I couldn't do X before OneNote, solve for X

I wanted to ask you all a question/favour, what can you not do without OneNote?  The other day I was listening to a focus group of information workers (what we call regular office workers) and they were talking about the problems that they face at work with sharing information and working together.  It was really interesting to see what they had to say and what problems they were facing in their workplaces.  I thought that OneNote would solve a lot of their problems, but of course that might just be me.  With the OneNote hammer everything looks like a nail : )   But seriously I thought that OneNote and other Office apps could solve a lot of the problems people face, but I wonder how you explain what OneNote is to people.  I think sometimes it is almost too generic for someone who has never seen OneNote before.

So my question for you all and the discussion I would like to start is what can you not do with OneNote?  What is something that you couldn't do before without OneNote?

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2008
  Frictionless note taking. I use OneNote like a whiteboard, and it's great that I can freely type text anywhere, easily format data into tables, and embed just about document into it. The Outlook integration is great, too, and I make use of the task sync more than anything else. What I couldn't do before OneNote (reliably!) was organize my stream of consciousness. I record just about everthing in my notebooks and hardly ever use paper anymore (and when I jotted things down on paper before, I could never find it again!). The search functionality is really great and is enhanced by the power and integration with WDS, especially through the Start menu search in Vista. My OneNote application runs all the time and I use it about as much as I use Outlook. OneNote is a life-saver and life-organizer. It is versatile in so many ways and I love it. It is really an undersold product and I think it is an easy sell if people just "try it". By the way, did I mention I love OneNote yet? -PL

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2008
  Thanks Paul!  This is exactly how I feel about OneNote and I am glad to see that you are taking advantage of the full power of OneNote.  But how do you explain this to other people?  I don't know if everyone feels the same way or has that 'problem' internally, do most people think that they need to be more organized?  And do they think a notebook helps? For me yes it does (and I guess you too)!

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2008
  When explaining what OneNote does for notetaking, I explain about the different note taking methodologies (topical, chronological), and explain how OneNote is better than both at finding info. The one thing that I wish it would still do is simple math using pen input.  Nothing fancy, just addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2008
  I can barely gather a qualitative thought (excel is great for other sorts) without a blank OneNote page.  I just started a new job and I have been pestering the IT dept. to load it on my computer.  Being able to rearrange seemingly disconnected thoughts has been paramount for organizing outlines for papers and projects.  I wish more people used it so I could take advantage of the great network/sharing features.  I rarely print on to physical paper now.  Print to OneNote is the best.

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 14, 2008
  I'm a fan of GTD (David Allen's <i>Getting Things Done</i>) although not a devout follower.  But the ethos of GTD is recording stuff rather than trying to remember it so you aren't left with that distracting "I'm sure I've forgotten something" feeling.  OneNote allows me to get to that calm state of knowing everything important is in my notebook, I can find it all at a moment's notice, and I can't spill Diet Coke over it and ruin it!

• Anonymous
  March 15, 2008
  I'm a complete OneNote lover, but I haven't been able to fully move away from notebooks and notecards because I often need to lay out the notecards and pages from my notebook on a table to sort and arrange them--especially useful when trying to bring various ideas together into one project, or for collapsing brainstorming notes. For recording and organizing my notes--for outlining or keeping track of a project--OneNote is great. For brainstorming--for pulling disparate notes together by arranging them in a visual space--I still rely on paper, especially for larger projects. I would love to be able to have a view option that let me see all the pages in a section at once, and ideally allow me to interact with them and visually rearrange pages and notes--even just to be able to drag a note from one page into another while being able to see them both at the same time would be great without needing an array of monitors set up. Another thing I can't do (easily) with OneNote is reorganize a collection of notes and pages. I would love to be able to select multiple pages at once and click a button that moved or copied them to a new section in the same space. In addition to that, I would love some sort of ability to establish relationships between different sections and pages in a notebook. While I know it's not a database program, I've reached a sufficient volume of notes that some database functionality would be tremendously helpful, even just the ability to add text tags. The existing tag system and tag report is fairly useful right now, but I would love to be able to tag an entire section or section group, or just tag a page of notes, but not the entire section. Ok, now I'm just digressing into my Feature Wish-List. :) Anyway, I love OneNote and still think it's the best note-taking software out there (trust me--I've tried them all). Mischa

• Anonymous
  March 18, 2008
  Completely agree with the above power note takers :) especially when it comes to research and organizing my thesis notes into bloggable sections. The only thing left for me would be a built in handwriting calculator on the page and a little circle telling me where to put the coffee mug on my tablet screen ;p

• Anonymous
  March 18, 2008

1. Collect all information regarding one topic in one place (with references back to the source).
2. Make notes about anything in a way that makes sense to me.

