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The Hidden Gem of Office 2003

The most exciting news from Microsoft’s Office 2003 may very well be the introduction of OneNote. Announced in conjunction with Office 2003, OneNote is a separate program designed as a personal productivity workspace assistant. Think of OneNote as a replacement for the writing pad only more powerful. It manages your electronic workspace allowing you to easily take notes, arrange topics into folders and sections, highlight tasks, code issues, and much, much more.

When it was first announced many people thought it was only designed for use with Tablet PCs. If you are using a Tablet PC, you probably can not live without OneNote. However, as a desktop or laptop user, you may find that OneNote can actually enhance your productivity by allowing you to take notes as you would with pad and pen, without the restrictions of electronic word processing software.. In the first of a two part series, we will examine some of the features that make OneNote useful for desktop or laptop PC users. Next month we will share the experiences of a Tablet PC user with OneNote.

As an electronic notebook, OneNote is terrific. You can quickly organize your notes into folders and sections which will be displayed as tabs across the top of the page. Vertical tabs can be created for various pages within a section. The organizational flexibility of OneNote to customize a workspace that meets an individual’s work habits is one of the strengths of the product.

Note Taking

Want to take a note, just start typing, or writing if you are using a Tablet PC. OneNote is great for quick outlines, or bulleted text. The workspace allows you to position the cursor anywhere on the page and begin typing. Think back to the pen and pad days when you could start a list and then go back and make notes in the margin. With OneNote you can do this and more. And while it does not have all the features and inherent complexity of Word, OneNote provides a casual and flexible environment in which to work. If you want to make an audio comment, OneNote allows you to insert audio comments anywhere in the text. As a side note, if you are going to use this capability extensively, you may want to use a noise suppression microphone to help eliminate background noise.

Note Flags

Want to assign yourself a task as you are taking notes, just insert a ToDo icon. If you are using Office 2003, OneNote will even synchronize its ToDo’s with your Outlook Task List. In addition there are eight additional note flags available in OneNote: Important, Question, Remember for Later, Definition, and four other note tags you can define yourself. One great feature is the ability to view all your note flags associated with a folder or your entire workspace by simply using the Task View. You can even create a summary page in each section, folder, or entire notebook for all your ToDo’s and other note flags and qualify the summary by timeframe , e.g. This week’s notes, Last week’s notes, etc.

Research with OneNote

OneNote is a good way to organize information when doing research on the Web. Content and pictures can be easily pasted into OneNote along with a link to the website to identify the source of your information. Content from Word and Excel can also be pasted, but you will lose some of your formatting and application functionality. For example, when your spreadsheet is pasted into OneNote, you cannot perform any calculations. With PowerPoint slides, simply drag the slide to the OneNote icon on the system task bar, OneNote will become active and you can paste the slide into your notes. As a nice convenience, OneNote reduces the PowerPoint image to about one quarter of its size. If you are a fan of Microsoft’s Research Pane, it can also be activated with OneNote.

Searching

Spiral notebooks may be great, but they are ineffective when you are attempting to search for a long forgotten note. OneNote has a great search capability that allows you to search across all folders in your workspace. Results are returned in a Page List task pane with links to any section containing your search argument. The search capability will even search handwritten notes with remarkable results.

Conclusions

OneNote may not be for everyone, but if you are looking for a way to enhance your capability to take notes and maybe more importantly effectively use the information once recorded, then the product may warrant a look. You can download or order a 60 day trial copy of OneNote from Microsoft. Also, if you want a handy guide for using OneNote try Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 for Windows by Todd W. Carter & Diane Poremsky, PeachPit Press, 2004 available from Amazon.com.

Next month we will focus on using OneNote with a Tablet PC. For more information about OneNote, or to share your experiences, please contact us.

Please note the services and products mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect KKL's recommendation of the products or services listed. This listing is done for informational purposes only.