Intern Voice: Surviving student life with Microsoft's OneNote by Danielle Joseph

My name is Danielle Joseph and I’ve been a co-op at Microsoft for a little over 7 months now. This September I’ll be heading into my final 8 months of school, wrapping up 5 years at the University of Waterloo. My life at school can get hectic very quickly as I usually take on a full course load of 5 courses, work 2 part-time jobs, take extracurricular classes like yoga, and try to meet up with all of my friends and family whenever I can. No one seems to believe me when I tell them that my work terms are my most relaxing terms, while my school terms are the busiest. 

While I’m in school, it seems like every minute of my day is planned and dedicated to something that needs to get done. Working at Microsoft, I also have a lot on the go, and usually have a lot of different projects for different managers that I need to keep track of. To manage everything properly, I thought I’d give OneNote a try. I’d never used the program before my co-op term here, but I had heard great things from other colleagues. It sure didn’t take me very long to fall completely in love with its ability to keep things organized, its simple manageability, its colour-coated tabs and so much more. Being a student at heart, all I could imagine was how great this tool would be not only in a professional environment, but while you’re in school. There are so many great features that allow students to keep their time managed, their projects on track, their photos with friends organized, lecture content uploaded, group projects edited...the list goes on and on.

As a student using OneNote, you can create a notebook for different aspects of student life. For example, my current OneNote file has a notebook dedicated to each of the following: School, Work, Pictures, Music, Misc. With each of these notebooks, I can create pages. In my “School” notebook, I can create a page for each of the courses I’m studying, and create separate sheets for each lecture I attend. I can also open my notebooks from anywhere with its SkyDrive capabilities! So next time I forget my USB key at home, or lose it entirely (it happens more than I care to admit) and need to access my notebook from the library computers, I can just login to my Windows Live account and open it right up! Another great feature: copying text from picture files and pasting it as text format. My professors often upload PDF files of slides in a lecture, or photographs of pages scanned from the textbook. This is great, but if I want to add my own text to the slides it’s not so easy to change. With OneNote I just paste the picture file onto the page, highlight it, and then copy the text from the image. I can then paste it in my notes and make any changes I want.

OneNote is honestly the best tool I’ve discovered while working at Microsoft. It’s kept me organized and helped me keep all of my files and ideas in one place. If you haven’t already played around with the program, I highly suggest giving it a try.

- Danielle Joseph