Chapter 4: Introduction to Microsoft Office OneNote 2003

Overview

W. Frederick Zimmerman

How many times have you scribbled a note on a napkin or doodled a chart on an envelope, misplaced it, and then wished you had it later? Have you ever had a conversation with a client and then wandered out to your car, desperately trying to retain the details of what was just said? Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 is an exciting new product that enables you to capture the best of your in-the- moment ideas and turn them into valid, usable information in real time. OneNote complements the core applications by giving you a way to capture, store, organize, and use research and support data in flexible new ways.

If you have your Tablet PC in a meeting, for example, you can use OneNote to sketch out the new organizational chart people might be having trouble grasping. You can project the chart onto a screen and use OneNote as a digital whiteboard for brainstorming sessions. If you're in a coffee shop, you can jot down a few reminder notes and then add them instantly to your Task list in Microsoft Office Outlook 2003. If you're in the car, you can use the audio feature to record and store a quick note or two; and with a single click, you can link the audio to your typed or handwritten notes about a client meeting so that you can be sure you've got all the information stored together in one place, where you can easily access it later. Wherever you are and however you work, if you have good ideas and a Tablet PC (or OneNote installed on your notebook computer or desktop system), you can put those ideas to work as real information right away.

If you do most of your note taking by typing on laptop or desktop systems, you can keep OneNote open on top of other applications, so you can capture, save, format, print, search, e-mail, and share your notes easily without getting sidetracked from your current task. (See Figure 4-1.) The power of the program is its flexibility-it works the way you do, encapsulating your thoughts in the way you're most comfortable recording and applying them.

Figure 4-1: A 50,000 foot view of OneNote.

This chapter introduces you to OneNote and gives you a first look at the program's many features. You'll see why OneNote is considered a revolutionary new tool that will change the way we capture and work with information, enhancing the productivity of both individuals and enterprises.

From the Experts

Microsoft Office Product Manager Roan Kang is excited about the new possibilities OneNote offers: 'In general, we see OneNote as the ‘staging area' for capturing and organizing your thoughts and ideas prior to the creation of more formal documents.  So it's not too hard to see every information worker in the future using OneNote to collect facts and research before creating their presentations and memos.  Also, OneNote is a great way to make meetings and brainstorming sessions more productive.  We can see someone easily taking notes during the course of a meeting, and organizing those notes to highlight crucial action items, and then sharing those notes with people who were both attending and those who were unable to make the meeting. More specifically, since OneNote is designed to work the way you want, we believe that different companies and organizations will be able to adapt OneNote to their specific needs in ways that we can't even imagine right now.'