Nota Bene: The OneNote Blog

Download more free OneNote calendars for 2009 (and 2010)

Back in January of this year, I provided shortcuts to the newest calendar templates for your OneNote 2007 notebooks. Since then, the Templates team at Office Online has been busy creating more free templates for you to download — including a full spectrum of customizable 2009 calendars and even a couple of early designs for next year.

Here are the direct links to these calendars:

If you’ve personally created some useful OneNote templates that you'd like to share with other readers, feel free to post a link to your download location as a comment!
 

OneNote. Share the love.

Ever wanted to convey to your friends, family, or co-workers what’s so great about OneNote?

This entertaining new video cuts to the chase: It’s the sharing!

Pass it on!  ;)
 

A “Send to OneNote 2007” print driver solution for 64-bit Windows

Okay... to be fair to our Marketing folks, the truth is out there:

It’s always been out there. This is what you see printed on the spine label of any Office 2007 retail package that contains OneNote 2007. You can read this label if you happen to hold an actual product box in your hand at your local Office Depot or Staples. But how many of us still buy software in a brick-and-mortar store? What if you buy it online or it came preinstalled on your computer? What if you downloaded the OneNote trial version and then converted it to the full license? Chances are, unless you enjoy hunting down and reading fine print as a hobby, you probably never saw the advisory. And even though this information was also disclosed on our Web site, it’s probably just as unlikely that you saw it there.

Hands down, the “Send to OneNote 2007” print driver feature has become one of OneNote’s most popular features. It works as an extension to the printing system built into Windows. But instead of pressing ink onto paper in a real printer, it lets any application on your computer send (“print”) information directly to the electronic pages of your OneNote notebooks:
 

This is magical. In addition to saving a ton of paper, you can do many convenient things with this option, such as printing presentation handouts from PowerPoint directly into OneNote without using a single drop of ink, and then annotating and taking notes on your presentation right there in your notebook. (Never done this? See it in action in this video demo, inspired by former Microsoft business division president Jeff Raikes.) Think of it as a “reverse import,” which gives you more control over how you can send stuff into OneNote. The thing is, once you start to appreciate this feature, you’ll never want to give it up.

Back in 2004, when we began working on Office 2007, true 64-bit operating systems were still only a tiny blip on the collective tech radar and entirely absent from the consumer mainstream. What a difference a few years has made! Most national PC retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, Sony, Gateway, HP, Dell, Alienware, and others now routinely preinstall 64-bit versions of Windows on their computers. The “Ultimate” edition of Windows Vista already contains both the 32-bit and the 64-bit DVDs in the same retail package for those customers that want to eventually upgrade. OneNote users who have been doing just that have been left wondering what the hell happened to the OneNote print driver they’ve grown to love. And no amount of fine print on the box was going to tip them off.

I’m very pleased to announce that my esteemed colleague David Rasmussen, the Principal Group Program Manager here on the OneNote team, has developed a solution to the conundrum. It allows users of 64-bit versions of Windows Vista (all editions) and also of the Windows 7 Beta to use the Send to OneNote 2007 print driver functionality on their systems.

First, make sure you’re running a 64-bit version of Windows by performing a quick and simple verification check on your computer.

To do this, follow these steps:

1. In Windows Vista (or Windows 7 Beta), click the Start button on the Windows task bar.
    
2. On the right side of the Start menu, right-click the word Computer and then click Properties on the shortcut menu that appears.
    
3. In the System window that appears, scroll down to the “System” section and note the “System Type” indicated there:
    
    
   
    
   •  If the operating system type shown is 32-bit, you do not need the OneNote print driver fix mentioned in this post.
    
   •  If the operating system type shown is 64-bit, keep reading.
    

I hope many of you will benefit from David’s solution. Please remember... keep the conversation going! Talk to us on our blogs and let us know how you use OneNote, what you love about it, and what you’d like to see in future versions.
 

Download the new “Green Living Ideas” notebook for OneNote

In celebration of Earth Day on April 22, I’ve put together a new “Green Living Ideas” notebook for OneNote 2007 that you can download for free. You can use it to list, organize, and keep track of a variety of “green living” ideas, reminders, and opportunities. The notebook contains five suggested sections, all of which you can customize in any way that you want.

The first four sections of the notebook contain suggestions for simple checklists that can help you categorize and organize the personal choices that you have made (and can consider making) about recycling and composting, conserving resources and energy, and lowering your personal impact on the environment. In these lists, each suggested item is pre-formatted with the “To Do” note tag, which you can click to mark the checkbox as completed (where applicable) or click again to clear the check mark. This is useful for reminders that you want to track for completion or for tasks that repeat on a schedule. To customize or edit existing list items, simply type over any text that you want to change. You can also insert additional list items where they belong, or delete the ones that you don’t care about.

