Using OneNote for Information Gathering

Not only is OneNote a great tool for meetings, it is also a great tool for doing research on the Web. It's easy to drag-and-drop Web content into OneNote. OneNote actually keeps the formatting of the source most of the time, making the research you do look good.

Drag-and-Drop Web Pages

Because you can move objects around easily in OneNote, you can make connections between items in your research results, drawing lines to connect related ideas and taking notes on things that stand out to you.

Figure 16.26 shows what a Web page about home MP3 players looks like when I dragged it into OneNote.

Figure 16.26. OneNote tries to keep source formatting for dropped-in Web pages.

Although OneNote does its best, it is certainly not perfect when it comes to formatting Web pages. One of the main problems I've seen is with tables and frames. If you select just the text or graphics you want to include, however, you'll have better results.

Tip

When dropping Web pages into OneNote, select the text or graphics you want to copy. Make it as simple as possible for the best results.

When you drop in a Web page, OneNote also inserts the URL of the source Web page so you can return there for more information. Of course, retaining the source page's formatting a bit better would be helpful, but it would be almost impossible to make every page look exactly the same in OneNote as it does in your browser. (Of course, you could always take a screen shot of the page and drop it into OneNote, but then you would lose the text-editing capability.)

The Absolute Minimum

Here are the key points to take away from this chapter:

• OneNote is one of the best applications made for the Tablet PC. It can handle all sorts of content, such as handwriting, text, graphics, and audio.

• You can easily navigate your notes in OneNote by organizing them into sections and pages.

• Keeping objects separated is important if you want to treat ideas separately.

• Voluminous handwritten notes can be converted to text easily.

• Audio recording in OneNote links the audio to the notes taken over time, so that the conversation at the point in time that you take a set of notes is tied to those notes. You can access the audio recording directly from the notes.

• Web pages can be dropped into OneNote for help in research and information gathering.