Resolving To Get Organized in 2004? Let OneNote Help
~~Kathryn
Jacobs, OneNoteAnswers
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 EditàMove
Page toà 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 ToolsàAudio
RecordingàRecord. 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 Fileà
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.
Next steps
Now that you have been introduced to OneNote, go play
with it. I’ll be offering more articles on this product as time goes on. If
there are topics you want covered in detail, send them to ABC.
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Kathryn Jacobs,
Microsoft MVP, PowerPoint and OneNote
Get PowerPoint answers at
http://www.powerpointanswers.com
Get OneNote answers at
http://www.onenoteanswers.com/
Cook anything outdoors with
http://www.outdoorcook.com
Kathy is a trainer, writer, Girl Scout, parent, and whatever else there is
time for.
I believe life is meant to be lived. But, if we live without
making a difference, it makes no difference that we lived.
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