The fifth and last notebook section provides space where you can collect links to useful “green” Web sites that you’ve discovered. If you prefer to keep a copy of the information from these Web sites as part of your notebook, you can simply paste such information into this section, or you can choose to insert screen clippings directly from your Web browser. To learn how to do Web research with OneNote screen clippings, read Use screen clippings to capture information quickly, or watch the video demo “Keep it together with OneNote 2007.” For more in-depth tips and demonstrations about using OneNote to store information from a variety of sources, check out the video demo “OneNote 2007: An Executive’s Best Practices.”

Realistically, you probably won’t be able to follow each and every checklist item provided in this notebook template. That’s okay. As with most of our templates, you can customize the contents by deleting anything that doesn’t apply to your personal situation or preference, and you can freely add and modify other items in the template that will make it more useful to you. The final result is a custom Green Living Ideas notebook that you can use and share with your family, friends, and co-workers. (If some of them don’t have OneNote, you can still share your notes and ideas with them.) For a quick video tutorial about customizing OneNote templates, check out the video demo “Take the work out of note-taking with OneNote templates.”

The Green Living Ideas notebook is free to download from our Templates site and it works with all versions of OneNote 2007 — including the free trial version. You can download other, free OneNote 2007 templates — including full notebooks plus individual sections and pages — from the OneNote Templates catalog on the Office Online Web site.

  Do you use OneNote at work (or want to)? Persuading your co-workers to stop using wasteful paper notebooks and endless printouts is the best way to help your whole office “go green!” If you could use some assistance with convincing your co-workers (and your boss) that OneNote is a worthy and environmentally friendly investment in the workplace, check out this free OneNote 2007 training presentation for PowerPoint that you can customize and then present at your workplace.

Our templates are just one small part of all the free stuff available on Office Online to help you learn, use, and recommend OneNote. If you’re looking for something specific and need help finding it on our site, leave a comment and I’ll do my best to help.

Happy Earth Day!
 

Lost your job? Let OneNote and Office help!

Early on in my technical career, I worked for a medium-sized company that was enjoying a period of brisk revenue growth. Almost immediately, the company began spending recklessly on lavish office perks, designer furniture, equipment, spendy retreats at resorts, and never-ending catered meals. (Sounds almost like the current banking crisis, doesn’t it?) A colleague of mine who worked in the company’s finance department at the time would later admit that the monthly expenses seemed very irresponsible to her, even by the standards of the affluent 90s. When reality ultimately came crashing in, sweeping layoffs were the only solution. Like so many of my colleagues, I found myself out of work from one day to the next.

My own experience with unemployment happened at a time when jobs in every industry were plentiful. You know, when you would get an actual phone call or a polite letter informing you of the fate of your application. Friends of mine who for the past few years have been engaged in what they call “professional job hunting” all confirm that those days are pretty much over. Traditional wisdom no longer applies, and if you don’t sharpen the tools in your arsenal to keep up with the times, you may lose out. By all accounts, you may even need to resort to spam techniques to make sure that your résumé lands somewhere where it might actually be seen.

With so many people losing their jobs recently, the Office Online team has gotten to work on a brand-new Career Center site to help Microsoft Office users with every step of their career or job search. As part of this effort, we’ve partnered with the experts over at Monster.com to make the whole process a snap. Like all of the resources on Office Online, the new job hunting tools are completely free, so be sure to see what’s available!
 

Watch now: Four steps to your next job!
 

Once you begin mailing out dozens of job applications, your résumé, and your cover letters, keeping track of it all can be a daunting task. Fortunately, our new Career Center also offers the OneNote job application tracker. This template-based OneNote form can be added to any section in your OneNote notebook. It makes it much easier to keep track of the various job leads in your sight.

Using the template, you can keep track of the companies to which you’ve sent an application, résumé, and cover letter. You can also jot down which version of your résumé and references that you’ve sent out for specific jobs, and what the names and phone numbers of any company reps and head hunters are with whom you’ve been in contact. You can then use the job application tracker to follow up with each employer, follow up with thank-you notes, and remind yourself of upcoming interviews and phone calls.
 

Let me know if you find the OneNote job application tracker useful. I’d also be interested in how you’ve used OneNote (and other Office programs) in your own job search — recently or in the past. Which program has been the most valuable to you and which tools and features have helped to make your job searches easier?
 

Love OneNote? Show your support!

