Jay sent us a note this morning and along with kind words about the site, he asked our thoughts on a home inventory solution: "I’m about to begin research on a means of creating an electronic home inventory that will enable me to photograph items and document all relevant information (purchase date, price, receipts, warranty info, serial numbers, etc.). I’m willing to pay for software to do this, and I’ve also toyed around with rolling my own via Excel or Access."

Now there’s a multitude of ways to approach this challenge, but my immediate thought was to use software that we’ve talked about extensively before…

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It’s draft night here in the development and just like last year, I’m armed with OneNote for my draft cheat sheets. This year, I’m using info from the same site as last year: FFToolbox. Instead of piles of printed paper, I’ll be drafting with my Samung Q1P UMPC and (new for this year), the Sierra Wireless 875U AirCard. I’d rather not rely on the commish’s WiFi that everyone will be hogging. Unfair that I have a mobile advantage? Perhaps, but after about 10 years of drafting for fantasy football, using OneNote sure beats papers everywhere. I found that out last year when it never took me more than 15 seconds to make a pick.

I’ve already used the Snipping Tool in Vista to capture all of the player info. I have a new OneNote notebook just for the draft and there’s a page for each player position plus a page with the Top 100 picks. As we draft, I’ll use the highlighter in OneNote to cross off the players taken both on their position page as well as the Top 100 page if they’re ranked. BTW: one of the non-mobile tech secrets to good drafting? Pay attention to the bye weeks. There’s nothing worse than taking two good players in the same position that have the same bye week.

I know I’ve said this once before (many times, actually), but for our newer readers sake, bear with me while I repeat this: "OneNote is the best piece of software to come from Microsoft, in my opinion." Of course, that means nothing to Mac users…or does it?

Nadyne Mielke is a user experience researcher at Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit and she’s hearing more and more about users wanting OneNote for the Mac. If you’d like to see it or if you just want to sing the praises of OneNote from a Windows perspective, why not hop over to Nadyne’s blog: she’s looking for feedback on why folks would want to see OneNote on a Mac. I’d also love to see a way for some OneNote Mobile functionality on the iPhone and of course, inking in OneNote is a fantastic experience when you need to search those notes. Just for the record; I’ll be using OneNote again for this week’s fantasy football draft, just like last year when I almost won it all.

(via Dan Escapa)

I love to share how my gadgets tools fit into my work days so it’s time for another "Day in the Life" article. In these articles I walk you through my entire work day and fill you in on how I use my gadgets to be productive.  Strap yourself in ’cause here we go!

Alarm rudely awakens me at 5:00 (yes AM) and I stumble downstairs to the first cup of coffee of the day.  Having grabbed the coffee I spin into my home office and undock (pushing the little button on the side of the dock) the Lenovo ThinkPad x61 and spin the screen around into slate mode.  Settling into the Man Chair, I turn on the news to check when to expect the day’s flooding and hit up Google Reader to check my RSS feeds that have come in during the night (don’t you internet people ever sleep?).  I also open up Outlook 2007 and process any email that came in overnight.  Both of these tasks work well in slate mode on the Tablet PC.  I have toggled the x61’s d-pad to page up/down mode (as opposed to scroll up/down) so I move down my list of Reader items by paging down one screen at a time.  Google Reader automatically marks that I’ve read each item I pass as it leaves the screen so I am free to interrupt this process whenever I want and not miss any unread items.  As I spin through the feeds I tag (star) any items I want to follow up in greater detail later.  Clean and simple and even with a couple of hundred items I process it in less than 20 minutes.  I finish my coffee and feeds at the same time and head up to shower and get ready for my day.

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I just got back from running the kids around and see a direct Twitter tweet to me from Kathy Jacobs. Great news out of TechSmith today with the introduction of a SnagIt to OneNote accessory! This plug-in allows you to take any of your SnagIt screen clips and shoot them from the preview mode right to OneNote. You can mod the location of where to send your ’snag’ to any place in your OneNote notebooks.

