 2 are the strength and uniqueness of the software EndNote, while it is not doing a particularly good job in usability (AT ALL) 3 is a pain: I read mostly in PDF format or I may occasionally print some articles out. I do not want to keep research or review notes on separate files; as in keeping real paper print out, you jot down notes and ideas on it and you highlight some important things on it (but I lost quite a few boxes of these printed out articles as I moved from cities to cities) . Therefore, I want to edit something on the PDF files (have to do OCR transformation some time) which are then attached to the EndNote library files. But the major headaches are A. not being able to do annotation directly on PDF... and B. having so many different applications to work with So the working cycle now is:
4. I search the library possibly with EndNote and download some PDF files (or scan some book), read and comment on it through Adobe Acrobat (poor annotation and mark up usability for tablet)
5. These edited PDF are organized in EndNote in their EndNote library files format
6. While writing an article or reviewing on MS Word, I open EndNote and search for a particular PDF and open that edited PDF in Adobe Acrobat again
7. If that PDF is relevant, I go back to EndNote and copy the reference citation in particular required format, and then I go back to MS Word again
8. I submitted the paper, and then I and the publisher distribute the paper in PDF format again
9. Go back to 1. While OneNote is still in its particular niche, I think it is entirely possible to make it the single one computer application that we have to use throughout the whole process, for searching (even for ourside article databases), for annotation, for archiving, for reference formatting, and for distributing. Eventually every sectors of various professions all need softwares that possess these capabilities

• Anonymous
  December 05, 2006
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• Anonymous
  December 05, 2006
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• Anonymous
  December 05, 2006
  How does one search the audio recordings in OneNote 2007? I've installed Windows Desktop Search but I still don't see anything relating to doing a audio search in OneNote. Justin

• Anonymous
  December 05, 2006
  Chris, Thanks for the update.  I am so excited that there will be an academic price!   Dan and I did get in touch, and he explained exactly the issue at hand.   You guys are the best and have built an awesome program.  Those that use ON keep asking me why we even have Word?  For the student, it is just so much better... erik

• Anonymous
  December 05, 2006
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• Anonymous
  December 05, 2006
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• Anonymous
  December 06, 2006
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• Anonymous
  December 06, 2006
  Nicolo: the good news is both your #1 and #2 are already in OneNote 2007. you can drag a PDF from the file system onto a OneNote page and OneNote will ask you if you want to link to it, copy it (embed it in the OneNote page), or "print it" into OneNote (which actually does all three things). When you "print" it into OneNote tells Acrobat to print the PDF to the special OneNote printer and then grabs the images that result as well as the text that Acrobat sends to the printer from that PDF. This is not OCR - just text capture so it is 100% accurate. For PDFs that are just images (such as scans of papers or brochures), no text is sent to the printer so OneNote needs to OCR the images. I think if the Word citation DB could hold clickable hyperlinks to docs and PDFs and so on in OneNote in addition to all the citation info you'd be basically complete. Certainly it could be made slicker but that's the current missing step. The Word feature for citations (and the equation work) was actually done by someone (Jennifer) right out of college (and helped by other people who had been out of college longer and had also done grad degrees). Jen was quite aware of EndNote and in fact has been working with them on future link-ups. Onenote however was not priortizing your scenario in particular (citations) although we had talked about it. Maybe next time if enough people share your need.

• Anonymous
  December 07, 2006
  Chris, I forget that the most of the education world writes papers on a daily basis.  In med school, we answer questions about diseases and drugs. About the academic...Our school has the academic license available for purchase, however, they state that the media won't be available to ship until after April (which seems odd).  They send a 2003 copy when you purchase. Will academic users be able to download the trial and use their academic code to upgrade? thanks... erik

• Anonymous
  December 08, 2006
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• Anonymous
  December 08, 2006
  Erik: not sure about that "daily basis" thing, but there is probably more paper writing going on than you are doing! As to activation of the trial, if you have a valid product key, you can actiavte it just as if you had received media and installed it. So if the code you are referring to is a 25 character product key, it should work. Tim: yes, I found that out at home where I gave the trial a spin. That's being worked on. One thing to note is that I'm told the text in the message you get is incorrect. It says something like "if you have any trial version installed you will fail validation". It is the opposite - if you have any full version installed you will pass validation. So if you had full Office2007 installed and then installed trial OneNote you will still validate as a "genuine Office customer" and vice versa. BTW if you convert the trial to a paid-for product by putting in a valid product key then you will also validate.

• Anonymous
  December 14, 2006
  Nicolo Menuhin: Have you ever heard of EndNote? It really confused me when I was pushing OneNote and people were talking about EndNote, but then I found out that it's a citation package with Word integration.

