Thing 16: OneNote

I’ve moved to having a laptop as my main device at work and started to use OneNote for note taking recently. I like having all my notes in one place – it’s very similar conceptually to carrying round a paper notebook. I like that I no longer need to carry paper print outs to meetings.  I find the screen clipping tool that’s part of OneNote really helpful as you can easily grab the part of the screen you want, rather than doing a full screen gab then editing it.

I mainly use OneNote on my laptop, but have installed the App on my phone as this would be handy for note taking and drawing quick diagrams on touch screen. I had some trouble getting this to sync – it did’t find every notebook I had made only the one called ‘Me @ Sites – University of Edinburgh’ – but when I checked the properties this one was set to save to one drive and the others were saving locally – so I reset everything to save to OneDrive. There are now backing up to OneDrive, but I still can’t see them on the App.

By default I’ve got two notebooks called:

• Me @ Sites – University of Edinburgh
• Me @ University of Edinburgh

Which are confusing with such similar names!

By watching the instruction videos I found out that you can send emails to OneNote and that’s really handy for keeping information together.

I also like the idea of shared notebooks for collaboration and I’ve managed to set this up with a colleague for a piece of work we are doing together. I’ve still got to get more comfortable with OneNote but I think it has a lot of potential, for collaboration and also because notes are easy to search.