Using OneNote for effective document management

Christain Cawley from the BrightHub blog has written an interesting piece in which he discusses how you can use OneNote as an alternative to Adopbe Acrobat.

He says: “Microsoft OneNote allows the creation of encoded document images in a fraction of the time of Adobe Acrobat. These files are portable and can be opened on any compatible device. Why pay extra when Microsoft Office already has the tools you need?”

Read the rest here:

Microsoft Office 2007 contains the extremely useful OneNote, a document image making program similar to Adobe Acrobat. Documents, images, and web pages can all be printed to OneNote (which appears as an option in your printers list) and then stored away. These documents can be retreived for printing later if required or named and indexed using OneNote’s useful tabs.

The OneNote application comes with all versions of Microsoft Office and comes with various useful features such as the ability to copy text using OCR, indexing of notes, voice and video clips added to a OneNote document, and support for tables and arithmetic expressions.

OneNote Images

Print Receipts to OneNote

One particularly good use for Microsoft OneNote is as a printer substitute. Many people are currently spending considerable amounts of time conducting business and domestic transactions online, and it’s always a very good idea to keep records of any changes to your online banking or shopping accounts.

While printing these changes to paper is useful and offers a tangible end product, it isn’t always possible. For example, your printer might be out of action, low on ink toner or empty, or even short of paper. Therefore, printing to OneNote offers a great alternative, resulting in a document that is searchable, portable, with easily copied content, and compiled with other similar documents into a tabbed notebook.

How to Print to OneNote

Once installed, printing to OneNote couldn’t be easier.

For instance, if you’re completing an online banking transaction and want to make a copy of the receipt that is currently being displayed, in your browser go to File > Print… and in the Printer Name drop down menu select Send to OneNote 2007.

OneNote will then generate an image of the page you’re viewing and present a new version of the document to you in a OneNote window, complete with a field to name the document and various options to add notes and highlights to the document.

You can also save a Microsoft OneNote document in .doc format for opening in Word while the application is also compatible with Windows Desktop Search 3.0. Once this is installed, your desktop searches will take in the content of OneNote image documents and display these among your search results.

More to OneNote

If you opt to print your OneNote document at some point, simply go to File > Print… and select your printer to output the document to paper.

Saving OneNote image documents involves a slightly unusual process: OneNote adds all “printed” documents to a virtual notebook, which means whenever you print to OneNote these documents will be added to your last used notebook. You don’t have to save this as OneNote retains the contents; additional notebooks can be saved, however, allowing you to use different notebooks for different types of documents. Notebooks can also be split into sections and organised by tabs should you wish to keep all documents in easily accessible and well-organized files.

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Bill Gates talks about how he uses OneNote

In case you missed it, Bill Gates has written a blog post over at the Inside Office Online Blog about how he uses some of Microsoft’s products. The great news is that he also describes how he uses OneNote both on a Tablet PC and a regular laptop. I think this is the kind of visiblity OneNote needs to move out of obscurity and into the mainstream – I keep telling people about it and am still mostly being met with puzzled looks and raised eyebrows as people have no idea what I am talking about.  Once I’ve given them the lowdown on how I use OneNote, they are rushing out to buy a copy.  As I’ve said before, that is why I decided to start this site. How you can all help is to spread the word about iheartonenote.com to your friends – hopefully before long, we’ll have started a OneNoteLovers movement!

Here’s what the big cheese has to say:

If you visit my office, you will probably notice right away that I have three large flat screen displays that sit together and are synchronized so they work like a single very wide display. The large display area enables me to work very efficiently. I keep my Outlook 2007 Inbox open on the screen to the left so I can see new messages as they come in. I usually have the message or document that I’m currently reading or writing in the center screen. The screen on the right is where I have room to open up a browser or look at a document that someone has sent me in e-mail. I spend the majority of my time communicating with colleagues, customers, and partners. As a result, Outlook is the application that I use the most. I receive about 100 e-mail messages per day from Microsoft employees, and many more from customers and partners.

It’s very important that I hear what people think about our products and our company. Yet I need to balance that against the very real risk of information overload from all the e-mail that I receive. The advances we made in Outlook 2007 for filtering, rules, and search folders have made it much easier to manage my e-mail than before, especially because so much happens automatically once I’ve set everything up. A great thing is that all my voice mail, faxes, and even instant messages are sent to my Outlook Inbox using our unified communications technology.

Another important feature of unified communications that we have integrated into Office applications is presence and identity. That means I can always tell at a glance whether the person I need to get in touch with is available or not. One change to Outlook that I appreciate is tasks are now integrated with how I view my calendar.

Before Office 2007, I never used the Outlook task feature, but now that tasks are automatically added to my calendar, it makes it much easier to stay on top of the important things I need to do. Working with other people efficiently and effectively is more important than ever, not just for Microsoft but for any organization.

