Say Goodbye to your Scratchpad

Say goodbye to your scratchpad. Say goodbye to your bits of notepaper everywhere and your binder of clippings. Say goodbye to the 10 minute hunt to find that bit of information you know you have somewhere.

In my second post I let you in on a little secret called OneNote: a digital notebook that can transform the way you and your kids gather and organize information. But how does it actually work?

Do you remember when you were in high school and writing an essay involved hours in the library and sometimes days pouring over all of your notes? Life has gotten a lot easier with the web – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we are any more organized in the way we manage our research and our time.

Microsoft’s OneNote digitizes your old loose-leaf binder. It takes all of your research and makes it searchable. It automatically footnotes your Internet research, so you don’t forget where you found your information.

It’s really cool.

You can fill OneNote with notes, pictures, web pages, e-mail messages – which are automatically categorized for easy search. It is great for students compiling information from a variety of sources to be used in research papers, but it is also tremendously useful for parents who have busy lives and like to stay organized.

I previously introduced you to Heather. She and her husband have five children, four of whom are on the autism spectrum. At times this amazing mom has had to keep track of up to 40 appointments in just one week! Impressed with how well OneNote synchronizes with Outlook, Heather manages her entire family life (even her kids’ medical records) with the help of OneNote.

Ninani used OneNote to do her school project on Nitrogen -and she (and her mother) said it made their lives a whole lot easier. This video is pretty funny – check it out:

There are so many reasons to try OneNote. Here are a couple of my favourites:

• You can easily capture content from the web and OneNote will include the URL for easy recall. This is a big time-saver for students who need to cite sources in research papers. For instance, say I’m doing a research paper on Wild Horses. I find a page I want to save, right-click on it and select Send to OneNote:

I select the notebook that I’m working in:

And OneNote adds the information from the page and automatically tracks where I pasted it from without me having to do anything extra:

Here’s the link back to where I pasted it from, at the bottom of the information inserted:

• You can search your notes – not only text but also images and audio. OneNote also shows you search results as you type, ranking results by learning from past choices, so you can get to your information faster and easier.

• You can record audio and video directly into OneNote. Simply click on the Insert tab, click on Record Audio (or Record Video):

And your recording will start and be saved in your notebook. There are controls in the menu for you to stop, start, pause, etc:

If wild horses aren’t your thing, think in terms of the recipe collecting and meal time research you might do online or how you collect and organize the information for your next big home renovation project.

Want to learn more? Check out the Making of Office 2010 on YouTube.

That’s it for now!

Until next week….

Ruth Morton
Microsoft Geek and Mother of Twins