Each month, as I go through customer comments and feedback here on my blog and from the articles on the Office Online site, there’s a recurring theme that we on the OneNote team never grow tired of hearing: Our customers really love OneNote. If you count yourself among those of us who can’t live without OneNote, it’s now easier than ever to show your support.
 

I Heart OneNote
http://www.iheartonenote.com/

Join the newest destination on the Web for both new and existing fans of OneNote. It’s a new Web site that offers current and future fans the ability to share notebooks, exchange tips & tricks, and help spread the word about OneNote. Check it out!

  If you register on the site before midnight on March 23, 2009, you’ll be entered in a drawing for a $500 Amazon.com gift certificate. So, if you’re thinking of joining the community, you’d better hurry!
 

Learn from a pro: Real-world draft management in OneNote 2007

Some of the best computer tips out there aren't ever “in the manual,” so to speak. We search the Web to see if someone before us has solved a problem or found an easier, better, and faster way of doing something we want to do. More recently, the convergence of blogs, broadband, and high-quality video have made this a great experience. Whether someone has taken the time to document a step-by-step tutorial about how they use a program, or whether they shoot a quick video about it, the best ideas can come from watching someone else work — letting us peek over their shoulder while they complete a real-world task with the software they’ve chosen, and then learning from their technique and style.

On Microsoft’s Office Online Web site, we recently launched our new Podcast site, which houses a large variety of free videos for all things Office. You can watch these videos from your Web browser or download them to your Zune or your iPod for later viewing. If you like a particular channel or series, you can subscribe to it (via RSS or via the Zune or iPod marketplaces) and get notified whenever new episodes are available.

As part of our new podcasting efforts, I'm very pleased to announce today the premiere episode of “A Writer’s Guide to Microsoft Office” — a new podcast series written and hosted by my teammate (and former editor), Joannie Stangeland. In her first episode, Joannie shows us how she uses a variety of OneNote 2007 features to manage poetry drafts that she prepares for submission to publishers:

Watch now: Learn draft management in OneNote 2007

Even if poetry isn’t your thing, the video is well worth viewing. Joannie showcases many of OneNote’s most useful (and hidden) features and she shares techniques that you can easily apply to other types of note-taking and content management in your own work. For example, I’ve seen few people make really good use of the Section Groups feature, or breezing through the Move/Copy dialog box to shuffle various pages between different notebooks and sections. Joannie also makes great use of OneNote’s superb search capabilities — a seemingly simple but much under-appreciated feature. So, even if you’re not a poet, this video gives you some great insights into the capabilities of OneNote 2007.

Poetry is more than just a hobby for Joannie. She studied with Beth and Nelson Bentley at the University of Washington. Her first book, A Steady Longing for Flight, won the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award in 1995. In 2002, Seattle-based publisher Rose Alley Press published Joannie’s second book, Weathered Steps, which is available on Amazon.com.

Joannie didn’t select OneNote as her tool of choice for draft management because she works for Microsoft during the day. She immediately realized its benefits back when OneNote 2003 had been released and few people (even within Microsoft) had heard of it. There was no book or Help topic to teach an aspiring writer how they might use OneNote to work with drafts and manuscripts and submission letters to publishers. Joannie developed her own technique when the cumbersome clutter of paper and manila file folders quickly failed her. As you can see in her podcast’s intro, she still has remnants of her old paper filing system. Once she’s tossed it on the floor and fires up OneNote, there’s no looking back.

Future episodes of Joannie’s new series will showcase how she uses other programs in the Microsoft Office suite to get her life in order when she leaves work in the evenings. I hope you’ll tune in and get some useful ideas from this and Joannie’s other experiences with the software she uses. If you have videos and podcasts of your own that you’d like to share, be sure to let us know!

For those of you who are new to my blog or to OneNote, be sure to download the free trial version of OneNote 2007 for a full 60-day test drive on your laptop or desktop PC. For help with learning OneNote during your trial period, you can follow the tips in the Guide notebook that's included with the program. For more info, check out Learn OneNote with the Guide notebook and Find your way around OneNote 2007.
 

Further viewing and reading is available here:

• Office Podcasts on Office Online
  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/FX102863881033.aspx
   
• Joannie’s podcast: “Poetry notes in OneNote 2007” (direct link)
  http://www.microsoft.com/products/msoffice/office/media/en-us/WritersGuidePoetryNotesOneNote.wvx
   
• Joannie’s Blog
  http://poe-query.blogspot.com/
   

Revisiting sticky notes: Computer or paper?

In my previous post, I aimed the spotlight at one of OneNote’s hidden features: electronic sticky notes, a.k.a. Side Notes.

