Crabby Office Lady

In my world, efficiency, organization, and productivity are terms bandied about like insults at a poetry slam. It's time to take note. When it comes to note taking, those three words can be the difference between someone who's just getting by and someone who has it all together.

I'm in love. I mean all-out, I-want-to-be-with-you-all-the-time kind of love. The object of my affection goes with me everywhere — to my office, to meetings, to lunch...even into my dreams.

I'm talking about Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 <sigh>, the grooviest note-taking software that's ever hit the small (well, smaller) screen.

And just in case you were wondering: Yes, I do take all my crabby little notes for all my crabby little columns in OneNote. And yes, I even sit with my Tablet PC on my lap at home and take notes while I'm watching my shows.

The basics

This is what OneNote is all about: Taking something as basic as many little notes and turning them into something you can really use to make your life easier.

That's right, you heard me: Actually using the notes you so copiously take (and with such good intentions). Can you even imagine having all of your notes in one place? You already do, you say? In hundreds of Word docs strewn all over your hard drive? Or perhaps on sticky notes stuck to your computer screen, your bulletin board, the seat of your pants, the heel of your shoe? Or do you have them all right "here", floating around in your noggin where no one (sometimes even you) can get at them?

Well, before you pooh-pooh the possibility of changing the way you think about note taking, research gathering, and idea sharing, consider some of these examples of how OneNote can work for you.

What have you done for me lately?

Here's a partial list (and I mean partial) of the things you can do when you take notes using OneNote:

• Keep all of your notes in one place (and that would be in, um, OneNote). Wondering where you put those e-mail addresses from the morning meeting? OneNote! Shopping list phoned in by the spouse? OneNote! Lyrics for your breakout country chartbuster? OneNote (although I wish you would've skipped that one)!
• Organize your notes how you want. Move, rearrange, separate, duplicate, or combine notes and other content anywhere on a page or in "notebooks" of your own devising. No more scissors! No more paste! No more shuffling little piles of paper! Put those notes right where they belong (even if you don't know where they belong until much, much later).
• Find the information you need quickly. Don't spend your time pawing through legal pads, digging through filing cabinets, or puzzling through reams of your own bad handwriting. This is one of my favorite things about OneNote.
• Gather information from a variety of sources (even that crazy Internet!)— just drag pictures, charts, text or other content into your OneNote document. And, get this: OneNote includes the original Web site address or file location as a handy reference.
• Reuse the notes you take — in presentations, memos, papers, speeches, or love letters. What I'm saying is that you can take the notes you've gathered in OneNote, and pop them into Microsoft Office Word 2003 documents or Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 presentations.
• Send any OneNote document to a coworker in an e-mail message, whether he has the program or not. There isn't any attachment to open — the notes just show up as text. We just knew you'd learn to share. (We're so proud of you.)
• Sure, I love that you never have to worry about saving any of your OneNote notes; it happens automatically. You can quickly type and then close OneNote or even turn off your computer, but the next time you start up OneNote, you'll be right back where you left off!

Now let's take a gander at how OneNote is organized so that you can get started quickly. And you know, when I first started using this program, that was what impressed me the most — how easy it is to just jump in there and start. Fly, little bird! Be free!

How OneNote is organized

Let's make this nice and simple.

1. First, the very top of the food chain here is My Notebook, which is really just a folder. You know, like a folder in a filing cabinet or a folder on your desktop.
2. Folders (including My Notebook) can contain other Folders or Sections (think "sections" like in a three-ring binder).
3. Sections contain pages.

After that it gets a little more granular (another favorite term we use around here), and we start talking about subpages, and page groups, and whatnot. But you'll figure all that out once you realize that you've been waiting for OneNote all your note-taking life. Here's a glance at OneNote on your screen:

As you can see, there are Folders (My Notebook and Personal); Sections (Tablet, Meetings, Research, Personal); and the little numbers on the right side are Pages, which you can rename.

"Well, that's neat and everything," you might be thinking, "but what does that have to do with me?" Consider the dream — no, the reality— of organization, of customization, of (music swells here) taking notes when, where, and how you want! And again, the See also section of this column is chock full of more specific information.

The favorites

Everybody has favorites and Crabby is no exception.

Favorite feature #1: Take notes anywhere

Don't like to feel all hemmed in? (Then thank your lucky stars you don't live in Victorian times. Whale-boned corsets...oh my!) With OneNote you can write or type notes anywhere on the page — just click where you want to put them and start jotting.

Then (and this is the beauty of it), when you click on that block of notes, it gets this horizontal gray bar called a "handle" and you can move it around as the mood strikes you.

Favorite feature #2: Write, draw, scribble, or doodle

Handwrite your notes or draw diagrams and pictures using a Tablet PC or a pen input device on your laptop computer or desktop computer. In other words: Be creative, go crazy, do it your way.

Favorite feature #3: Side notes

A side note is like a miniature OneNote window that you can use when you just want to jot something down while you're working in another program. This handy (there's that word again) little puppy will stay open on top of other programs making it easy to do research. All the notes you take in side notes are automatically saved, just like the rest of your OneNote work. You can open OneNote and click the Side Notes tab to see all of the notes you created in the side notes window. When you want to incorporate a side note into your regularly scheduled notebooks, how do you do it? That's right, just paste it on over. And look closely at the side note in the image below: See how it automatically picks up the URL of the page you're grabbing the note from? Talk about useful.

Favorite feature #4: Note flags

A note flag is basically a little icon — such as a shape or a check box — that you can use to "flag" an important note. Once you've flagged notes on various pages in various sections of your notebook, you can then view them all in a single list in the Note Flags Summary task pane (on the right side of the image below). It's a great way to keep track of important little things that will just fade away into the vast amounts of typing or writing on a page.

Favorite feature #5: Stationery

Whether you're a "bunnies and kitties all the time" type of personality or have more of a strictly business or academic bent, you can customize how OneNote looks with stationery.

OneNote comes with six different types of stationery — alas, "bunnies and kitties" isn't standard. Sorry. However, you can create your own customized stationery by formatting a page in your notebook, and then saving it as stationery in OneNote. Little critter stationery, here we come!

Ladies and gentlemen: Start your note taking!

And there you have it, my little chickadees. Now you have no excuse for not being super organized. Read more about one OneNote in the See also section of this column, and be sure to view some of the demos, too. Sometimes seeing really is believing.

"He listens well who takes notes." — Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

About the author

Annik Stahl, the Crabby Office Lady columnist, takes all of your complaints, compliments, and knee-jerk reactions to heart. Therefore, she graciously asks that you let her know whether this column was useful to you — or not — by entering your feedback using the Was this information helpful? tool below. And remember: If you don't vote, you can't complain.