How to quickly take notes using OneNote

As an IT professional, I get into a lot of meetings where I need to note down action items and inputs from my customer base. Information wise, those meetings get really messy, so I needed a more effective way to gather notes besides Notepad or Outlook’s task organizer.

If you like to write stuff down on paper, you might want to check out the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, which lets you write in a physical notebook, but transfers everything to digital format also. If you want to do everything electronically, then check out OneNote.

With OneNote, I can type anywhere in a document to start a new note and it is also easy to move those notes around around (like how PowerPoint textboxes behave).

The idea behind OneNote is to represent a real notebook. This way you can create notebooks for work, home or any topic that you want.

To create a new notebook, right click the bar at the left side then choose New Notebook.

Enter the name of the notebook then click the Create Notebook button.

The new notebook will appear as a new item on the left side bar.

To create note entries click the new section tab and then type in any text that you want on the document. By default there is a title header and below is a date and time so you know exactly when the note was created.

You can also use the draw menu to insert shapes and drawn objects inside a document.

If you have the technical preview of OneNote 2010 you will see new features like multi-level subpages, collapsing subpages, drag-drop to make a subpage, and Math support.

You can quickly calculate numbers and basic mathematical functions during a meeting or while taking notes for yourself. For example if you have an equation like “12/80 + 100”, put an equal sign at the end of the equation then press the space bar. After hitting the space bar, the result of the equation comes out! There is no need to open calculator or Excel just to calculate basic equations!

Once you are done entering notes, they are automatically saved. There is no save button! OneNote automatically files your entries so you won’t have to click a button just to save your notes.

That practically covers the basic notes creation for OneNote. With it you can quickly manage information in a free form manner. It is good for creating drafts and collaborating notes with other OneNote users. OneNote was originally marketed by Microsoft as a companion to tablet PCs and it has excellent support for pen and hand writing recognition interfaces.