20 Windows 7 Tips and Tricks for Tablets

16. Microsoft OneNote

If you’re serious about taking handwritten notes, then you need a copy of OneNote. This powerful but simple note-taking application is in all new versions of Office (apart from the free Office Starter) but it’s pre-installed on many tablet PCs as well so check your Start menu. If it isn’t already on your tablet, you can get a 60-day free trial here.

The great thing about OneNote is that When you , With OneNote, you don’t have to convert hand-written notes into text to search them. OneNote recognizes your handwriting and stores the various alternatives it thinks you could have written, and when you search it brings up matching pages with text you’ve typed, content you’ve clipped in from other places and notes you've written in ink all together. You can also record audio that’s time-synced to your notes, so if you're wondering why you underlined something three times you can click to hear what was said just before you wrote it down.

You can ‘tag’ your notes to make it easier to find things later, so you can have a tag for Web sites you want to visit or books you want to read. There’s a ‘checkbox’ tag that makes it easy to write a to do list and check items off as you get them done. You can draw diagrams, write equations – and convert them into actual maths that OneNote will work out for you. And you can have notes automatically copy themselves onto SkyDrive to share with your desktop or laptop, too.