If you're looking for some organization in your home office or just looking for a place to store all of those Post-It™ notes, look no further than Microsoft Office OneNote 2007. Once a skeptic, I've now become almost evangelical about this fabulous piece of software.
In previous versions, OneNote was used primarily by students with tablet PCs. However, with this latest version, OneNote has gained a lot of ground to become a one-stop shop for all of your office organizational needs. In fact, it doesn’t take long to use OneNote to organize your home office. From research notes on that book you’ve always wanted to write to your shopping list and everything in between, OneNote tracks it all.
With Office OneNote 2007, you can store, organize and reuse your notes. I only discovered one potential downside to OneNote 2007. That is, much like a good Day Planner, once you start using OneNote, you won’t be able to stop. And, with its seamless integration with other Microsoft® Office applications and Internet Explorer, you’ll soon be taking notes, recording audio cues, and copying screen shots – all within this one program.
But, better than paper, with OneNote, you can quickly and easily move, edit and delete notes that you’ve already entered. Plus, notes can be organized into categories, then subcategories and even shared with others. This is like the Holy Grail of notebooks.
And, it’s so flexible, you can use OneNote in whatever way works best for you. With OneNote, you won’t be forced to conform to some universal standard of note-taking. You can take your current practice and use OneNote to keep track of everything you need to remember and/or recall.
The OneNote environment provides one place to store everything that doesn’t logically fit somewhere else, and even those things that do. In its simplest use, OneNote acts like a notebook with section dividers, allowing you to neatly organize notes related to specific topics. But, on a grander scale, OneNote can be used for team project collaboration and as a total information organizer.
I'll be honest; I'm a chronic but random note-taker. And, my office organization was arcane, at best. Case in point - I’d take a phone call, grab the nearest piece of paper that didn’t appear important and jot down a reminder, fully intending to take action the moment I hung up the phone. Next, I’d see an important e-mail – and, not wanting to forget the contents, I’d print it. Thank heavens, because when I needed to remember something else that print-out gave me another random place to write down yet another reminder.
Once important reminders were either printed or written down, I would then move to researching my next book, article or video. It seems as though I’m forever researching something. But, trying to remember where I found something on the Internet was becoming as difficult as remembering where I had written down a reminder or more accurately, which piece of paper on my desk contained the exact information I was looking for at the present moment. And, for all the things I didn’t write down, I relied on the classic standby – my memory. This, as many of us can attest, is certainly not a fail-safe method of retrieving data.
Thankfully, much of this chaos changed when I started using OneNote 2007. I’m now a certified note-taking junkie. You see, with OneNote, I can actually find all of the notes I’m taking. Not only are they in OneNote, but they’re organized, as well.
With OneNote, I can find any note, any random thought I’ve typed, any website I saved, any important piece of text at a moment’s notice. And, what I found is that it doesn’t take any longer to type a note in OneNote than it would ordinarily take you to write it down. In fact, if you like the physical act of writing, you can even use a graphics tablet to enter notes into this extremely versatile program.
I also discovered (and love) OneNote’s integration with other Microsoft® Office products, especially Outlook. I use OneNote to synchronize my appointments and tasks. This way, I can easily track what needs to get done and when. Unbelievable as it may be, my desk is finally clear of all the clutter (well, most of it).
How you use OneNote and to what extent is completely up to you. Just remember that this is a product that seems to offer tremendous possibilities. Image by jaky.
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