Just noticed my personal OneNote usage has exploded

As I was looking around earlier this week, I just happened to notice that my personal OneNote usage has really gone up these last few weeks. I guess I take having my notes for granted so much that I am a little amazed at how much I use OneNote on a daily, non-work basis.

Just as some examples, I am currently using OneNote to:

Track my running. I hope to get my half marathon time down even more this year and am diligent about tracking my running. I used the template I wrote about before to get to the point of completion, and now I am using the intermediate template to work on my speed. Additionally, I'm keeping a good log of all my running in OneNote (nothing special here, just a table with distance, time and various notes) so I will be able to analyze my progress later.

Keeping up with a remodel project. I had a big long list of "to do" items before everyone showed up to rip the ol' house apart, and using OneNote to track them all made sure nothing fell through the cracks.

Vacation planning. For me, part of the fun of a vacation is planning it and simply mulling it over in my mind. I keep a section for this up on Skydrive so I can make notes about my plans, itenaries, maps, etc… and have them available always. I have not used OneNote for this much before, but now that I am, I really enjoy having this information handy whenever I want it.

My blogs. I obviously write my articles in OneNote so I have nice record of what I publish and can quickly search my older articles. I also take notes for future ideas here and again having them in the clould has proved very handy.

And misc. collection of facts, web content snippings and bad puns (that's what I do to occupy my mind on long runs: think of puns).

Anyway, I have probably doubled my personal OneNote usage just recently and was a little surprised at how much more I am using it. Feels seemless, and I guess that is a good quality metric for judging OneNote :)

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 14, 2012
  John, I too have found myself relaying on OneNote more and more as I use it to jot down ideas and stay organized or paste Webpage sections using the Windows+S (my favorite feature). Unfortunately, I never thought I would use it as often as I do, so when I originally set it up I just went with the defaults and started entering data. It was so easy to use, I never bothered to really learn it (if that makes any sense). Therein lies the problem I am faced with today: in preparing my computer HD for reformatting, I was backing everything up and realized I need to get the backup from OneNote. I thought changing the path of the ON backup to a flashdrive would be the most efficient method but it wouldn't accept a removable drive for backup. When I opened ON again my notebook was gone. I tried to find my backup through the command prompt and eventually found that AppData was hidden. After changing that setting I could see OneNote>12.0 but the file size was way too small for the backup I was looking for. I've changed the backup path back, but I cannot find the original backup. I was saving locally and am not connected to a network. As you can tell, I am a real novice with OneNote, but can you please tell me how I can recover this backup?

• Anonymous
  April 18, 2012
  The comment has been removed