OneNote In Microsoft Outlook


OneNote is far more flexible than Outlook for note-taking. If you want to type a quick note on your keyboard, OneNote accepts your typing and files the note according to your wishes. If you have a tablet PC or laptop and write notes using the handwriting stylus, OneNote saves your handwriting. If you want to record a conversation and store it as a note, May be as an addition to meeting notes you were typing and writing by hand, OneNote keeps them all together. If you want to copy web page content into a page of notes that you’ve been typing, that’s fine. Copy pictures and videos from your disk to your notes. Take a screen from any program and put the screen’s image in your notes.

The capacity of OneNote to capture data—and, more important, to manage that data together in one document you call your notes—truly is powerful. OneNote uses a note-organization system based on the real-world concept of notebooks filled with sections. You distinguish the notebook sections by section dividers with colored tabs that label each section. Each section holds one or more pages. Where OneNote distinguishes itself from its real-world notebook counterparts is in its capacity to store not only text, typing, and pictures on its notebook pages but sound, video, web pages, and links as well. And the really powerful thing about this eclectic repository is that OneNote can store all those kinds of data on a single page in its notebook! You put data where you want it, in the format you want it to be in.

Why have notes in a file cabinet, emails, word processing documents, database files, videos of presentations, and sticky notes on your monitor when they can all reside in one OneNote notebook? Obviously, much of your data should remain where it is (such as in the database, which is much better equipped to manage huge amounts of data), but with OneNote, you can organize all that data into one spot and provide links to any data that isn’t stored directly in a OneNote notebook.

OneNote initially comes with three notebooks already created for you:

• Work notebook

• Personal notebook

• OneNote Guide notebook

The Work notebook includes sections for your meetings, projects, planning, and other business you might need to track notes for. Obviously, you may not need all these, and you can rename or remove the sections and add your own. The Personal notebook includes sections for travel notes, recipes, to-do items, and account information such as frequent-flier numbers and other kinds of data you’ll run across and need to access.

You differentiate each notebook by a named, colored tab down the left side of your OneNote window. When you click a notebook tab, that notebook’s section dividers appear across the top of your screen, and the pages within the selected section are named down the right side of the screen. All notebooks have at least one section, and all sections have at least one page. It’s up to you to add more sections and pages as you need them.

You can create as many notebooks as you want, but you don’t have to make them all available and open. Only those notebooks you have open appear on the Navigation pane to the left of your OneNote window.
The power comes in the freedom that OneNote gives you to organize your notes in whatever way you want. If you want to start writing or typing in the middle of a new notebook page, go ahead. If you want to draw something anywhere on the page or stick a web link anywhere on the page, just click and stick. In addition, OneNote searches through almost any data looking for something you want to find. (OneNote can sometimes locate text that appears in graphics images.) If you don’t like where you put a table, drag it somewhere else. Don’t worry about margins or the order of what you put on the page. Make room for handwritten notes between two typed notes by dragging the typed notes apart to make room for your handwriting.