Microsoft OneNote

This is a post about a little known application that has saved me more than once.  It’s called OneNote.  And the 2007 version is even better.  You know all those design binders you have on the shelf?  Take each one you want to keep, make a new “notebook” in OneNote and Scan or type in the information.  Each notebook can contain sections, and each section contains pages.  You can have more than one notebook in the 2007 version.

 

Usually, you’ll end up weeding out most of the junk.  And, in most cases, what’s in those binders came from pdf files or online webpages that you printed from various sources anyway.  So, you can just copy and paste directly into OneNote (and when you do that, it drops a link on the page indicating where you grabbed it from). 

 

The cool part, is the entire notebook is searchable.  No need to worry about organization.  That is my biggest road block to maintaining any reference material.  One of things that I like to do is save certain blog posts or discussion group solutions so I can refer to them later.  But organizing random solutions is not easy.  The search function solves my problem and will even search within images.

 

Enough of the banter, go download the 60 day demo and try it for yourself.  You’ll not only loose the bookshelf, but gain a sense of organization!

And for the inisde take from Microsoft, here’s a powerpoint (managing-onenote-notebooks.ppt) presentation for the short attention span people…..