"Lately a lot of you have said you really like OneNote but don't see any reason to use it beyond its tablet ink capabilities... so I sat down with Mike Tholfsen (who from now on we'll refer to as the OneNote Ninja) who talked about his dream of "OneNote Next-Gen Learning" and got some cool demos of the stellar features that you don't even need a tablet for but are must-haves for students today."

Nice short-ish video on the cool things you can do with OneNote in an university study context, even without a Tablet PC.

"ODF has been criticised due to technical limitations imposed on sharing them with Microsoft Office applications, while the soon to be released compound document format (CDF) is said to be better suited to increasingly prevalent Web born documents and Web 2.0 applications. "We can't meet our market requirements with OpenDocument," said Gary Edwards who started the OpenDocument Foundation last year. "The truth is OpenDocument was never designed to meet market requirements.""

Wow, this is pretty explosive stuff, given the situation between ODF and Microsoft's OOXML. So much for an ODF standard paradise - now stop the crazy cat fights!

"As religious as I am about the Ribbon and contextual interface, I suffer just as much knowing a feature exists somewhere in the application that I just can’t find in the Ribbon...You basically type the command you are thinking of, and you’ll be presented a list of matching command buttons. And unlike commands in the Ribbon which are only a select few picked by someone else who thought might be relevant, this search goes deep into the application to find anything and everything."

Pretty cool plugin, especially for those who buy into the search and keyboard way of doing things, that seems to be proliferating software and the web now.

"I've been noticing several requests for us to add OneNote to our Mac product portfolio. I should say that, as a non-Windows user, I've never used it myself and have no personal opinion about it. I've heard good things about it from both Windows and Mac users, though, so I'm curious."

Check out the comments here - I don't think I've seen so much Microsoft love from Mac users ever! Nice they agree though - OneNote is a wonderful product that is very underpromoted and used.

"Microsoft now says a plug-in that will allow Office 2004 to fully work with the new formats won't be ready until six to eight weeks after the Office 2008 for Mac software suite ships, sometime in the second half of this year."We had to make some choices," said Amanda Lefebvre, a marketing manager in Microsoft's Mac business unit. "We are continuing to focus our development on the completion of Office 2008.""

Er right. You couldn't just employ a few more Mac guys, or do they hate Microsoft so much they all disappear when you reach out. I can hear Mac users complaining already that Microsoft is putting profits from MS Office 2008 ahead of existing users. Bad move.