I find that SharePoint, a software program that enables people to easily create internal Web sites so they can collaborate on projects, has become indispensable. For example, each year I do something called ThinkWeek where anybody in the company can submit a paper about an idea they have to change the way our company works or to pursue a new development project. We used to rely primarily on printed documents, but now it’s simple for us to create a Web site to manage the entire process. This year, more than 350 papers were submitted. Not only did I read and comment on many of them, but other technical leaders from across the company were able to go up to the ThinkWeek Web site and add their thoughts. This has led to many lively discussions and started numerous new projects, something that was much harder to do when everything was on paper.

This release of SharePoint also has many social networking features that I find enormously helpful. In addition to searching any corporate intranet site for documents, SharePoint now enables me to search for specific people based on their expertise, job title, or the department they work in. Also, employees can easily create personal Web sites where they can post photos and list their experiences and interests. SharePoint even automatically associates every document with its author, and explains his relationship to other employees on the same team and in his department. So SharePoint makes it far easier to quickly identify the two or three people who are experts in parallel computing, for example, even though there are more than 80,000 employees at Microsoft now.

Of course, collaborating often means meeting with my colleagues in person or remotely over the Internet via Office LiveMeeting. I always take a lot of notes about ideas to think about or things to follow up on. I try to bring my Tablet PC to meetings as often as possible so that I can use OneNote 2007 to write notes in ink that can later be searched or converted to text. Even if I forget my Tablet, I can scan a document or piece of paper and add that image to OneNote. One of the nice new features in OneNote 2007 is that it automatically recognizes the text in those scanned documents, so that it’s easy to search for them later.

Then there are times when I really want to drill down into an industry or market trend. The new business intelligence and data visualization tools in Excel 2007 and SharePoint are fantastic for accessing the kind of data that used to be hard to find because it was stored in back-end databases, and then dig through that data to gain some real insights into what is going on. Now I can easily take a look at how a change to something like our assumptions about customer demand might affect the market for a certain product. Taken together, the improvements in Office 2007 have certainly had a large impact on the way I work. I seem to discover a new feature or a better way of doing something almost every day, and I am hopeful that many of you will find the new Office to be as useful as I do.

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Using OneNote for effective document Management

Christain Cawley from the BrightHub blog has written an interesting piece in which he discusses how you can use OneNote as an alternative to Adobe Acrobat.

He says: “Microsoft OneNote allows the creation of encoded document images in a fraction of the time of Adobe Acrobat. These files are portable and can be opened on any compatible device. Why pay extra when Microsoft Office already has the tools you need?”

Read the rest here:

Microsoft Office 2007 contains the extremely useful OneNote, a document image making program similar to Adobe Acrobat. Documents, images, and web pages can all be printed to OneNote (which appears as an option in your printers list) and then stored away. These documents can be retreived for printing later if required or named and indexed using OneNote’s useful tabs.

The OneNote application comes with all versions of Microsoft Office and comes with various useful features such as the ability to copy text using OCR, indexing of notes, voice and video clips added to a OneNote document, and support for tables and arithmetic expressions.

OneNote Images

Print Receipts to OneNote

One particularly good use for Microsoft OneNote is as a printer substitute. Many people are currently spending considerable amounts of time conducting business and domestic transactions online, and it’s always a very good idea to keep records of any changes to your online banking or shopping accounts.

While printing these changes to paper is useful and offers a tangible end product, it isn’t always possible. For example, your printer might be out of action, low on ink toner or empty, or even short of paper. Therefore, printing to OneNote offers a great alternative, resulting in a document that is searchable, portable, with easily copied content, and compiled with other similar documents into a tabbed notebook

.

How to Print to OneNote

Once installed, printing to OneNote couldn’t be easier.

For instance, if you’re completing an online banking transaction and want to make a copy of the receipt that is currently being displayed, in your browser go to File > Print… and in the Printer Name drop down menu select Send to OneNote 2007.

OneNote will then generate an image of the page you’re viewing and present a new version of the document to you in a OneNote window, complete with a field to name the document and various options to add notes and highlights to the document.

You can also save a Microsoft OneNote document in .doc format for opening in Word while the application is also compatible with Windows Desktop Search 3.0. Once this is installed, your desktop searches will take in the content of OneNote image documents and display these among your search results.

More to OneNote

If you opt to print your OneNote document at some point, simply go to File > Print… and select your printer to output the document to paper.

Saving OneNote image documents involves a slightly unusual process: OneNote adds all “printed” documents to a virtual notebook, which means whenever you print to OneNote these documents will be added to your last used notebook. You don’t have to save this as OneNote retains the contents; additional notebooks can be saved, however, allowing you to use different notebooks for different types of documents. Notebooks can also be split into sections and organised by tabs should you wish to keep all documents in easily accessible and well-organized files.

Read Full Post »