Do you have a major research paper due for your college history class? Or maybe you’re researching and developing a technical white paper for your company. Word is a great application for the final paper, with indexing, citation, and footnote features. And maybe you also use Word to take notes as you research—or perhaps you use pen and paper. But there’s something better—a lot better—to use for gathering your information.

It’s OneNote 2010: your full-service note taking tool. Use it to keep all of your information in one place, and link your notes and information to your research paper with the nifty Linked Notes feature. You can access OneNote Linked Notes right from the Review tab in Word.

With Linked Notes, you simply have OneNote open and docked to the side of your computer screen while you also have Word open-- and use OneNote to capture pretty much any research information you need to. Notes in OneNote can be linked to different sections of your research paper, and by clicking on the Word thumbnail icon in your OneNote notes, you can go right to the relevant section of your research document.

You can take notes (either typed or handwritten, if you have a laptop and stylus with inking enabled), and capture whole web pages of information with OneNote’s Insert Screen Clipping feature. When you copy and paste anything from web pages—generally, inserting a screen clip is the best way to do this—the pasted material appears with the source link as the reference, making it easy for you to keep track of sources for your research paper citations.

Do you have people you want to interview for your research paper? No need to use a separate recording device—you can record audio and video interviews using OneNote’s audio or video recording features. Your recorded interviews will be part of your linked notes, so you can refer to them anytime, right in your docked OneNote window.

When you’ve completed your research paper, you can remove the linked notes with the click of a button--but they’ll always be right there in OneNote, and you can pull them up anytime you need them.

Want to learn how to set up Linked Notes with Word and OneNote? Read Take Linked Notes in OneNote 2010.

Word and OneNote’s tight integration can come in handy for other things besides linking your notes. Maybe you want to post some of your OneNote notes to your blog so that you can get comments and feedback from your readers as you are working on your research paper. Or you may want to send OneNote notes directly to Word—perhaps you’ve refined a section of notes and you want to add them directly to your research paper. Instead of copying and pasting, you can use the fast and easy Send to Word feature. Both of these things can be done from the File menu in OneNote.

And, finally, maybe you just want to save your OneNote notes—either individual pages or whole sections—as a Word document. Do it easily--also from the File menu.

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