Nota Bene: The OneNote Blog : Productivity

OneNote is a trial lawyer’s best friend

Michael C. Oldenburg — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:00:00 GMT

For as long as I've worked on the OneNote team here at Microsoft, I've never grown tired of hearing from real-life customers who sometimes take the time to tell us their stories about how technology and Microsoft Office products have improved their lives. Read my full blog post to meet how trial attorney and nationally recognized legal technologist Bruce A. Olson came to discover and rely on OneNote in his professional life....(read more)

How OneNote 2007 helps ‘Halo’ game developer Bungie

Michael C. Oldenburg — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Video game developer Bungie, the creative force behind the highly successful trilogy of 'Halo' video games, wanted to find a better way to organize production materials and facilitate collaboration among its staff during the game development process. Read my full blog post to learn how Bungie programmers and artists alike have adopted OneNote 2007 as their centralized information repository....(read more)

Discover and learn easy time-savers in OneNote 2007

Michael C. Oldenburg — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Computers were supposed to save us time, right? Surprisingly, not everyone gives the useful shortcuts in our Office programs their due attention. Hardly a month goes by when I don’t hear somebody say that they’re “too busy” to learn a time saver or two. The truth is, we’ll always claim to be “too busy” for a lot of things that could really help us. For many, it’s simply an excuse to stick with what they know, or to slog through a task just to get it done, even if it’s the hard way. But imagine learning just a half-dozen keystrokes that could shave away more and more wasted time from all of the repetitive tasks that you perform every day. Over the span of a week or a month, the time you save can add up very quickly. Read my full blog post to see how easy it is to discover, search for, learn, and use keyboard shortcuts in OneNote 2007....(read more)

Never miss a deadline with OneNote!

Michael C. Oldenburg — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:30:00 GMT

The newest episode of the video series "A Writer’s Guide to Microsoft Office" is now available. This latest video shines the spotlight on OneNote 2007, which is used to track writing contests and writing submission deadlines by a local writer. It's another great example of how easy it is to do real-life tasks in OneNote without a lot of up-front work or overhead. No matter what the task, OneNote adapts to the way you like to work. Check out my full blog post for the video and for links to related content....(read more)

Lost your job? Let OneNote and Office help!

Michael C. Oldenburg — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:00:00 GMT

My own experience with unemployment happened at a time when jobs in every industry were plentiful and when you would get an actual phone call or a polite letter informing you of the fate of your application. Those days are pretty much over. If you don’t sharpen the tools in your arsenal to keep up with the times, you may lose out. With so many people losing their jobs recently, the Office Online team has launched a brand-new Career Center to help Microsoft Office users with every step of a career or job search. We’ve even partnered with the experts over at Monster.com to make the whole process a snap. Also available is the new OneNote job application tracker. This free, template-based tool can be added to any section in your OneNote notebook to let you keep track of your applications, resume versions, contacts, follow-ups, and more. Read my full blog post to check it all out! ...(read more)

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

Michael C. Oldenburg — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 03:30:00 GMT

Some of the best computer tips out there aren't ever “in the manual.” They 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. Today, I'm pleased to announce the premiere episode of “A Writer’s Guide to Microsoft Office” — a new podcast series written and hosted by my teammate, Joannie Stangeland. In her first episode, Joannie shows us how she uses a variety of OneNote 2007 features to manage writing drafts that she prepares for submission to publishers. 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. Joannie developed her own technique when the cumbersome clutter of paper and manila file folders quickly failed her....(read more)

Revisiting sticky notes: Computer or paper?

Michael C. Oldenburg — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

In my previous post, I aimed the spotlight at one of OneNote’s hidden features: electronic sticky notes, a.k.a. Side Notes. Now, a group of researchers at MIT has restarted an old debate: "Why Computers Can't Kill Post-Its" (Forbes Magazine, 01/22/2009) 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?...(read more)

Do yellow sticky notes make you want to scream?

Michael C. Oldenburg — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 04:00:00 GMT

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

The real beauty of keeping all of your sticky notes in an electronic format instead of paper is that you can format, find, use, and reuse their information (even share it with others if you want or need to) — all without retyping a single word. If you get in the habit of using Side Notes instead of paper sticky notes, they’ll quickly become a natural extension of your OneNote notebook, even if you don’t want to bother organizing them. So, no matter how many Side Notes you create and keep, OneNote keeps everything together for you, all in one place. It’s just another reason to love OneNote!

Take OneNote to class!

Michael C. Oldenburg — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 04:00:00 GMT

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/

With shared notebooks, collaboration is not just a buzzword

Michael C. Oldenburg — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:00:00 GMT

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!

Learning OneNote 2007 right out of the box

Michael C. Oldenburg — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:00:00 GMT

In recent weeks, page hit counts for our introductory content about OneNote on Microsoft’s Office Online site have been steadily rising. As the worldwide adoption of Microsoft Office 2007 keeps increasing, so does awareness about OneNote 2007.

As much as we in the OneNote user community have already come to rely on this great program — the veritable Swiss Army knife of the Office family — we know all too well that OneNote’s simplicity can often hide its true power from new users who are taking their first test drive.

Some users have told us that they’re having trouble getting started, or that they assume that there’s a specific note-taking system to learn before they can reap the benefits of keeping all of their stuff in OneNote (see my previous post, “Taking notes the ‘right’ way,” about this common misconception).

