Applies to
Microsoft Office OneNote® 2003 Service Pack 1

People use OneNote at work to plan and track projects and meetings or to create outlines for documents or presentations. But you can also use OneNote to organize personal projects. OneNote can help you plan a party, vacation, kitchen remodel, or — in the case of Susan — help to organize a house-hunting trip. Susan, who uses OneNote in her job as a user researcher in the software industry, shared with us how she used OneNote on her Tablet PC when she and her fiancé began to look for a new home.

If you've been through the house-hunting process before, you know what a stress-inducer it can be. Keeping track of the information your realtor shares with you can be one of the biggest challenges of buying a new house. With OneNote and a Tablet PC or laptop computer, you can use the process Susan followed when you search for your own new home.

Note  Some of the features or functionality described in this topic are available only if you have installed Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 Service Pack 1. To learn more about the service pack and how to download it, see Service pack features in OneNote 2003.

Creating custom house-hunting stationery

The evening before their first outing to look at houses, Susan and her fiancé read through the listing information sheets their realtor had sent them. Realizing that it would be a challenge to examine each property closely, gather consistent information, remember questions, and keep all the listing sheets organized, Susan decided to use OneNote to create custom stationery that would help her track the details of each house as they went along.

First, Susan created a folder in her OneNote notebook and titled it House Search. Next, she set up a sample page for her notes and saved it as stationery, so she would be able to create a new page quickly for each property she visited. As illustrated below, Susan's stationery consisted of checklists in the header area. She used the To Do note flag to add check boxes, so she could mark off whether each house provided the "must have" and "wish list" items that Susan and her fiancé had identified for their new home. In the body of the page, she added headings for noting details — including the list price, the agent's comments, and remarks about specific features.

Note  To create your own house-hunting stationery, try using Susan's example as your model. Identify your requirements and create checklists accordingly. Create areas for other types of notes in the body of the page. When you're finished, save your page as stationery.

Using note flags to keep track of favorite houses

After finishing her house-hunting stationery, Susan created a custom note flag so she could mark the titles of the houses she liked the best. She used the Star note flag icon with the name "Best." Later, she would be able to use the note flag summary feature to recall the houses that were in the "Best" group.

Note  In addition to creating a flag to mark your favorite houses, you can create custom note flags for other purposes. For example, you can create a note flag for marking questions that you want to ask the realtor later. If you flag your notes, you won't have to work so hard to remember important questions or details!

Entering listing information

The next day, after Susan and her fiancé joined their realtor in front of the first house, Susan created a new page based on her custom stationery. Then she typed a short description ("Brick Tudor") and the address of the house into the title area. She also noted the neighborhood, so she could later organize her pages into sections according to neighborhood.

Susan marked off on her requirement lists the things she saw at first glance — such as a garage and two stories. As they toured each room of the house, she took notes under the headings she had already created. She also made audio recordings of the realtor's comments about the house, including opinions on pricing. The illustration below shows Susan's stationery after she entered the information.

Note  Using a supported digital video camera, you can also record videos and automatically add them directly to your notebook. These visual records can be especially useful for refreshing your memory about a particular property. As with any type of recording, we recommend that OneNote users always ask the subject of a recording for his or her permission to be recorded.

At the next house, Susan created a new page in her OneNote notebook, typed the new address in the title area, and followed the same process.

Tip

If you're using handwriting on a Tablet PC on your own house-hunting trip, set Pen Mode to Create Handwriting Only to ensure OneNote recognizes numbers in the title area. For best results, type the address instead of writing it.

Organizing information gathered in OneNote

At the end of the day, Susan and her fiancé felt they had done a thorough job of collecting information on the houses they looked at — and, there were no printouts to keep track of! To complete the organization of her house-hunting notebook, Susan categorized her pages of house-hunting notes by neighborhood and sorted out their favorite houses to make following up with the realtor even easier.

Tip

Try augmenting your house hunting notebook with notes or recordings taken on a Pocket PC or Microsoft Smartphone. Your Pocket PC or Smartphone can come in handy when you don't have a laptop or Tablet PC with you — for instance, if you're running errands and you happen to notice an interesting house for sale, enter notes about it on your Pocket PC or record notes using your Smartphone. The next time you connect your Pocket PC or Smartphone to your computer, your notes or recordings will automatically be copied into the Copied from Device section of your notebook.

Organizing listings by neighborhood

For each neighborhood they visited, Susan created a section in her notebook and entered the name of the neighborhood in the section tab. Then, she moved each listing page to the appropriate section or neighborhood. Now, Susan and her fiancé could browse the different neighborhoods for listings. They could also add more listings to neighborhoods or new neighborhoods altogether, on subsequent house-hunting outings.

Finalizing the search

After her house-hunting notebook was organized, Susan ran a note flag summary and found all houses marked with the "Best" note flag, as shown in the following illustration.

Then, because Susan had noted which agency listed each property, she was able to look up the listings of her favorite houses on the agencies' Web sites. In most cases, she found an image of the house and used OneNote to capture the image on her screen, then pasted it onto the page of the corresponding listing in her notebook in order to easily remember the property later. Conveniently, OneNote automatically included a link to the Web page from which Susan captured the image, so she could quickly refer to the online listing later.

The following illustration shows an example of a screen clipping being captured.

At one point, Susan couldn't find a particular house in her notebook that she remembered they had liked, but that she hadn't marked as a favorite. She remembered that it was the only house with a carport. Susan searched her notebook using the keyword "carport," and OneNote displayed the listing where Susan had typed "carport" in her notes.

OneNote helped Susan and her fiancé keep track of many details throughout the day. By using custom stationery to take notes about the listings, making audio recordings where necessary, using note flags to mark favorite listings, and sorting the listings by neighborhood, they were able to feel confident they were making informed decisions about the properties. Susan then called their realtor and gave him the listings of three houses she and her fiancé wanted to look at a second time. They were that much closer to putting an offer on a home.