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Resolving To Get Organized in 2004? Let OneNote Help

I am a note jotter. My house has always had a ton of pieces of scrap paper with little notes jotted on them. Everything from "Refill this prescription" to "555-123-4567". Problem was, I seldom remembered which paper had what notes, which ones I had taken care of, or what the note was talking about.  

Years ago, I started using an electronic organizer to keep my notes. Great tool, but not very easy to use unless your fingers are small enough to work with tiny keyboards. Handwriting based machines weren't much better, since my handwriting is terrible.  

Last fall, with the release of Office System 2003 came my solution: OneNote. OneNote is a new product sold as an addition to Office. It allows you to enter and organize notes of all types, search them, organize them, and share them with team members. 

OneNote is designed to work like your average notebook. You take notes on pages, which combine to make sections. Multiple sections make up notebooks. Notebooks are saved as files with an extension of "one". You open and close notebooks just as you would any other file.  You can have multiple notebooks open at a time. 

While OneNote is easy to learn and use, you will find it a very powerful tool for organizing your notes.  But first, you need to conquer the basics of its use. 

Basic Use

Opening OneNote the first time gives you a blank page to write in. By default, this page is the first page in your General Notebook. Your screen will look something like this:

 

To enter notes, you either type or draw on the area of the screen that looks like notepaper. If your piece of note paper doesn't have lines, you can turn them on by clicking the icon that looks like a piece of paper. (This is the "Show/Hide Lines" button.)   

The tabs at the top of the pages show which sections you currently have open. The three that are shown will always be available, you can add more by right clicking a tab and selecting "New Section". When you create a new section, it is called "Untitled". To change the name, just select the title and type your new name.

Down the right side of the pages are indicators of which pages are in this section. By default they are numbered, starting at one. If you want to give your page a name, click in the area above the word "Title" and type your title.  The page will still show on the list as a number, but titling your page makes it easier to find things later. 

The page tab that looks like a piece of paper is a special tab. It allows you to add new pages at the click of a mouse. New pages always go at the end of the existing section. Want to move a page? Click the page tab and drag it to where you want it. 

Put a page in the wrong section? Use Edit-->Move Page to Another Section. Don't want a page after all? Click the tab to select the page and use your delete key. Need to rename it? Just change the title text. 

So, what can go on pages?

Short answer: Anything! You can type text from your keyboard. You can draw diagrams using your mouse or other input device. You can paste information from other applications. You can even add sound to your notes.

• To type text, click anywhere on the page and start typing. One of the nice things about OneNote is that text doesn't have to be contiguous in order to be on the same page. You can click anywhere and start typing.
• To add diagrams, click and drag or draw with your mouse. If you have a tablet, you can draw with the pen as well.
• To add items from other sources, select the information, copy it, change to OneNote and paste it. One really nice feature of OneNote is that if you add information from a web page, it will automatically be annotated with the URL for the page that you copied it from.
• You can also add items from other sources by selecting the content and dragging it to the OneNote page. Again, if the information comes from the web, you will get the source URL. (This is a great feature for creating reports. Once you have all your notes, you can create your bibliography by copying the URLs from OneNote to your bibliography.)
• To add sound, go to Tools-->Audio Recording--> Record. Any sounds picked up by your microphone will be recorded and saved with your notes. Even better, the sound will be coordinated with your typed and drawn notes. This allows you to record a lecture or meeting, take notes, and later hear what was being said when you were taking your notes.

As you add information to a note page, you will see that chunks of information have a bar across the top. Clicking this bar allows you to move the element around on the page. If you bring two pieces of information so that they are one above the other on the page, OneNote will assume that you want them combined into one piece and stick them together for you. To take elements apart, either select the item and drag it to somewhere else or click to the left of the element where you see a four directional arrow. That arrow will select anything in its line and allow you to move it. 



So far so good: What else can I do?

One of the most powerful features of OneNote is the ability to use stationery to organize information. Many stationery sets are included with OneNote. To see what stationery you have available, do a File--> New and bring up the "New" pane. At the bottom of the pane, you will see an area of stationery categories. To expand the categories, click the plus sign to its left. To use a piece of stationery, double click the name. A new page will be created in your current section that has the stationery as its basis. 

Some of the ones I find most useful are:

• The ToDo lists: Found under the Planners category, these pages give you easy ways to enter and track the items on your to do list.
• The Meeting Minutes pages: Found under Business, these pages are pre-structured to help you get through your meetings in a less painful manner. They even make minute taking something I might actually volunteer to do!
• Lecture 3: Found under the Academic category, this page lets you easily track what is going on in a session. Students will use these pages as intended. I use them in my training design to make sure that I know what I need to cover during a particular session before I start the actual creation of the class.

In addition, you can create pages that have elements on them already. These pages are called stationery. Just like paper stationery, they come with information already on them. You add your specific content to the page, or copy elements from the stationery page to your current note page. 

For example, I have a series of stationery pages that I have created which contain a wide variety of my most used AutoShapes. Since I can't draw well, I copy these AutoShapes to my note page for emphasis during a design or note taking session. I can even add text boxes over top of the shapes by entering the text elsewhere on the page, selecting the text and dragging it over the shape. 

Looking for my Autoshape stationery? Check out the stationery page of this site!