Like many of you, I work on a computer every day. I constantly aim to fulfill the personal computer’s original purpose: To make the machine do as much work for me as possible, not create more busy work. So, for me, doing stuff on my computer rather than on paper almost always wins out.

Now, a group of researchers at MIT has restarted an old debate:
Why Computers Can't Kill Post-Its (Forbes Magazine, 01/22/2009)

In a nutshell, the old argument is that when you need to jot something down, the ease of peeling off a sticky note from its pad and scribbling down a random thought will always be better/faster/easier than grabbing a laptop (or a cell phone) and typing the information electronically. I must admit, I used to think this was true. Windows, for example, has always included some sort of Notepad application. Ironically, I have faithfully used Notepad over the years for editing electronic text files and HTML code, but never for note-taking. Later, the Journal application was introduced. I never looked at it sideways. It wasn’t until OneNote 2003 was released that I gave electronic note-taking a try and was sold on it — sticky notes and all. No, that’s not because I work at Microsoft. I was sold on OneNote because the program was designed in smart ways that got around the typical computer program conundrum, which the Forbes article chronicles in its Outlook example.

Keeping important information from various sources all in one place is almost always a benefit in my work, and OneNote is the one program that finally came along and made this possible (and easy). Storing my stuff in electronic format also saves me time by reducing or even eliminating duplication of effort, which is the very thing that happens when scribbling important notes on a piece of paper and having to rewrite or retype them elsewhere later on for the purpose of sharing the information with others or putting it in its rightful place. If you pay close attention to your daily routines for even just a little while, you quickly realize how much repetitive busy work we do every day while banishing ourselves to an eternal Cut & Paste hell (“monkey work,” as my boss’ boss calls it). And with the growing awareness about going “green” and saving natural resources wherever possible, the choice to go paperless almost always wins me over.

In all of the other note-taking programs I had seen before, you always had to save each entry or file separately when you were done. You couldn’t focus on your thinking and writing, you had to immediately decide where the files should live on your hard drive. Worse, you had to be organized about keeping everything together, or risk losing important information. There was no automatic backup to help safeguard your information. The list goes on and on. OneNote won me over when I realized that I didn’t have to be strictly organized in order to use it and benefit from it. You can use the program as free-form as you like, and you can go nuts about organizing stuff later on — if or when you feel like it. The choice is yours. OneNote’s most underappreciated benefit is a design choice that freaks out many new users: There’s no Save button on the toolbar. This is perhaps my favorite thing about OneNote. I can trust that everything I type is stored instantly, without me having to make any decisions about saving or wondering where my stuff ended up. It all just works the same way that I work.

“Office workers are like electricity: When they want to get something done, they follow the path of least resistance,” says the author of the Forbes piece. Perhaps so, but I also think that the popularity of Post-Its has to do with old habits being hard to break. We tend to (pardon the pun) stick with what we know, and we get pretty frustrated when someone moves our cheese. Think of the last time a feature, a toolbar button, or a menu command in your favorite computer program was changed, or removed in a new version. You didn’t immediately care whether the new design was better. Instead, you spent most of your time complaining that you had to change your routine. Over the years, I’ve had many of my own experiences with this — most recently the Fluent interface (a.k.a. the Ribbon) in the four main Office 2007 applications. Looking back, I can laugh at myself for even slightly resisting change at times when the new design could have saved me time and effort if only I had given it a fair chance. When we’re honest with ourselves about being creatures of habit, it’s often the first step in being open to a better way of working. I’m not at all a believer in changing things for change’s sake, but more often than not, change lets us grow and make progress.

Truth be told, when I first joined the OneNote team, I was very reluctant to let go of my trusty paper notebook. In my head, I made all of the same pro/con comparisons that the Forbes article makes about paper sticky notes and computers. Ultimately, I found out that the paperless method worked better for me once I really committed to using a program like OneNote. The fact that OneNote requires a computer to run isn’t an issue for me. I already use a computer pretty much all day, every day. After the 2-3 seconds it takes to start up OneNote, it’s like a natural extension of my brain. I have OneNote running on my desktop computer to access shared notebooks across the company network, gather information from various sources (the Web, Office documents, screen clippings) and I have OneNote on my laptop for meeting notes. Reaching over to grab a paper sticky note at any point during the day would actually take more effort than pressing the Windows logo key+N in OneNote to create a new Side Note. As I pointed out in my previous post, the fact that Side Notes automatically inherit all of the functionality of regular OneNote pages makes the whole paper vs. computer argument a no-brainer for me.