• Anonymous
  March 19, 2008
  I notice that most of the comments are things that people couldn't do before OneNote, which I agree with. I'm a student and I have a tablet, so OneNote holds all of my school notes. I really enjoy being able to record the lectures, and take notes on them, and get related info off the internet to drop in, and being able to keep it all organized. It's an invaluable tool. However, I am also an amateur programmer. I know this might sound silly, but one thing that I can't do with OneNote that I would love to be able to do is keep my programming projects in notebooks. I already keep parts of them, like research and brainstorming, and the occasional flowchart for difficult flow problems, but I don't keep the source code in them because there's no syntax highlighting (which is really not surprising, since it's not a plain text editor). So. That's my thing. A little silly, but you asked.

• Anonymous
  March 19, 2008
  We are using OneNote in combination with SharePoint to provide team wiki's. OneNote provides a fantastic user friendly interface onto the SharePoint document library. This is revolutionising the way teams are sharing information. For example nobody bothers to fill in the metadata around a document when they drop it into a document management system but with OneNote the teams are spontaneously annotating the files on the page with contextual information. This is great and really enables the team to work together. However there are a number of areas where improvements could be made:

1. Many people work in a matrix organisation and we need to support the cross team perspective. While creating virtual notebooks across several notebooks is possible this could be made much more simple.
2. Using OneNote in a collaborative fashion does produce conflicts with synchronisation. Can anything be done to allow forced synchronisation of specific files, pages, sections? Or allow a user to check to see how else has a file open?
3. RSS alerting off each page, section, section group would be fantastic. This would really enable you to keep track of what was happening in a shared notebook. Yes I can do it off the SharePoint document library but it's ugly.
4. Bring OneNote up to equivalence with the rest of the office suit. For example if I embed a excel table into word I can click on it and it opens as an editable object. This should occur for all MS Office files. Dropping slides into OneNote is great but they are only images. If I want to edit a slide I have to open the file better to allow me to click the slide image and that slide opens.
5. finally from a wiki perspective it would be great to see automatic hyper linking where you have an exact match between a word on a page and a section group, section or page. If not automatic then something as simple as the [[name]] mark-up language of MediaWiki.

• Anonymous
  April 07, 2008
  "4) Bring OneNote up to equivalence with the rest of the office suit. For example if I embed a excel table into word I can click on it and it opens as an editable object. This should occur for all MS Office files. Dropping slides into OneNote is great but they are only images. If I want to edit a slide I have to open the file better to allow me to click the slide image and that slide opens." I couldn't agree more - I use onenote as my engineering design notebook.  I still have to switch back and forth between excel and onenote - being able to "inline" excel worksheets would be amazing (and logical).

• Anonymous
  April 10, 2008
  All other value is already written.. for me, OneNote is a great Document management tool.  I use it to put scan and put ALL my bills and other communications - and I can plan my payments/ correspondence and other elements easily.  

• Anonymous
  April 24, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 28, 2008
  I write fiction, and without OneNote, I wouldn't be able to organize my research as well has I have been since I started using it. I love that I can create sections and tabs for everything, and effortlessly move things around when I need to. Before I made the switch, I struggled with reorganizing my work in progress in Word, and it made me want to tear my hair out. After breaking up scenes and chapters by pages and subpages, I have been able to work a lot more efficiently. Having the ability to put visual aids on the pages while I'm writing is great, because I can capture things on the page while I'm writing about it. I've created notebooks for every project I'm working on and I'm showing my friends how to do it, too. I downloaded the Mobile Power Toy a few weeks ago so I could take notes on my phone and then easily sync them onto my computer. So much better than writing in a notebook! I could go on and on... :)

• Anonymous
  June 05, 2008
  I wanted to ask you all a question/favour, what can you not do without OneNote? The other day I was listening to a focus group of information workers (what we call regular office workers) and they were talking about the problems that they face at wor

• Anonymous
  June 06, 2008
  I wanted to ask you all a question/favour, what can you not do without OneNote? The other day I was listening to a focus group of information workers (what we call regular office workers) and they were talking about the problems that they face at wor