Applies to
Microsoft Office OneNote® 2003 Service Pack 1

By Paul Ford

When I first started up OneNote, I wasn't sure how I'd use it. Working for the past eight years as a copywriter and Web site developer (or, to use the fancier title, information architect), I've become a Microsoft Office Word veteran, and I wasn't sure if I needed another software tool to do hierarchical outlining.

Nonetheless, there are a lot of times when I don't want a hierarchy, especially at the beginning of a project. That's when I want to be creative — to get my ideas down and not worry about where they fit into the scheme of things. Previously, I've done this on old-fashioned legal pads.

OneNote, however, is leading me to reconsider. No software before OneNote has come close to the flexibility and simplicity of a pen and a piece of paper. Unlike many other applications, OneNote is not document-centric. Although it supports hierarchical organization, it gets rid of the idea of the "document" and replaces it with the idea of a notepad (complete with the option of the blue-and-red lines of a classic paper pad).

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.

Like a notepad, OneNote lets me write whatever I want, wherever I want it on the page. Unlike a regular notebook, OneNote lets me sort, structure, and use my notes to build more traditional documents (the kind I usually create in Word). OneNote gives me a way to get down any idea in written, sketched, graphical, or auditory form without worrying about where it fits into the project.

With such versatility, OneNote helps me think about what the client is really saying before I start to think about deliverables and final products; it allows me to stay agile during the brainstorming stage by not imposing any structure on my ideas or forcing me to think hierarchically. Because my job is to see things with fresh eyes and help my clients compete more effectively, anything that helps my mind work in new and unexpected ways gives me an advantage.

Using OneNote to brainstorm

I've found that OneNote is particularly useful when I want to quickly capture brainstorming during a meeting and then turn the ideas from that brainstorming session into an outline that I can send to Word to create longer documents, like proposals, functional specifications, copy, or deliverables.

Creating quick summaries with note flags

I recently met with the IT department of a large financial services firm that wanted to make its current Web site more flexible for its users. I used OneNote to keep track of what was being said.

Before the meeting, I customized my OneNote note flags, going beyond the predefined flags by adding a few of my own, including "Web pages," "Database-backed Web page," "Web page element," and "Web navigation." When creating my custom note flags, I could associate specific icons with them. For example, I used the house icon for "Web pages" and a star icon for the "Web navigation" note flag. During the meeting, as a new site element was discussed, I wrote a note and flagged it according to its type.

To protect the confidence of my client, I can't show the actual notes from that meeting, but I can show you a mock-up of what it looked like.

Kind of messy, I know. But an exciting thing happened next: I opened the Note Flags Summary task pane and created a summary page of the current section of my notes. OneNote automatically sorted my flagged items into a classic outline view and put that view on a page in the same section of my notebook.

After the meeting, I went back to my office and moved a few things around with the mouse, sent the whole thing from OneNote directly to a Word document that would serve as my final proposal, and added my commentary. Within a short time I had a nice outline that explained for my clients exactly what Web page functionality we would need to build and what would be on each page. Because I was using OneNote, I was able to quickly capture what was being said, and I was also able to structure that information almost instantly into an outline that I could start working with.

For me, the ability of OneNote to get me from near-random, throw-notes-everywhere brainstorming to a structured outline in so little time is perhaps the most useful aspect of the program. It saves me an hour every time I use it — time that I previously spent transferring legal pad notes to Word, cutting and pasting as I tried to find the most logical order for my ideas. Now, the note flag summaries do about 80 percent of this work for me.

Other ways to capture and share project information

OneNote is also great for helping me keep track of the people I encounter in meetings, as well as the details from those meetings. Because of its tight integration with Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003, I can create an Outlook contact from the information I typed on the page in OneNote. I can do the same when I schedule a meeting with a client — enter the details in OneNote, and then create an Outlook appointment from that information. I can also do the reverse and insert the details of the Outlook appointment, such as the agenda and names of attendees, into OneNote so that the information is available to me while I take notes during the meeting.

The huge benefit of having contact and meeting information in OneNote, versus my yellow legal pad or the back of a business card, is that I can easily search my OneNote notebook for a person's name or the details of a meeting later on.

Other ways to capture and share project information

I've been experimenting with using OneNote in other ways to capture information during meetings with clients, including recording client phone conversations in OneNote, sketching with OneNote, printing notebook pages to share with others, and copying notes taken on a Pocket PC with OneNote.

To record phone conversations using OneNote audio, I purchased a small device at an electronics store. On one end, the device has a phone jack that my phone plugs into; on the other end, it has a microphone output that plugs directly into my computer's microphone jack. With this device in place, I can record entire conversations as I take notes. Later, I can use my typed notes as reference points to jump to any point in the conversation and listen to what was actually said. (Remember that if you record phone conversations you are legally obligated to tell the other party that you're recording the conversation.)

In face-to-face meetings, I can use an external microphone plugged into my laptop's microphone jack. (Some laptops and Tablet PCs have built-in microphones that can be used in the same manner.)

Even though I don't have a Tablet PC, I find sketching with OneNote to be extremely handy. I use the touchpad on my laptop or a pen input device to draw — for instance, I might create a grid of what kind of content we want on a Web site or sketch diagrams that illustrate processes.

For printing, OneNote has very respectable output for easy sharing of notes with other team members. Sketches are saved in a vector format, which means that they scale well without showing any pixels. This makes printouts that much better.

Finally, if you use a Pocket PC, you can transfer the notes taken on your Pocket PC into OneNote. When you connect your Pocket PC to your computer, your notes are automatically copied to the Pocket PC Notes section of your notebook. Taking notes on a Pocket PC and transferring them to OneNote is great for short meetings when you don't have access to your computer, for creating to-do lists, and for brainstorming on the run — in my case, on the subway on the way to work!

Summing up

OneNote does three things very well:

• It allows you to be spontaneous in how you arrange ideas and notes.
• It allows you to rearrange your notes and ideas in a variety of ways.
• It allows you to mix different kinds of media.

OneNote makes my meetings more productive, because it lets me easily capture a wide range of information about what's being said — whether I'm using text, sketches, or recorded audio. Working in client service, I find that the agility of OneNote and the time it saves by not requiring me to retype notes from paper ultimately benefit my clients by freeing my mind and my schedule so that I can devote more time to their problems. OneNote straddles the divide between the brainstorming stage and the outlining and planning stage, providing a very simple-to-learn tool that makes it easy to keep complex sets of ideas and notes in varying degrees of order.

I've decided that OneNote is a fully qualified replacement for the trusty legal pad — as easy to get to and as easy to flip through, but with the immense benefit of allowing me to reuse my notes seamlessly in other programs. Retiring my trusty legal pad is not a decision I take lightly, but I've noticed that while I still bring a spare notepad to meetings, it tends to stay in my briefcase while I use OneNote to keep my thoughts in (or out of) order.

Paul Ford is an author, information architect, and programmer in Brooklyn, NY. He can be found at http://www.copywire.com and is occasionally heard on NPR's "All Things Considered" as a commentator.