For the record, I don’t think that there’s any need to kill paper sticky notes. For one or two random things during the day, I still use them on occasion. But as an organizational system for managing thoughts and tasks, a growing pile of paper sticky notes all over my desk fails me every time. Computers don’t make our lives easier by merely sitting on our desks. They make our lives easier when we choose to use them to their full potential. Installing and using OneNote got me a lot closer to this goal.

So, what’s your take on sticky notes? Do you prefer paper or a computer program (and why)? Have you checked out the Side Notes feature in OneNote? If so, what do you like or dislike about it? If you could improve sticky note programs on computers, how would you make them better? And can you think of any features of paper that haven’t yet been successfully implemented in the note-taking programs that you’ve seen or tried?
 

Do yellow sticky notes make you want to scream?

Okay, let’s face it. It’s hard to hate yellow sticky notes. Like Velcro™ and the World Wide Web, they’re arguably one of modern civilization’s coolest inventions.

Even so, if you’re in the habit of reaching for a sticky note each time you have a fleeting thought, you already know that they can quickly turn into too much of a good thing, especially if you paste them all over your monitor. Doing this can have unwelcome side effects at work or at home, such as announcing to your co-workers that you’re terribly unorganized, or finding out too late that your kids needed more drawing paper before hiding their new masterpieces in secret places. Not to mention that traditional sticky notes have all the limitations of paper: You can’t edit or format them, you can’t easily categorize them, you can’t tag them, you can’t consolidate them, you can’t assign them to tasks, and you can’t search them for keywords.

So... is there a better way to manage all that unavoidably random information that we're forced to scribble down during the day?

You bet! Meet “Side Notes” — an often overlooked feature in OneNote that lets you take your traditional paper sticky notes to a whole new level. Side Notes are the electronic equivalent of those yellow sticky notes that you love, except that they offer all of the benefits of regular OneNote pages. You can edit, format, sort, organize, tag, consolidate, search, and annotate Side Notes, and you can turn anything that you randomly jot down on them into formatted lists or even real Outlook Tasks. By adding reminders to Outlook Tasks on your Side Notes, you'll never forget anything important.

You can keep Side Notes displayed on your computer’s desktop (instead of around the frame of your monitor), which has the added benefit of privacy whenever you’re not at your desk. When you lock or shut off your computer, no one else can read your Side Notes. If you don’t want them displayed at all while you work, simply close them. You can recall them again at any time by opening OneNote’s “Unfiled Notes” section. If there are specific Side Notes that you need in front of you at all times, you can choose to “pin” such notes to your desktop so that they are always visible, even over other windows.

Just like regular pages in OneNote, Side Notes are automatically and continuously saved as soon as you create or edit them, so you’ll never have to worry about getting distracted and forgetting to save your changes. Getting rid of Side Notes is just as simple. When you no longer need a particular Side Note, simply delete it. Just think of the amount of paper you'll stop wasting!

To learn all about the cool Side Notes features in OneNote 2007, watch our new video:

Watch now:  Manage random information with Side Notes

Download free 2009 calendar templates (or make your own!)

Happy New Year, everyone!

As any seasoned user of OneNote 2007 will tell you, the beauty of OneNote is the ability to keep everything together in one place. Calendars are no exception, whether you keep them with you for quick lookups or you link dates and events to specific pages in your notebook.

The Office Online Templates team has been hard at work to make the latest OneNote calendar templates for 2009 available, the first few of which you can now download for free:

• 2009 full-year calendar
• 2009 monthly calendar
• 2009 daily calendar (January)
• 2009 daily calendar (February)
• 2009 daily calendar (March)
• 2009 daily calendar (April)
• 2009 daily calendar (May)
• 2009 daily calendar (June)
   
• View all available OneNote templates (by category)
  The remaining months for the daily calendars will be posted soon.
  Check the full templates catalog each month to see what’s new!

To learn how to do this, watch our new video:

Watch now: Take the work out of note-taking with OneNote templates!

Take OneNote to class!

Here in the hallways at Microsoft, there’s a particular utterance that can be heard with ever-increasing frequency:

“Wow—I wish we’d have had something like OneNote back when I was in school...!”

I'm one of the many people who feel this way. Aside from laptop computers and the Internet, OneNote is the one innovation that could have changed my life back in the day.

While students and teachers have different roles to play, they share a need to capture, organize, find, present, and share information on a variety of subjects. In present-day schools, paper notebooks may suffice for jotting down information, but their value really ends there. If you wanted to find information again later (and, let's face it, isn't that the point of writing things down in the first place?), then you had better be incredibly organized or incredibly patient as you surrender to flipping and shuffling through endless stacks of paper. Worse, if your idea of sharing notes with classmates is making photocopies or — gasp! — retyping your notes word for word in an e-mail message, then you probably already know that you're not making the best use of your time.

