Microsoft OneNote 2010

2011/11/20 0 Comments

Well, to be honest I have to say that I’m more of a mac guy.

But this note taking program, OneNote 2010, is absolutely amazing. It’s actually the reason why I have Windows 7 running on my mac via Parallels. (I wrote about my experiences having Microsoft OneNote on a mac in this post.)

There are several alternatives to OneNote on a mac, which I listed here, but to me, OneNote still is the real thing. Why? I will tell you in this post.

So: What is OneNote?

OneNote is a NoteTaking Program for Windows. It’s part of pretty much all Versions of Office 2010.

It basically imitates what you used to have made of paper & cardboard: Notebooks. A great benefit is that you can also have several notebooks open in your program surface at the same time – even when they are saved in different places … but if you want it to, the search includes all opened notebooks. A great thing – that we will talk about later… .

To the first level of organization are the notebooks. Every Notebook can have chapters (called sections in OneNote, represented by tabs on the upper part of the page) and pages. Plus there are further ways of grouping chapters and pages, which is very handy if you have a lot of content with many sections and many pages.

When you open the program and create a new notebook, OneNote first asks you where you want to create your notebook:

locally on your PC
in the internet, using the cloud of the Windows Live Skydrive
on a network server, when you are connected with one – with is the case at work for many of us.

Those are the basic options – but of course your local folder could also be a dropbox folder. Which is a great way of keeping your OneNote notebooks in sync on different computers. I’m using it for example on my office PC at work, and on my Apple MacBook pro via Parallels. I type something in the office, and as soon as I open my laptop at home, the information is there right away also. Well, to get not too confusing, I will talk about my installation of OneNote in a different post. Let’s get back to the basics… .

So let’s say that we create a local notebook that we call “Note Taking Tools”.

By the way: I changed the layout of OneNote the way I like it: The notebook selection on the right side (since I have to click there the least), and the section selection to the left. Those changes are easy to do in the options menu.

So we have the Notebook “Note Taking Tools”. In that Notebook I created a section “Note taking Programs”. Remember: That’s the equivalent to chapters in a book. Another chapter to add later might be “Note taking Hardware” or something like that.

In that Chapter “Note Taking Tools” I created to pages, “OneNote” and “Curio”, because those are the programs I want to collect notes about, first. For every of those pages, I created a subpage with the detailed areas I want to write about. First I chose the topic “workflow”. The smart thing about those subpages: You can collapse them, so that only the page “above” is shown. Great to keep the overview – you will see later how that looks.

The menu you see on the upper edge of the page is exactly the same ribbon style menu that is used in the other programs of the Microsoft Office 2010 package in Word 2010, Excel 2010 and so on. It pretty much does everything what you need:

changing the design and layout of your texts – the possibilities are endless, like in Microsoft Word
choosing tools to draw. On a Windows Tablet with touch you can really draw with your fingers. When you are working with a mouse, you will most probably do raw sketches. But the functionality is very handy if you want do mark something with circles like I did in the screenshot above.
Set tags to different items.
Insert everything from pictures to audio notes, also documents of any kind. In this case I dropped a PDF into OneNote via ctrl+c and ctrl+v. The best thing about that: PDFs are included in the OneNote search!

The One Note search function

This is one of the really outstanding features in OneNote 2010.

In the supper right of the the OneNote surface, there is the search field. As default, it is set to “search all notebooks”. So when you type in a term or word, it searches all the notebooks – regardless if they are saved locally, in the cloud or on the server. As long as they are opened, they are searched. Of source you can also set the search to the current notebook or the current section. And you could also set these settings as standard.

What is really incredible: OneNote is even searching inserted documents like PDFs, emails or Word files – and even audio notes and inserted pictures! Yes, thats’s right! Here’s the proof. I inserted a screenshot from some website and searched for it in OneNote: