So What is OneNote?

So what is OneNote?

OneNote is an application designed for note taking, and is often overlooked in favour of Microsoft Word. However OneNote is set apart by its interface, which offers flexibility in the organisation of your notes. The layout is essentially that of a notebook, the pages automatically divide into notebooks, sections, pages and subpages, thus lending itself to easy organisation and reorganisation of vital information. OneNote is designed to allow text to be inputted anywhere on a page, as you would in a hand written notebook.

OneNote may also be seen as a collaboration tool as it also allows users to save images, tables, audio and other forms of communication in a free-form document.  When importing files such as Excel spreadsheets, images or Visio diagrams, OneNote stores a copy of the original file directly to the notebook while also allowing for editing. 

OneNote also saves all notes to your OneDrive online storage account, allowing access from a wide range of devices.

OneNote’s benefits include:

Email linking – Outlook includes a OneNote icon in the ribbon of email messages, allowing you to browse and choose where you would like to save the email within OneNote. This allows for emails to be linked to corresponding projects for ease of access.

Charts & Graphs – OneNote offers its own chart tool or allows you to import charts and graphs from applications such as Excel or Word.

Built in OCR – If you have an image in which you only need the text, paste the image into a OneNote document and choose the copy text from picture option. You will instantly get a plain text version of the text within the image that you can paste into a notebook or word document.

Collaboration – OneNote has a sharing feature which allows multiple users on a network to connect to the same notebook for viewing or editing purposes. Notebooks can have many authors and masses of information, so OneNote automatically highlights recent changes and lists the authors of new material for ease of collaboration.

Information storage and retrieval – OneNote has a built in search feature, which begins displaying results as you type, allowing for quickly locating files. Users can also add keywords to audio and video files in order to aid others in quickly locating and viewing the media. Searches can be altered to span the entire history of the application or to focus on specific notebooks or groups of notebooks.

All of these benefits aid productivity in the work place by allowing a wide range of media and information to be stored, organised and viewed in one place.

So if you have the Microsoft Office Suite, why not try OneNote now? You’ve got it already.