In the customer feedback that we receive month after month from our Office Online Web site visitors, the question asked most often is some variation of “What is OneNote?” or “What can I do with OneNote?” We've published several written overviews and Getting Started materials, as well as a growing number of video demos about OneNote. I'm especially pleased to share with you the latest addition to the latter category — a new video aimed at students of all ages, as well as their teachers and parents. It was put together by Joannie Stangeland, a present colleague and former editor of mine. Joannie has long been a OneNote enthusiast and she's never too busy to show others how to use OneNote to its full potential — both in the workplace as well as at home.

As Joannie's kids have begun college life, she has seen first-hand the value and potential that OneNote offers in and out of the classroom. In this video, Joannie wanted to showcase some of the features in OneNote that hold special appeal for both students and teachers:

Watch now: Take OneNote to Class!

Unlike our more traditional how-to demos, Joannie's video doesn't overwhelm with details. It's meant as a quick “drive-by” of cool features that you may not have known about before. If you want to point fellow students, teachers, and parents to a better way of managing academic life, be sure to share this video link with them. Chances are, they'll love OneNote, too!

Conventional wisdom always told us, “If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Back when I was in school, my paper notebooks weren't broken — but they severely limited what I could do with my notes and how quickly I could recall the massive amounts of information that I committed to paper each day. With each new class or semester, with each new page added to the growing pile of paper, finding the stuff that I cared about became more and more difficult. With a program like OneNote, your notebooks literally grow with your life, your experiences, and your learning. You can be as organized or as random as you want to be, you can instantly recall anything and everything you need, and you can easily share it with all the world, if you choose to.

If you've never seen OneNote in action and Joannie's video has piqued your interest, be sure to download the free trial version of OneNote 2007 for a full 60-day test drive on your laptop or desktop PC. For help with learning OneNote during your trial period, you can follow the tips in the Guide notebook that's included with the program. For more info, check out Learn OneNote with the Guide notebook.

For more tips about using OneNote in the classroom, check out these links:

• Microsoft Office at School: For Students
  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/school/FX102783161033.aspx
   
• Microsoft Office at School: For Teachers
  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/school/FX102781621033.aspx
   
• Microsoft Office at School: For Parents
  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/school/FX102781641033.aspx
   

  OneNote 2007 makes a perfect gift for the students on your holiday list. It's available as a standalone version or as part of the popular Microsoft Office Home & Student Edition:

• Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 (Standalone Edition)
  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000HCZ8EY/
   
• Microsoft Office Home & Student Edition (OneNote 2007, Word 2007, PowerPoint 2007, and Excel 2007)
  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000HCZ8EO/

It's that time of year again...

If you missed my original blog post, you can still read it here:

 
Survive the holidays with OneNote 2007
http://blogs.msdn.com/michael_oldenburg/archive/2007/12/16/6686183.aspx

Be sure to check out the Templates site on Office Online for new calendars in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, you can download a ton of other templates there — all free of charge.

To receive free monthly tips and tricks about a variety of Office programs and technologies, including OneNote, consider bookmarking the Microsoft At Work and the Microsoft At Home Web sites. There’s always something new to learn and check out!
 

Free download: Office 2007 Help updates (including OneNote!)

You probably know that pressing F1 in any Office 2007 program opens the Help viewer, which lets you browse that program's Help content by clicking through a Table of Contents or by searching for keywords and feature names. Clicking the appropriate link on the Help menu will do the same thing, although this interface style has gone out of fashion in programs with the new Fluent (a.k.a. Ribbon) interface, such as Word 2007 and Excel 2007.
  

What you may not have noticed before is that, regardless of the interface, the programs in the Office 2007 suites have two very different Help experiences. When your computer is connected to the Internet, and if you (or your system administrator) have given permission, the Help viewer will fetch and display the most up-to-date and complete content for the Office 2007 Help in each program. This experience is preferred because, in this so-called “connected state,” you're sure to always see the latest and greatest Help content that's available for your program(s). In this scenario, the Help viewer bypasses the Help files that were originally installed with each program because such disk-based content cannot be automatically updated and thus becomes outdated rather quickly.

If you yank the network cable from your computer or otherwise disconnect from the Internet for any reason, the Help viewer reverts to the offline Help files on your hard drive — outdated as they may be. All of the Help and How-to content that has been published since the launch of the product is then no longer fetched from the Office Online Web site. This is problematic when you need to look up procedure steps for a program task or feature and the corresponding Help topic exists only online. For example, imagine you're traveling on business and finishing your big PowerPoint presentation on the plane. Your boss told you to insert an animation or video, but you don't remember how to do this. If a specific article with the solution to your issue was not published as part of the original "offline Help" files on your Office CD or DVD, you'll have to wait until you can next connect to the Web.