• Anonymous
  December 19, 2006
  I downloaded the OneNote 2007 trial to a new pc and started it up to take a look.  Then I copied over my old notebook files from my previous pc.  Uh...., how do I convert my old 2003 notebook to 2007 format?  From the dialog boxes streaming by, it looks like it would have done this if I had had my old notebooks on my new pc when I first started 2007, but I can't find an option to import old notes after initialization. Thanks!

• Anonymous
  December 20, 2006
  Laurette, use File/Open Notebook, and point to your older 2003 notebook folder (probably called "My Notebook").

• Anonymous
  December 23, 2006
  Hi Chris, How do I post bug report? As OneNote 2007 retail (trial) version is no longer beta, I don't find the way to report bugs. My problem: When I sync with another PC, the section tab order does not sync properly. I have to rearrange section each time, and I don't think this is by design. This problem occurs in OneNote 2007 beta2, and not fixed in the final version (Japanese).

• Anonymous
  December 24, 2006
  I've installed OneNote 2007 but currently there is no way to purchase the product. I'm concerned that the trial version will lapse before that opportunity exists...then I'll be stuck with vital working notes, inaccessible...thoughts on this? the website is really awful on this...purchase issues should be spelled out clearly. great program!

• Anonymous
  December 24, 2006
  Agesaki: you can post on the connect site under the beta and just be sure to mention that you are actually using the final release (include the buld number from help/about). Or email me using the contact form. Steven Schiff: the product will be available at retail January 30 so I assume your trial lasts until at least then (I installed a trial Dec 7 and it expires Feb 28). Your expiry date is visible in Help/Activate Product. Right now it doesn't seem as though you can convert to the full product online (i.e. can't buy a product key) probably because we have some deal with retail stores to not sell the product before they can, but that should become available Jan 30 too.

• Anonymous
  December 26, 2006
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• Anonymous
  December 27, 2006
  Jen: There's no way to move the date to the right, sorry. 2007 requires SP2 of Windows XP. I do not know if install on SP1 is actually blocked or not, but we don't require things for no reason:-) FWIW SP2 is a very important SP for Windows XP as it significantly improves the security of the OS - highly recommended.

• Anonymous
  January 03, 2007
  Separate notebooks and the ability to summarize tags within an individual notebook is great. However, the value of tags would be greatly increased if each notebook could retain its own tag definition. While this would make it hard to summarize across notebooks, it would allow each notebook to serve a different purpose. For example, I may want to have one notebook for work, another for home, and yet another for planning a video shoot. In the latter, I would use tags to identify locations for various shots, or other location-oriented purposes. I could see another application where I would want to place a tag on certain notes to identify a medicine or treatment. The tag summary is great, but it seems very limited since all notebooks share the same tag definitions.

• Anonymous
  January 12, 2007
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• Anonymous
  January 12, 2007
  Hal: of course this could go both ways (you might want to have the same tags across notebooks for many reasons). One reason we increased the number of tags to 99 was to allow you to define more tags and use different ones in different notebooks if you wanted. Of course the summary still shows them all but you can scope by notebook to get the view you want. I certainly see the value in what you say - the Onneote team has lots of ideas for how to make Tags better. AP: The beta expires 3/31 (if yours doesn't be sure to get beta 2 tech refresh - free for download here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b07a3387-01cf-4bc3-821a-0bb10e7a59fa&DisplayLang=en) After the beta expires (or before) you can install the free 60-day trial. If you already have the trial then you are right that when it expires you will need to purchase the full version to keep adding notes (you can always view your notes). There is no compatibility pack for 2003 to read 2007 notes or for 2007 to save as 2003. You can read why here: http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/david_rasmussen/archive/2006/10/08/Why-the-OneNote-2007-and-2003-file-format-are-different.aspx We tried to be very clear in the beta and trial invitations and download intructions and warnings that there is no backwards compat, and that the beta will eventually disable itself - that's why we tell people not to use the beta for "mission critical" uses, and to back up therir 2003 notes in 2003 format in case they want to revert. In your case if you are really inconvenienced by your campus' delay, you could buy the academic version ($49, probably less on the web) on your own. If spending money is out of the question, you can export as Word or MHTML and open that in Word, although that loses some capability and layout since the two apps have different capabilities.

• Anonymous
  January 13, 2007
  So to clarify, once the beta expires, my notes are still viewable? If so, things are not too scary just yet. At least I'll be able to access it for exam time. I was told that I have already "paid" for the update  (Office 2007) in my tuition but since campus software updates tend to lag... Thank you for replying! It certainly made my nerves settle down a bit.

