What to do with those OneNote notes after you take them
I live in OneNote 24/7 on my Tablet PC. It’s the first program I fire up each morning, that’s in the event I even closed it the night before. It’s the single biggest thing missing from the Mac experience and I don’t lament every single day that I don’t have it on the MacBook Pro. I’ve used OneNote so extensively and for so long that I forget that it can be a complex program to the new user. As a writer I can sympathize that there is nothing quite so daunting as a blank note page staring you in the face. Reader Jose Mendiola of Palm Insider wrote me an email with some questions about OneNote worth sharing:
Thanks to your comments and suggestions, I am now a bigfun of taking notes during meetings with the Q1 and One Note. I have onequestion though, which I would appreciate you would treat at JKOTR or via email: what do you do with your notes after taking them??I know it’s a silly question but I am not sure if you would convert them intotext (not always easy), file them as a jpg, or store them on the native format.
Read on to view my response.
Jose, my work is largely project-oriented so I have a notebook for each client. Each project then has its own section at the top of the OneNote page, with individual note pages in the tabs on the right. I make sure that any given note gets moved to the appropriate project section right away, or better yet I am in the habit of creating it there in the first place. That keeps me from having to do anything with the page later and insures my notes are filed with no effort on my part.
Your question about converting ink notes to text or image is a very good one. One of the first mistakes I see new Tablet OneNote users make is to try to convert all ink notes to text. I had the same impulse when I first started using OneNote but quickly found there is no need to do so. As you pointed out, converting involves a lot of work because if you’re going to the trouble to convert the ink to text then you want to correct any recognition errors. While OneNote is highly accurate recognition errors are unavoidable.
The fact is I don’t do anything with my ink notes, it’s not needed. I rarely share my notes with others so my ink stays as my ink. The OneNote search function uses the highly accurate Windows Desktop Search engine and since I can get my hands on any piece of information within seconds from anywhere in my notebooks there is no need to convert my ink. When I finish a page of notes I am truly finished with it unless I search for something I noted. Fast, clean and easy.
I use the Send to OneNote utility to get everything that comes my way into OneNote. Since that printer driver inserts it into the note page as a graphic I can ink my own notes right over whatever is already there. I do this so much that the OneNote printer driver is the default printer on my Tablet.
James,
How do you feel about OneNote 2007 forcing you to keep all sections of your notebook open? I was surprised to find the ‘Close Section’ option from 2003 missing from 2007. Reading Microsoft’s webpage, apparently they removed it because some users closed some of their sections, but couldn’t find them again later. (Odd reason to remove a feature in my opinion). Still, not being able to do so means that OneNote can get quite large in terms of a memory footprint if you have a lot of sections in OneNote, which I have. Given how much you use the program, I wonder how you’re dealing with this change. Do you think it slows down the processing of the ink when writing. I find that OneNote comes to a halt from time to time when I’m taking notes, which has me considering using it less for fast-paced meetings. Would love to read your thoughts on the matter.
Pam, I have lots of sections too but I don’t have a performance issue. I didn’t even realize the close section option was removed as I have always left the sections open.
Thanks a lot James, very helpful. I will try to be more organized beforehand. Silly enough, I wasn’t aware about the possibility of having a notebook for each client. Smart.
I also do absolutely nothing after entering something into Onenote. For me, it’s Onenote where I end up dumping everything. Web pages, Windows Journal notes, mind maps, emails, etc. I usually ‘print’ to Onenote to get stuff there.
Since I’m shuffling between my UMPC, desktop at home, laptop at work, I have foldershare.com sync my Onenote notebooks. It’s a great tool and syncing happens automatically in the background whenever it notices a change.
Rodfather, do you find that Foldershare creates duplicate folders in OneNote? That’s happening to me and I believe it’s because it thinks the notebook has changed on both computers and won’t replace one. I end up with an extra version of the notebook with a filename appended by the computer name. I may have to quit using Foldershare as it messes things up royally.
James, you are not suppose to use foldershare to sync your onenote notebooks. The best option is to share the notebook with yourself. This will avoid the problem you are having with the duplicates caused by foldershare
James, when I add a new computer to sync with my Onenote notebooks, I closed and deleted the default notebooks that are installed. Then when I add the “OneNote Notebooks” folder to sync, it fills that directory with notebooks from my other computer(s). I then opened each notebook (Personal, Work, etc).
I tried having a central place to have my Onenote files and share from there. But it never worked out since I didn’t have a central server that’s always on. Plus it takes some work to get security down. Foldershare makes it easy since you don’t have to worry about security.
BTW, no I haven’t had syncing problems or duplicate folders in the past.
May I add here that adding keywords to the page is useful for finding the page later? This is useful when a page is needed for more than one projects and you don’t want to duplicate it in different sections or notebooks. I precede the keywords with ‘9999′, so that I will search for ‘9999 keyword’ to locate the all related notes. This is particularly useful for keywords that are generic. I’ve extended the system further so that ‘9999′ denotes projects and main headings, and ‘8888′ for topic keywords. You need 4 digits to avoid picking up too many date references.
Does anyone know how to get the ON printer driver “back”? It’s disappeared from my computer and no amount of Office 2007 repairing or uninstalling/reinstalling has restored it. It’s just gone, which reduces ON’s functionality quite a bit.
Any suggestions appreciated.