Office At Work : OneNote

Have yourself a merry little Christmas – with OneNote

PhilEvans — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:02:00 GMT

As you may have guessed, we've gone a bit OneNote crazy in the team. We love it. It's just so.... useful. Leading on from my last post, here are some more thoughts around how OneNote can help you this Christmas.

Whether you’re preparing to celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, or simply looking forward to a mid-winter seasonal break at home (or away), some planning will make everything go more smoothly. Of course you could just write lists in a notebook, bookmark useful sites on your PC, and tear out present ideas and recipes from magazines. But just think how much more useful it would be if you could keep all these bits together in one place. Microsoft Office OneNote 20007 gives you an infinitely-sized electronic notebook which will provide writing space, storage areas, a calendar, to-do lists, and you can import files from other programs like Word and Excel which you may already have on the go. Remember - if you've Office 2007 Home and Student you're already good to go. And if you don't? You can download a 60-day trial for free, from us here :).

Countdown has started

The first thing to do in your new OneNote notebook is to download a monthly calendar template and number each square for the month of December. (Tip: take off ‘snap to grid’ in the Edit menu so you can position the numbers easily within each square.) Now you’re ready to add daily items to each box so you can keep track of what you should be doing when. Don’t forget to include last posting dates if you have friends or family overseas. A great feature of OneNote is that you can convert any piece of text to an Outlook appointment or contact using the Tools menu so important information doesn’t get forgotten.

Cards

They can be a hassle, but they don’t need to be! Make a new section in your notebook and quickly insert a table from the Table menu. Then you can list all the people to whom you’re going to send cards, together with columns for ‘sent’ and ‘received’ for instance. (Tip: turn the title of the section into a hyperlink from the Insert menu, paste that onto the date on your planner when you’re going to write your cards and the pages will be linked together.) Next year, you’ll have a ready-prepared list to work from, to which you can add or remove names. If you already have names in a Word or Excel file, it’s even easier. Just drag the file onto the OneNote page, and you’re ready to go.

Recipes and menus

If food and drink is your thing, you probably started thinking about festive victuals in October! Use screen clippings to assemble all your fave recipes in one place, or simply paste the URLs into your notebook. (Tip: if you’re working on something in your notebook and you think of something else, open a new side note window from the Windows menu. You can quickly jot down your thoughts and the note is filed in Unfiled Notes.) How about scanning that much-loved but dog-eared recipe for Granny’s Christmas pud and inserting it into your notebook? That way you’ll have it forever!

Time to delegate

To make life easier, enlist some help. Choose a to-do list template (from the Format menu > Templates) and list some jobs with names attached. Print it out and distribute it, or email it to everyone involved. (Tip: you can email from inside OneNote by simply clicking the email icon on the toolbar.) Or for children, why not put each task on a separate card and get them to lucky dip for them! Add a variety of tags from the toolbar to anything in your notebook so you can keep control, and get a list of tagged items from the View menu.

And finally...

A lovely idea is to keep a diary or journal in your notebook of the people and events that made your Christmas special. It’s easy to say you’ll remember, but it’s even easier to forget. Choose a template (from the Format menu) in the Decorative section to make this section stand out, and get everyone to contribute with words, pictures, even audio or video recordings. Next year you’ll have some memories to revisit and get you in the seasonal spirit once again.

Now where are those decorations...?

Phil

The At Work Holiday Survival Guide Part 1

PhilEvans — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:26:00 GMT

Well, it seems winter is well and truly here. It’s cold, it’s dark, and it’s wet. But at least the holidays are coming! However, alongside the lovely upsides of Christmas - such as cake abundance and inbound gifts - there are also hazards such as present buying, party planning, and family politics. Fortunately, help is at hand, and in this series of blog posts, I’m going to try to help you negotiate these hurdles so that you can breeze through the festive season with a minimum of stress. First up on the list? Christmas shopping.

Shopping

There is no doubt that the advent of online shopping has given us a tremendous increase in choice and flexibility when trying to buy presents for people at Christmas. However, when you’re buying for multiple loved ones, things can get pretty complicated, particularly if you’re going for the whole ‘thoughtful’ present angle for those extra brownie points. When I shop online this Christmas, I’m going to use OneNote. Here are three reasons why OneNote is going to help me turn this potentially horrendously boring (and expensive) task into something which is much, much less painful:

1) A picture speaks a thousand words

They say a picture speaks a thousand words, and this is especially the case when brainstorming for presents. So, instead of bland and boring lists of text, I use OneNote to compare gifts that I find online. Not only do I find this more useful than text to refer back to, but it’s much more engaging for me; I’m a very ‘visual’ thinker, and I find plain-text lists quite boring. My brain much prefers to deal with images.

Tip: Use screen clippings to capture information quickly

2) OneNote lets you escape the boring bits

The useful thing about doing your shopping this way is that you can take all the information you need without having to do it all manually. For example, when you screen clip something off a site with OneNote, you can capture in one swoop:

- The price

- The shop

- A direct web link to where to find the product again

That last point is massively useful for keeping on track of where you found everything, stopping you losing track of where you found the best price, present, or offer.