Sitting on planes isn't the only situation where offline Help files may suddenly become important. In many companies, employees are not permitted to connect to the Internet for security reasons or due to corporate policies. For these customers, keeping our offline Help files as up-to-date as possible is very important. Larger companies typically have an IT staff that keeps cached versions of new Help content available in-house for searching. But for smaller businesses, no such luxury exists.

Whatever your situation, I recommend grabbing our newest Office 2007 Help updates and installing them on your computer.
 

If you have configured your version of Windows Update (Windows XP or Windows Vista) to include updates for all Microsoft software, these new offline Help file updates will show up in the “Office 2007” category of your “Recommended” updates (see screenshot). Depending on how your Windows Update is configured, you may already have these updates, or you may need to manually check for them. You may not see exactly the same items on your screen as are shown in this screenshot. The number of Help updates depends on whatever individual Office 2007 programs you have installed (separately or as part of any of the suites).

By the way, if you don't have Office 2007 updates integrated with your version of Windows Update (or if you don't want to for some reason), you can go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=40747 to check for all available Office 2007 updates for your computer. This is the same link that the Office programs go to when you click Check for updates from the Office interface.

Once updated, the offline Help files on your hard drive will contain a new, up-to-the-moment snapshot of the Help libraries which we keep current on the Office Online Web site every month. So, even if you're not planning to ever disconnect from the Internet, offline Help files on your hard drive might just get you out of a bind the next time you find yourself up against a deadline and in need of finding that elusive, secret handshake for mastering a particular task or feature.

  To make sure your Office 2007 Help viewer is configured to fetch the latest online content whenever you're connected to the Internet, click the button in the lower right corner of the Help viewer window (in OneNote 2007 or any other Office 2007 program, press F1) and then choose Show content from Office Online from the popup menu. “Connected to Office Online” means that your Office program will automatically include the latest online content in the Help Table of Contents and in the Search results.
 

By the way, to quickly find all OneNote-specific Help & How-to content that's currently available on Office Online, click the links in the left margin of my blog (under the OneNote Links heading).
 

With shared notebooks, collaboration is not just a buzzword

Wikipedia defines “collaboration” as follows:

“Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people work together toward an intersection of common goals — for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature — by sharing knowledge, learning, and building consensus.”
 

Back in the 1980s, IBM may well have dubbed their revolutionary new machines “Personal Computers,” but these days, if you use your PC in an office or at school, you probably already spend at least as much of your time collaborating with others as you do on your personal projects.

At first glance, collaboration seems like a no-brainer. Each day, we meet people face to face, talk with them on the phone, and exchange all the free e-mail we want. Instant messaging is another great way to chat or exchange files, especially if you and your teammates share similar hours near a computer. And yet, things quickly get a lot more complicated when you’re trying to keep more than a few people on the same page.

Work hours and locations are more diverse than ever. Information overload is everywhere. Our inboxes are full of “Look at me now!” requests and unscheduled tasks that are becoming increasingly difficult to process, let alone manage. How are we supposed to update each other on news and status without adding to the existing e-mail hell? Nobody wants more meetings just to talk about all of the work that has to get done.

We want our computers and tools to help us, but choosing the right tools for collaboration can be tricky. Most people will admit that they tend to gravitate towards what they know (or what’s been set up for them), and not necessarily what will help them collaborate in the smartest, most efficient ways. So, how do you try a better way when you don’t know that there is one waiting in the wings? First, assess honestly how well your tried-and-true methods and tools have served you in the past and then keep an open mind while you do some research on your own.

In my newest Office Hours column, I'm outlining how OneNote 2007 offers smarter ways to share information with a team or workgroup. Even if you already know how indispensible OneNote can be for management of your personal information, you might not yet have discovered its built-in collaboration features. Aside from the “how to” steps in the article, I’m offering some best practices that you may find useful — such as adding a hyperlinked Table of Contents that points to the pages and sections in your shared notebook, or including a reference section to keep important information at everyone’s fingertips.

As always, I’m interested in your feedback. Please tell me if you find such articles useful or if you’d rather see this type of information covered in a different way (the more specific your feedback, the better!). You can leave feedback by submitting comments directly at the end of the column (or any other Office Online article), or by commenting here on my blog. If you prefer, feel free to drop me a line directly.

