Tagging with OneNote

This is from iheart member Steve:

I don’t know about you, but for me organizing is a challenge in part because I don’t maintain a single discipline about how I do it over time.  I get some pieces working, add others, read a good article and think “I should do that”, and next thing you know I’ve forgotten all about the basic steps that helped me improve in the first place.

This happens with OneNote too for me.  The ability to ‘TAG’ tasks to do is a great thing, AND I notice that the more I create lists, say for ‘home’, ‘critical tasks’ at work, other ‘tasks’ to be delegated or develop, I suddenly have 7 or 8 pages with things to do.

Here’s a capability of OneNote I’m learning can help.  Do a Tag summary page and see them all at once.

• On the Command Menu, go to ‘Insert’ and the first choice, ‘Tag’.
• On the ‘Tag’ submenu the first choice is ‘Show All Tagged Notes.’
• Click that and it brings up a ‘Tags Summary’ sidebar that will let you see all your tasks, and group them by Section, Date, etc. You can show checked or unchecked.
• And the really sweet tip here: At the bottom of the sidebar is a button that let’s you ‘Create Summary Page.’  Click that and it creates a page listing all your tagged tasks in the order you’ve chosen.
• I title that with a date and time and print it out so I can see the various threads I’ve created.  I print it out on paper as a handy reminder, and then I go back and tidy things up.

This saves looking all over for things you wanted to remember at the time, but now have forgotten where the page went to.  You can also do this for items you’ve tagged as ‘Outlook Tasks.’  I don’t know about you, but for me this practice helps me find things before they’ve gone missing for too long.

I notice it actually does help me Get Things Done.

Steve

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OneNote 2010 Technical Preview: Hands-on Review

OK, so for those of you who don’t live in the US of A, today is labor day and we are at the end of a 3-day holiday weekend. Although, here in Seattle, most of us spent the holiday hiding from the Monsoon-like rain that has fallen pretty constantly. This was a big bummer for those of us who usually attend the annual Bumbershoot Music Festival which is largely held outdoors underneath the Space Needle at Seattle Center. I have to confess that I only made it to one of the days – Saturday. But, I did manage to catch both Katy Perry and Cheryl Crow..so, all was not lost.

So, today, i have actually been catching up on some work and found this review of the OneNote tech preview.  We haven’t spoken about the new version in a while – the beta is coming in November, so here’s a little something from Will Kelly to get you in the mood

After installing the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview (msft), OneNote 2010 was the first application I fired up. While OneNote grew in popularity from Office 2003 to Office 2007, the impending release of OneNote 2010 is going to offer longtime users even more to like and, quite possibly, create some new fans.

This post is going to deep dive into some of the new enhancements you will enjoy when OneNote 2010 is publicly available.

Improved Ribbon. OneNote 2010 really benefits from the ribbon improvements in Office 2010. While the introduction of the Office ribbon drew some slings and arrows from long time Office users, the Office 2010 ribbon is greatly improved and smoothes over some of those rough edges.

Tagging. While previous OneNote versions always garnered praise for usability and organization options, OneNote 2010 adds tagging to the “Home” ribbon. You have the option to tag your important notes with predefined tags or ones you create yourself. This new option really complements the already strong organizational capabilities of OneNote notebooks.

Sharing Tools. OneNote gained its popularity as a note-taking and research tool. OneNote 2010 includes sharing tools to make it an even more effective for research, including the capability to email OneNote pages, support for multiple authors sharing notebooks, and page versioning. With OneNote 2010 due to be available in more editions of Microsoft Office, both geographically dispersed and traditional project teams should be able to take advantage of OneNote collaboration.

Improved Drawing Tools. While I am a big OneNote user, I still rely on an old school yellow legal pad and pen for taking notes in meetings. The reason is that my work as a technical writer means I do a lot of drawing of process flow diagrams and such. The OneNote 2010 drawing tools offer the drawing options I need so I can finally leave my yellow legal pad and pen behind.

Audio Tools. While you can’t escape client meetings, you now have the option to record meetings directly into OneNote (provided your laptop has a microphone) and then search through the audio files later.

Office Integration. When I first read the news about OneNote joining the Microsoft Office suite proper, my hope was for better OneNote/Office application integration: the upcoming Office 2010 is working to deliver on it. While I try to keep my expectations simple, I am already enjoying the Linked Notes feature, which enables you to keep notes on saved documents. There is also the capability to send OneNote pages directly to Microsoft Word. I was also excited to see the capability to attach documents to OneNote pages because I can see me using it to attach drafts, research and other project artifacts to keep my projects better organized.

Final Thoughts
While the Web Component of OneNote 2010 isn’t available for review yet, I see it as an addition could directly challenge Evernote and should drive innovation in the note-taking market. Additionally, just as Microsoft is bringing Outlook to OS X, expectations are going to rise that access to Microsoft needs to make OneNote available on the Mac.

OneNote 2010 is a standout in the Office 2010 Technical Preview and I look forward to seeing the final version.

HAVE YOU TRIED THE TECH PREVIEW FOR ONENOTE YET? IF SO, WHAT DID YOU THINK?

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