While the SnagIt to OneNote tool is free, SnagIt itself isn’t. Both SnagIt and Camtasia Studio are well worth the price IMO, but Kathy’s got a free license key for each of these two products. You’ll need to drop her a comment in this post, so check out all of the details and be sure to enter by August 1st. Thanks for the Tweet, Kathy!

Jezlyn popped a note in our nearly clean Inboxes late last week to tell us about VoodooPad. I figured it was the latest game accessory for the Wii, but I was way off. VoodooPad is a Mac OS X application that has many of the characteristics and features found in my favorite Microsoft application: OneNote. I’ve only just started to play around in the app, but my first impressions are very favorable thanks to features like these:

• Multiple page tabs for your information
• Spotlight support for indexing and search
• Embedded file support along with a unique linkback feature
• Ability to sketch diagrams (difficult without a digital pen, but doable)
• Save pages as Microsoft Word docs

There are many more features and while the package doesn’t truly emulate OneNote, it has some very similar use cases. The VoodooPad Lite app is the free version, which is limited to 15 pages and has a watered down feature set for light duty. The full VoodooPad version is $29.95 while the Pro version is $49.95 and adds functions like a built-in web server and data encryption. I’m continuing to look it over, but since I found value in the first few minutes, I wanted to pass it along now.

Here’s a OneNote setting I never stumbled across but William at The Student Tablet PC did: you can reduce the frequency of OneNote background activities to stretch that battery just a wee bit farther. Remember that similar to Vista and Windows Desktop Search for XP/2000, OneNote is indexing your chicken scratch, audio recordings, OCR from photos, typed text and more in the background. That effort takes extra processing power and a little disk I/O, so by reducing the frequency in this setting, you’ll theoretically use less battery power. Of course, you might have to wait longer for recent items to be indexed, but as we say in the mobile tech world, it’s all about compromise. Nice find William!

It’s no secret that I live in OneNote.  I take a lot of handwritten notes every day but I also use OneNote as an information repository.  I routinely collect all documents I receive that are pertinent to a particular project and I put them into OneNote.  I do this mainly by printing them using the OneNote virtual printer which works well with the Word, Excel, PDF, screen shots and Project documents I receive.  They are captured into OneNote in a form that lets me ink right on top of them should I have a need to do so.  Paper documents I receive I scan into OneNote which works the same way.

Occasionally I need to share a page or two of my notes with colleagues who do not have OneNote and the best way to do so happens to be the easiest.  One of the first things I did after installing Office 2007 was to get the add-in that adds PDF output capability to all the Office programs.  I use this all the time to distribute Word or Excel documents that I don’t want altered, plus it has the benefit of providing the document in the universal PDF format.  It’s a must-have plugin for Office.  When I need to send a page or two of my OneNote notes I save it to PDF from right inside OneNote and send that.  This has the benefit of saving an exact copy of my note page, whether it’s handwritten, scanned information, or a document I have printed to OneNote.  It works very well, is extremely quick, and since it’s a PDF I don’t have to worry whether the recipient can handle it or not.  Great solution to a need that couldn’t be easier.

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.

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Yogi Berra-like quote: "Until you ‘get’ OneNote, you just don’t ‘get’ OneNote". People hear us referring to Microsoft OneNote all the time, but I often think they either figure it’s just a basic notebook app or they get overwhelmed by the many features and functions. So, how exactly do you ‘get’ OneNote?

A good start is this post by Dan Escapa; Dan highlights the oft-overlooked OneNote 2007 Guide Notebook that’s included with the product. Call it a virtual manual that should be perused even if you typically don’t read the manual. It’s filled with usage scenarios to illustrate how OneNote 2007 comes in handy. Dan also has a few links to external videos and and tutorial articles, so if you never quite figured what OneNote is all about, you’ll want to click of few of these. I still maintain the opinion that OneNote is among the best, if not the best, bit of software that Microsoft has developed to date. OK, except for the new Hold ‘Em in Vista…I like that too.