In case you haven’t seen them, here are my previous Office Hours columns about Office and OneNote:

• OneNote: A smarter way to share information with your team
  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA102750221033.aspx
   
• Use Office 2007 on your mobile phone
  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA102402571033.aspx
   
• How OneNote made friends in a corner office
  http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA102282211033.aspx
   

You can view all articles (including those by my fellow Office columnists) by checking out the Office Hours home page!
 

What do you want to see in a OneNote 2007 book?

Over the past few months, I’ve been asked by some of my readers if I can recommend any good books about OneNote.

In short, the answer is a reluctant “No.”

If you do a quick search in Amazon.com’s Books section for “OneNote 2007” (include the quote marks in your search), you’ll see that the results will be underwhelming. You may remember that the previous offering for OneNote 2003 a few years ago was much more generous. So, why the sudden dearth of choices now?

While I don’t have any official data on this, I suspect that it’s just another case of everyone tightening their belts these days. Just as companies of all sizes in nearly every industry have radically consolidated their businesses and narrowed their scope to save costs, so have book publishers who used to pump out a gazillion books each year. It’s not hard to imagine why those books that are dedicated to version-specific, software-related subjects would be most affected by this. They almost always have a very limited shelf-life because of their specific focus.

Computer books are not everyone’s cup of tea. A lot of people never crack one open and prefer to read Help content online. But I’ve met a lot of people (customers, colleagues, friends, and acquaintances) who have told me that they much prefer learning about computer programs by keeping a book next to their computer, in which they can follow along in an overview of the software or in tutorial lessons that teach them about the software’s many features. In terms of training, books almost always succeed with their target audience because the information they contain is presented in a linear, sequential fashion. Help topics are meant to get you out of a bind when you’re in the middle of doing something and you don’t know how to use a certain feature.

When I started at Microsoft twelve years ago, it was still common practice for software companies to fully document a product — right down to the last toolbar button and dialog box. At Microsoft, we didn’t yet have Office Online at that point (or anything like it) and customers were unable to tell us what they thought about the usefulness of our documentation. We had no way of measuring which features (and associated Help topics) were the most popular, or which features created the biggest pain points and needed more explanation. As a result, literally everything was documented, just in case our users needed to read up on it someday. For better or for worse, those days are long gone.

One thing hasn’t changed. Companies continue to give their employees software programs to use at work, but little (if any) training is made available to help them master these tools. These days, if you can’t demonstrate a good grasp of Office software, your résumé may well be passed over. So, where’s an ordinary person supposed to get reasonably-priced, comprehensive training to get up to speed on software? Back when so-called “day one” software documentation was beginning to narrow more and more, a new industry sprung up to fill the sudden void. Technical self-help books like the Dummies series were being published to help novice users who had trouble ramping up with a software program.

Love them or hate them, these types of books have done very well in sales over the past several years. But despite their popularity, even these publications seem to have downsized their catalogs as of late. For example, to cover the various new Microsoft Office programs, book publishers seem to have combined everything into a single “Office 2007 for Dummies” or similar book in which the individual programs are discussed in much shorter fashion. That may work well for established and ubiquitous programs like Microsoft Word. But even though it may not seem like it, OneNote 2007 is only a Version 2.0 program that happens to have done incredibly well as a standalone product. Surely it deserves more comprehensive training coverage than this?

If you happen to belong to the group of people who love computer books, and you would like to finally see one dedicated to OneNote 2007, I have good news! Kathy Jacobs, one of OneNote’s most dedicated and vocal fans (who just happens to be a prominent Microsoft MVP) is planning to write a book of her own and she wants your input. In a recent blog post, Kathy outlines some of her plans for this title. Rather than copying the same repetitive approach of previously published tech books, she wants to create a book that speaks more to home users and students instead of only corporate users.

Personally, I think this is a great idea. If you can learn to master OneNote 2007 in a more natural and less formal setting and get comfortable with its features, you can easily apply those skills when using OneNote at work. By contrast, I think the opposite isn’t always true. It can be much harder to learn OneNote if you’ve only seen it discussed in work scenarios and not every home user or student can necessarily identify with these.

So, here’s your call to action. If you’ve been a consumer of technical self-help and training books and you’ve always wanted to give someone an earful about what you liked and disliked about these types of books, let Kathy know. Do you want step-by-step tutorials or broader overviews with specific case studies and scenarios? Should it cover only basic features or describe advanced techniques from expert users? Is a bound and printed book best or would you prefer a downloadable, electronic version instead?

You can share your ideas and requests for a OneNote 2007 book by leaving a comment here on my blog, by dropping me a line, or by responding directly to Kathy’s original blog post. As fellow content producers, Kathy and I will both be very interested to read your thoughts and responses!