Your top OneNote "AH HAs!!!"

[pgray007]

I've been playing with one note for the past several months for taking notes in business meetings on a conventional laptop. Partially based on its power, I have a new HP tablet PC arriving today.

At this point I am keeping basic hierarchical notes in a business environment and just scratching the surface on tags and templates, but loving the outlook integration. I was wondering what 1-5 things you have discovered in ON that have changed the way you use it, or been incredibly helpful so I can jumpstart my learning.

Thanks!

[K0LO]

pgray007:

A few of my favorites, in order:

1. Seamless synchronization of notebooks that are kept on a network share. You can work on your notebooks on your desktop PC, or on your tablet; doesn't matter. Any changes from either place will synchronize the next time OneNote is run and has network access to the shared notebook.

2. The fully-customizable full-screen toolbar. In full-screen mode there is more room for writing without window borders and clutter to get in the way. You can put only your favorite tools on the toolbar for quick access without hunting through multiple cluttered toolbars.

3. Makes a better presentation tool than PowerPoint. Take your tablet to your next meeting any use OneNote instead to give your presentation. You'll have easier access to multiple-colored pens and simple drawing tools than you'll get from PowerPoint in the presentation view.

4. Download the "Publish as PDF or XPF" add-in to make creation of pdf documents from your OneNote notebook pages a breeze.

[sbtablet]

I use OneNote a lot for reading, marking up PDF files, etc. Love it! But it treats the PDF that you print to OneNote as background or picture. You can't just select the text.

One of the happiest days of my recent life was the day I ran across somebody's tip that you can right-click on that background text and copy the text from the page to the clipboard From there I can dump it in a Word, file and take out a quote for a paper, etc.

This trick is nowhere in the menus, and I would never have found it by myself.

Definitely my biggest AH HA!

[KenHinckley]

Here are mine:
1) The first time, years ago, that I discovered OneNote and started using the screen clipping feature. No more dorking around with PrintScreen and saving of the bitmap from Paint or whatever!

2) The next time, more recently, that I discovered the Windows-S keystroke to trigger said screen clipping. Not super useful on a tablet, but when the keyboard is at the ready, whoa! Super useful to me.

3) Even more recently when someone pointed out to me that you can right-click on the OneNote icon in the system tray and use the options to change the default screen clipping behavior when you hit said Windows-S keystroke. Otherwise it brings up a new OneNote window every time you hit Windows-S.

4) When I first started playing around with the tagging features and discovered the auto-summarize view that appears in the left pane to show you everywhere that a tag occurs. And of course I park that tag toolbar on the left of the screen to keep it handy. My only wish is that I could tag a specific word or phrase rather than entire line. (also sometimes cumbersome when trying to tag ink for similar reasons...)

5) When I started seeing other teams at Microsoft use the shared notebook sections to share information across teams and multiple users. I haven't yet mastered this feature myself (I haven't really had a chance to even try) but it is pretty darned cool when someone else does that and shares out a key notebook section with you so everyone can keep up on the status of a project.

[minimage]

Was used to penning my PC reload/replace checklists in GoBinder and emailing them to my management inline, so that they didn't have to have the app to view or print. started using OneNote "File --> Send to --> Mail recipient, and my Mac-loving boss griped, because I could only do them as attachments. I couldn't sell MS on the need for ON on the Mac (don't give me that look; that's what I gathered from their blog!) so I was emailing screen prints. Last week, I finally noticed the little icon that lets you send a copy; inline notes at last!

Yes, I'm ashamed that I didn't notice it sooner. It was more of an "Oh, DUH!" than an "A-Hah!" No wonder I didn't convince MS [img]smileys/smiley9.gif[/img].