Office 2007 and OneNote 2007

In school I never learned to use any office applications.  As a dev, I thought I was very cool because I could use tools like pine to check my email.  That cool factor disappeared quickly, when I took my first job at IBM I had to pick up and use Lotus Notes.  This wasn't a choice really, all of IBM puts their calendar and file sharing inside of Lotus.  When I migrated to Microsoft, I also migrated to the Office Suite. 

My use of Office is fairly limited by my knowledge ... funny how sometimes you can program for apps you don't use very well.  When I transitioned to Office 2007 I took some time to explore some of the new add-ins (i.e.  I heard that LaTeX was built-in and wanted to see it and was thinking of blogging).  I have always liked the idea of OneNote but I never seem to use it.  I think it would be an immensefly useful tool, but need to spend some time getting started.  If you're in the same boat as me, here are some things you might find useful:

Darren Strange is Office Product Manager in the UK.  He has a great set of blog casts including one on OneNote 2007.  Stay tuned for the full 17 minutes (it's worth it ... I usually am a 2 min listener)  He explores the integration of Outlook 2007 and OneNote such as sending emails to OneNote, adding OneNote notes into a calendar entry, adding a follow-up task to a OneNote entry.

I think gaining OneNote skills would be very advantageous in college.  At some schools I have visited (like Purdue) I saw a number of students using the Lenovo ThinkPads and OneNote and loving it.  I found an interesting discussion between Nigel Ward at professor at University of Texas El Paso and The Student Tablet PC (Tracy Hooten from University of Texas Austin and Trevor Claiborne University of California Berkeley).

So, what about you ... do you OneNote?