3) ‘Find’ keeps it all manageable

One of the really cool things about OneNote is that it includes a pretty smart search feature. This is much better than flicking through endless pieces of paper. You can even make the text within the screen clippings you’ve taken searchable, as I have:

Tip: Search and find notes easily

So, let’s see how this all comes together, using a - purely hypothetical of course - example of my ideas for my mother-in-law (click image to see full size):

You can see that I have four ideas which I have found on MSN Shopping based on my initial thoughts around ‘what she likes’. Using screen capturing, I’ve captured the ideas in a visual way, along with the price. When I did this, OneNote automatically made a note of the web address to the item, which sits below the picture. It can also make all the text in the picture searchable so I can find things really easily later. I then thought about the advantages and disadvantages of each present and added my own notes, before eventually deciding to buy idea number four. When I place the order, I’ll use the ‘Find’ feature again to create a list all of the items from that particular shop so that I can check easily what I want to buy and don’t forget anything – avoiding those annoying multiple delivery charges.

What do you make of this use of OneNote? Let me know via the comments section - I’m interested to hear what you think.

Stay tuned for part two of my guide to surviving the Christmas holidays!

Phil

How to take a screen-shot

GillLeFevre — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:20:18 GMT

One of the great parts of my job is that I get to spend time talking with other users of Microsoft Office about how they use the product and I'm regularly surprised (and even inspired) by the myriad of different ways the same product is used.

Inevitably I also spend a fair bit of time answering questions from people who can't get something to work. This can be more tricky, especially if the conversation is by email or phone and so I can't see the computer in question. This is where screen shots can be a total saviour and the best thing is they're really easy.

The everyone-can-do-it way

Take a look at your keyboard. Chances are that somewhere in the top right-hand corner (although this may vary) there's a funny little button saying "PrtScn". This is short for Print Screen and pressing it takes a picture of your screen (although it might initially look as though nothing has happened).

Once you've "printed" your screen (and originally, this button used to do exactly that) you can then paste it into a document (for example, Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint), into an email message (HTML or Rich Text format only) or into image-editing software to refine the picture.

If you press the Alt key at the same time as PrtScn, then only the active (or top most) Window on your computer is printed. This is useful if you want to focus on a specific program (for example, an error message that you get in Excel) or don't want to share all of your desktop.


My desktop printed using PrtScn	The active window printed using Alt + PrtScn

For more detailed instructions, see this useful post on About.com.

The OneNote way

If you've got OneNote installed (and if you don't then you're missing out on one of the most useful members of the Office family - try it here!), then there's an even easier way: the screen clipping method.

Press the Windows key + S and your screen will appear slightly dimmed and white. Then click and drag your cursor over the area you want to clip. When you release the cursor, the area you selected will automatically be stored (temporarily) in your clipboard, ready to paste.

You can get more instructions and information on how to change what happens to your screen clipping once you take it from Office Online.

The Windows Vista way

If you've got Windows Vista, then there's a great feature called the "Snipping Tool" that you can use to take a picture of any part of your desktop. See this article for more instructions.

007 eat your heart out

ElisaS — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:40:53 GMT

I don't know about you, but I am constantly learning about new and cool things that are out there to make our lives easier. (Just because I work at Microsoft doesn't mean I know everything about every feature about every product we design!)

Picture the situation, you're about to go on a conference call - a really important one where you need ask lots of questions to really understand an issue or situation. The call is also with someone whose first language isn't English so its going to be additionally challenging.

Well, this is where I found myself a few weeks ago - I knew I would have lots of questions to ask and was really keen to understand their way of doing things. My concern was that I would be so conscious of writing notes that I wouldn't really be listening, absorbing and understanding their answers.

This is when a colleague suggested I record the call! How do I do that? (Not having a dictaphone tucked away in my desk!)

"Use OneNote" was the reply!

Well I'd not heard of that feature (nothing new there!) but my colleague showed me what to do in a matter of minutes.

Off I went into a room and commenced my conference call, on speaker phone. (Of course, requesting permission to record the call!)

Where I would normally open a OneNote page to start typing notes for a call I just clicked "Insert, Audio Recording" and off it went.....recording my whole call.

For me, this was great as I could spend my time asking questions and really trying to understand what was being said, then afterwards if I wanted to go back and check something the recording (saved as a wmv file) would be there for me to listen to, anytime!

This saved me writing pages and pages of notes and making the call much more useful and less time consuming. Of course, I did write SOME notes, but not half as many as I would have had I not recorded the call and of course it is now all stored in one place!

How many pages do YOU write during a conference call or meeting? Have you used this feature when conducting telephone interviews with potential new employees? These recordings then sit in the OneNote document where supporting notes / docs can be added. Give it a try and me know your thoughts - share with your colleagues - they might be as impressed as I was!