www.jep4.com

Thursday, July 29th, Beyond Benign welcomed 60 middle and high school teachers from around the world to our Green Chemistry & Sustainable Science Curriculum Workshops. The week long workshop was developed to introduce teachers and their students to the topic of Green Chemistry and to provide hands-on inquiry based curriculum units in which students can explore this emerging approach to chemical manufacturing and sustainability.

I always feel very privileged to beta test new versions of my favorite software - especially software I really enjoy and find valuable. OneNote is one of those - I'm actually writing this blog post in OneNote 2010 (technical preview).

This "beta season," there aren't what I would call 'drastic' interface changes in the Microsoft Office suite as a whole: OneNote and Outlook have been updated with the Ribbon menu system that was new to Office 2007. Conversely, the Options section that has always been used in OneNote, is now a part of the "backstage" area of every Office program.

The "backstage" is an awesome improvement, especially in Outlook, which was riddled with nested menus and dialog boxes. Backstage cleans the unnecessary navigation to a minimum and collects options in a nice neat and well organized manner.

I'm really enjoying the new ability to "minimize" the Ribbon. This quick hide/display option allows me to put the ribbon away, maximize my screen real estate in any Office application - and is particularly nice in OneNote since that screen real estate equates to handwriting area.

The customizable "Quick Access Toolbar" is particularly useful in OneNote, when I'm in handwriting mode (85% of my time) because I've been able to put most of the tools I use every day together in a slim, unobtrusive space. I do miss being able to move that toolbar around, though!

OneNote collaboration and integration have taken on lives of their own in 2010 - it would take several posts to even touch on the vast improvements in these areas! Suffice it to say that I can now share and collaborate so much more easily through several methods that I see OneNote becoming the primary document tool we use at work. Once a document has been edited and vetted in OneNote - the menial task someone on the team will have is putting the document in Word to "gussy it up" with styles.

More soon!