Ever since my early college days, I have been a regular user of notepads — those small, spiral-bound things that you can easily carry in your shirt pockets. The notepads were an immense help in tracking the studies and various activities.*
When I started my IT career, I was pleased to see Microsoft Outlook. It has a great Calendar feature and a neat Tasks feature++. For a while, it seemed to me that I wouldn't need anything more.
Yet even after a few months, I was still carrying my notepad around. The reason being that Outlook doesn't have any provision for free-form note-taking. Sure, you can always type out the content and save it as drafts, or mail it to yourself, but it only adds to the clutter.
So again I was back on the road, looking for a better tool. I tried using sticky notes (both the digital and paper kind), Google Docs, Evernote, but none seemed to work. **
On joining my current project, I was intrigued to see my scrum master, Pradnya, using an application that looked familiar but couldn't quite place it. So I asked her, and she graciously walked me through it. And thus started my journey with perhaps one of my most favourite software tools: Microsoft OneNote.
OneNote is a digital note-taking tool, and it comes bundled with Microsoft Office suit. In fact, it has been around since Office 2003 ( and hence the notion of my being familiar with it, even though I had never tried it before). It is organized as a typical notepad: you create a notebook, which has multiple pages, and each page contains one or more sections. You can move or merge sections and pages either within the notebook or across other notebooks.
You can do all sorts of things using OneNote: type in notes anywhere at random, capture a screenshot and insert it directly into the page, record audio or video, create free-form sketches or drawings. There is no need to manually save the document, the data is saved automatically as you type.
OneNote has a seamless integration with other Office products: you can email a page directly using Outlook, you can import your Outlook tasks into OneNote, you can directly insert Excel documents or Visio diagrams into OneNote, and so on.
Another powerful feature is the wide range of in-built tags: To-Do, Highlight, Remind me later, Critical, Idea and so on.
The search feature is quite powerful: it can search across text, images and audio recordings.
OneNote also works as a superb collaboration tool. You can use it as a digital whiteboard and share notes with other users and edit each other's notes (with required access privileges). You can invite people to view/use your notebook, share the notebook with a meeting in progress or share it on Web as a link.
And of course, you can also password-protect your notebooks :)
With SkyDrive, all the notes are automatically saved to the cloud and are available on all the devices you use (for example: office desktop, personal laptop and smartphone). You can download and 'save' the entire notebook (with all its pages and sections) either as a OneNote file or a PDF and email it to other people.
I have been using three versions of OneNote till now: OneNote 2007 on my personal laptop, OneNote 2010 on my office desktop and OneNote 2013 on my phone#. In fact, having OneNote was one of the prime considerations in choosing Nokia Lumia Windows Phone as my new smartphone.
I would highly recommend this tool to everyone. A quick tip: Add OneNote to your start-up programs list so that it is launched every time the machine boots up.
This blog was completely written in OneNote.
And, I don't carry a notepad anymore.
If you haven't tried OneNote yet, here are a few links to get you started:
And if you're already using OneNote, these MSDN blogs would be of great help.
Mike Tholfsen, Test Manager for OneNote crafted this wonderful poem:
* It is a matter of nostalgic joy to leaf through these pages.
++ It's another matter that I didn't have as many meetings back then. How I yearned for those, and man, how I wish these days to have lesser meetings so that I can get some meaningful work done.
** I am surprised that Evernote — which was quite a rage back then, and is widely popular even now, didn't work for me.
# Just as am about to post this article, my office desktop is already upgraded to Office 2013 ( and hence OneNote 2013) and my personal laptop got the Office 2013 as well via Microsoft HUP. Yay!!
