OneNote for One and All
Let me just start by confessing right up front that I never used OneNote to its full capacity until I actually started working here at Office Online. Like most people, I'm busy, so I tend to stick with what I know. In my previous jobs here at Microsoft I relied heavily on Excel for just about everything we did, with a little Word and Publisher thrown in for good measure. So when I came over to Office Online I anticipated I would start to learn about more of our products.
Little did I suspect that I would soon become an evangelist for one of them. I had taken a few notes in OneNote in the past, but I did not fully grasp what was possible until I ran across this demo: One Note: An Executive's Best Practices .
I soon began to apply what I had learned - forwarding meeting appointments from my calendar to OneNote and then jotting my notes from the meeting right there. I started marking tasks from within OneNote so they would appear on my calendar as reminders for me. I highlighted important things I needed to remember, inserted links to documents and turned OneNote into my catch-all for all meetings.
Then I started to tell people about OneNote. I began proselytizing to whomever crossed my path. One of those who listened was my niece. She's just started her first year of law school and had recently upgraded her software. Like me, she had never used OneNote the way Jeff Raikes describes and was so excited to learn about it.
She was so thrilled when she realized she could organize all of her schoolwork within OneNote, she fired back an email immediately saying: "I am already trying out the OneNote and it is WONDERFUL! I am able to divide all my classes into different sections and put my notes in subpages! Plus, I can highlight and tag other things!!"
Yes, she's a little heavy on the exclamation marks, but I read that as indicative of a true convert. I can only imagine how many fellow law students have taken up the mission...
--Nancy Crowell
