Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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In one of my favorite movies, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, Jonathan Winters spends the better part of the flick running around shouting "We've got to get organized!"

In a world of information overload, we are barraged by digital facts. I don't know how you have coped with this, but I've handled the overload by creating masses of little Notepad TXT files, and hoping that I'll eventually back them up in folders where I might eventually find my notes.

Truthfully, I might continue to do that as well, had not my trusty editor sent me a copy of QUE's Absolute Beginner's Guide to OneNote, by Patricia Cardoza. When I read the first chapter, I saw something I truly love: an answer to an important question I didn't have to read a lot of text to discover: "I Don't Have a Tablet – Can I Use OneNote?"

Since, apparently the answer is yes, I plowed on. I have horrendous handwriting and have not been able to wrangle (nor do I really want) a Tablet PC.

Introducing OneNote

As I continued with Patricia's book, I focused (as I generally do) on the pictures, and I noted that OneNote's interface ressembles, can you believe it, a notebook.

It's not just any notebook, however. It's the type of notebook that used to be carried by those annoying people in junior high school called a "looseleaf." But these annoying people had everything organized neatly in little tabs. So I figured if OneNote could make me have a tidy looseleaf notebook of digital files, I wanted to try it right away.

After opening the program, I was confronted with two things: first, a 13-slide tour and an icon on my system tray for creating "side notes." These I presumed to be notes I can create that can eventually be entered into OneNote, but without opening OneNote.

Figure 248

This was confirmed in Chapter 8 of the Absolute Beginner's Guide which covers Side Notes in depth.

So I closed the tour and decided to just plow on into OneNote itself, and did what I always do. Which is, I clicked File > New to see just what a OneNote file is.

Figure 249

This opened the trusty Office Task Pane which showed me that OneNote divides its content into:

Pages
Subpages
Sections (groups of pages and subpages)
Folders (groups of Sections)
Side notes (independent notes created even when OneNote is not running and later stored in the Side Notes section.

As an Excel user, I also grokked the fact that the tabs at the top of the OneNote window could be useful.

For one thing, the two default tabs (General and Meetings) had different colors, to differentiate ordinary junk from Meeting-related junk. And, by right-clicking on either tab I could create and rename new tabs, for more junk.

I also discovered that if I didn't take the tour or read Patricia's book, I might inadvertently create masses of untitled pages and subpages in the tabs on the right side of the page.

This would be bad, because it would make my OneNote look like my old looseleaf in junior high, which had everything from old sandwiches to candy bars stashed between its tabs.

But the concept is cool. By organizing your notes within the sections and tabs, it is very intuitive that you can not only create notes, but you can also actually find them by topic.

While I fully intended to read Patricia's book and to take the tour, I decided to keep exploring this product. I clicked the Planners tab under Stationery, while in my Meetings tab, and found three different types of to-do lists with cool checkboxes that I could check off as I did these wonderful things.

Figure 250

Unfortunately, this resulted in even more untitled tabs being added to my notebook, so I decided to see what I could actually Save or Save As.

It turns out that OneNote saves Sections that you can individually name, open, and save to a My Notebook folder somewhere – and not surprisingly it is in your My Documents folder under your user name in WindowsXP.

Figure 251

Patricia's book continues with a similar quick look at OneNote, and then goes through some nice examples of why you would use this product, with five concrete projects:

Using OneNote for college classes;
Using OneNote for business meetings;
Using OneNote for personal use (such as moving, which I just did);
Using OneNote for journalism (which I am supposedly doing right now); and
Using OneNote for collaboration and projects.

In each of these examples, the advantage of OneNote over Notepad are apparent, and the quick access to the tabbed pages makes it a great alternative. It also has great search capabilities and (as illustrated in the book) OneNote isn't just for text. Patricia's examples include ample graphics and even maps, which certainly show how this product can help get you organized.

Towards the end of this chapter we also see that OneNote can store multimedia information, so that in an interview situation the product can replay an audio file.

Since there is an audio recorder right in OneNote, you can also quickly use it as a voice recorder, as long as you have a microphone properly configured and set up.

As with other Office products, you can publish your OneNote pages as HTML for the Web, or copy and paste them to other Office applications.

So with my quick half hour intro and Patricia Cardoza's book, I was sold on OneNote as an alternative to Word or Notepad for getting organized at future meetings or preparing for projects.

I'm looking forward to using the product between my laptop and desktop to prepare for future presentations and other projects.

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