Others expect OneNote to be some sort of new-age word processor in which they’re still confined to the same invisible boundaries of traditional documents. Even those who have already come to appreciate the flexibility of the OneNote canvas are sometimes still unsure about how best to manage electronic notebooks in efficient ways.

All of these things considered, I wanted to dedicate this entry to something that some of you may have overlooked when first booting up the program: the OneNote 2007 Guide.

What’s the OneNote Guide?

When OneNote 2003 first debuted in the marketplace a few years ago, it included a Flash-based tour to give users an overview of the program. While such self-running tours can serve as an effective introduction, they usually offer little or no interactivity. Worse, you can't try things out for yourself if all you have is a blank screen and no content with which to experiment.

For OneNote 2007, we decided to do something different by including an actual OneNote notebook — called the “OneNote 2007 Guide” — with the product. OneNote users can read its pages to learn about OneNote’s capabilities and features, and then experiment with the pages and sections first-hand by trying out the various techniques right there on the program’s canvas.

Sounds cool, but where is it?

To view the OneNote 2007 Guide, click the “OneNote 2007 Guide” notebook icon on the Navigation Bar (on the far left of your screen).

When the Guide notebook opens, click either of its two section tabs (near the top of your screen) and then browse through the pages in any order you want by clicking the page tabs in the page list (near the right side of your screen).

If the OneNote 2007 Guide isn’t shown on your Navigation Bar, you can easily reopen it by doing the following:

On the File menu, point to Open, and then click Notebook.
In your Documents folder (on Windows Vista) or your My Documents folder (on Windows XP), double-click the OneNote Notebooks folder.
In the OneNote Notebooks folder, click to select the OneNote 2007 Guide folder, and then click Open.

If you’re sharing your computer with co-workers or family members and you still don’t see the Guide notebook in your notebooks folder, it’s possible that someone else might have deleted it. In that case, keep reading — I’m sharing the necessary steps for restoring the Guide from its original file later in this post.

Annotate it, play with it, mess it up!

Aside from teaching you the basics about OneNote, the OneNote 2007 Guide also serves as a hands-on training ground, so don’t be afraid of “messing it up” — that’s what it’s there for. It’s not like you’re wasting any paper!

You can try out all of the things that the Guide pages mention. Experiment by moving stuff around on the page, change the font, size, and color of text. Add some new pages to an existing section and then create a couple of new sections. Rearrange section and page tabs by dragging them. Draw some shapes with the drawing tools. Insert some pictures or Web clippings and import some of your Office documents and files to see how they show up in OneNote. Send yourself a notes page in e-mail to see how it appears in your Inbox. Experiment with tables, note tags, and hyperlinks, and then try out the cool search features.

No need to get overwhelmed — just go at your own pace and search the OneNote 2007 Web site for Help whenever you want to learn more about a particular feature before moving on to the next.

Remove or reset the OneNote Guide

When you’re done messing around and trying stuff out, you can either delete the OneNote 2007 Guide from your hard drive for good, or you can restore it to its original glory and keep it as a handy reference manual.

In either case, do the following:

On the Navigation Bar, right-click the OneNote 2007 Guide notebook tile, and then click Close this Notebook.

In Windows Explorer, navigate to your Documents folder (on Windows Vista) or your My Documents folder (on Windows XP), and then double-click the OneNote Notebooks folder.

In the OneNote Notebooks folder, right-click the OneNote 2007 Guide folder and then click Delete on the shortcut menu.

If you now want to restore the OneNote 2007 Guide to the way it was when you first installed OneNote 2007, follow these additional steps:

Close OneNote 2007 if it is running.

In Windows Explorer, navigate to the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\1033 folder on your computer’s hard drive. If you installed OneNote in a different location, navigate to it instead.

Locate and then double-click the file ONGuide.onepkg.

In the Unpack Notebook dialog box, change the Name to “OneNote 2007 Guide” and then click Next.

Under Who will use this notebook?, leave the default settings, and then click Next.

Under Confirm notebook location, leave the default path, and then click the Create button.

If you’re using a version of OneNote 2007 other than U.S. English, substitute the “1033” code in the file path mentioned in Step 2 above with the correct locale identifier (LCID) code for your edition of OneNote or Office 2007. To learn more about LCID codes and software localization considerations, you may find the information in this Wikipedia article useful.

Besides Visual Studio, what’s a software engineer’s best friend?

Michael C. Oldenburg — Thu, 22 May 2008 03:00:00 GMT

On his blog titled “Progressive Development,” Microsoft software engineer James Waletzky chronicles the adventures of Motley and Maven, two fictional software developers who engage in an ongoing, entertaining dialogue about the best and worst practices of their profession.

This week, Motley and Maven discuss developer productivity tools. While one is skeptical, the other points out how OneNote 2007 can be a developer’s best friend:

Motley: “OneNote is just like Microsoft Word. It’s not a place where a developer should be spending time!”

Maven: “OneNote is perfectly suited to feature teams and developers! It provides a simple, organized, efficient, and easy-to-manage method of organizing ideas and general content. It is a developer’s best friend!”

You know, I think Maven is on to something! He goes on to say that he thinks OneNote 2007 is “the greatest application that Microsoft has ever shipped.” I may be a little biased, but I couldn’t agree more. ;-)

Check out the entire post here — it’s worth reading and sharing with your colleagues. Nicely done, James!

To learn more about James’ blog, check out the About page on his site.