Microsoft’s OneNote, for Students, Professionals, or Just About Anyone in Between

If you haven’t heard of OneNote, you have now. You should already be using OneNote in your day to day life whether it be working at the office, out of home, organizing your daily life, or taking notes in school. OneNote is Microsoft’s one stop shop to gather, organize, find, and share your notes and information you need to be productive. I was introduced to OneNote at the beginning of this school year. (I am a student at Penn State Harrisburg) After opening the program a few times at the beginning of the semester just to get a feel of what the program was for I put it aside and took my notes the old fashion way.

I will be the first to admit, I am a terrible note taker, my handwriting is sloppy and my hand cramps up very fast. During the middle of the semester I decided after the mid-terms that I was going to start taking my laptop into class with me, to every class. I now take all my notes in OneNote and I rarely write anything down in pencil and paper.

OneNote has so many features it is hard to just skim the surface on this one so I may do another installation on this topic if there is any interest.

This isn’t your typical run of the mill word processing program. It is like having a desktop with sticky-tabs scattered about the desk. You can jot down your notes in any organized fashion seemingly fit for you, or you can start a new paragraph anywhere you feel like. Inserting complete word documents are a snap. Copying in text from a web-site or file automatically references back to the source you copied it from so you never have to wonder again where that excellent graph you stumbled upon came from.

Here are a couple of screen shots from my personal OneNote. OneNote organizes itself with the used of different notebooks along the left side of the screen, Each notebook has it’s own set of Section Tabs running along the top of the screen, and each Section Tab has it’s own set of pages and or sub-pages of pages.

If that isn’t a handful, You can draw a readymade axis to make a sketch on, as well as OneNote is compatible with Tablet PC’s so that you can draw directly into OneNote. This is just the salt before the tequila and lime for this program. On another date I will go into more depth about the possibilities of this program, but if you aren’t already using this program you should be.