• Anonymous
  January 14, 2007
  AP: that is correct. All that happens when the beta or trial expires is that the notes become read-only. If you get the final version or convert the trial to full product they become read-write again - nothing lost.

• Anonymous
  January 15, 2007
  Just a quick note to say that I had an issue installing the trial, after having OneNote 2007 Beta Refresh 2 installed. I followed the instructions at KB928218: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928218 This meant that I was able to install the trial version without error. Now, I'm left with the fact that I can't seem to remove the version of BR2's OneNote Mobile from my WM5 device. I can't install the new version until that's removed... Any help graciously recieved: keithspragg@hmail.com (like hmail, but you know.. google's version) Thanks, K

• Anonymous
  January 23, 2007
  I have been using the trial version for a while already OneNote is convenient because:

1. I can trigger it by just a click or a short-cut
2. There's no need to save the note I typed in and I can organise it afterwards, and archive it easily with the centralized organization
3. I can share it easily
4. It is easy to make copy and paste of images / text etc across applications onto it (but I cannot copy OneNote's text to Acrobat directly, I have to paste text onto notepad, and then copy that again in order to get the text onto Acrobat, it's weird)
5. OneNote works with Tablet PC Now I know the Scrivener, and I think it has many features that OneNote should have, especially a dedicated (not sidebar) "Corkboard" view, and outline view http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

• Anonymous
  January 23, 2007
  Keith, I highly recommend you ask this in the newsgroup: http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/default.mspx?dg=microsoft.public.onenote&lang=en&cr=US Nicolo: from the screenshot of corkboard that looks like a feature we designed for the first release of OneNote years ago but haven't made a priority relative to other work we've wanted to do. What about scrivener do you find interesting that OneNote doesn't have?

• Anonymous
  January 24, 2007
  Chris: I found scrivener interesting mainly because of the following features:

1. Cool graphical interface: due to the OSX interface and the OpenGL cable OS... Hope for the best in the coming Vista... Eye candies...
2. Corkboard feature where notes seem to be capable of being manipulated as the real notes on a corkboard (turned out this feature is not implimented as i've thought) : imagine you have a project corkboard/whiteboard where you can nail/(magnet)stick piles of notes on it freely according to how these notes related and even draw some some notes and flow relations between then This would be great as it is like a meta-organization for notes, and this helps to conceptualize and recall the project status more vividly also My suggestion: consider implementing such a metacognitive feature for meta-organizing notes in a more conceptual way. Also make notes capable of appearing as notes / cards. These are going to be real useful
3. Outline mode: there's not way for me to manipulate several notes at a time in an easy way (OneNote 2003) My suggestion: consider making something like the "Organizer" as in Adobe Acrobat Professional for organizing materials in an easy and centralized way
4. Full screen mode: eye-candy and helps me to concentrate with all the other things (background) made dark (dim to a modifiable degree). It is like the full-screen mode for Acrobat --- I think it really helps  to concentrate either on reading or on writing and the full-screen mode of MSWord doesn't do that dimming / blackening of background Hope this helps to consider some of the features to add in the SP1 :)

• Anonymous
  January 29, 2007
  Hi Chris, While currently I have been trying out OneNote as my primary note-taking and brainstorming package, I still use EndNote as my primary PDF and original reference indexing repository. It would be very good if I can create links from other programs (some HTML links alike) so that I can trigger OneNote and let it point to a specific individual note within a .one notebook from other program. At the moment, I can just paste link to let other programs to open a particular notebook as a whole Always trying to improve the OneNote that I like and that I've chosen to live with it ;)

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2007
  Nicolo: for the corkboard functionality, have you tried using OneNote containers this way? If you type a little text on a page, then click elsewhere on the page and type something there, you get two "containers" - and of course you can keep doing this to get more. You can grab the handle at the top of these containers and slide them around on the page like note cards on corkboard. In 2007 we made a little tweak to make this easier - the containers do not auto-merge when they get close together. There is no way to draw arrows or lines that connect the containers and stay connected even when they move, alas. For your #3 outline mode, I am not quite sure what you mean. for the kind of hierarchical outline on a page people often use, I think OneNote has a lot of functionality. For reorganizing pages 2003 is a little weak - 2007 added drag and drop with multi-select so that is an improvement. for #4, have you tried View/Full Page View (F11) in 2007? I like it a lot for the reasons you describe. For your last comment I think we nailed it. In 2007, just right click on anything on a page (such as text or picture or ink) or also on a page tab, a section tab, or a notebook tab and select "copy hyperlink to this <thing>". Then paste that in your other program. chris