Thoughts on OneNote

Since I have been using OneNote I have found it to be really amazing and in principal it is very easy the way it allows you to store data and file items. To me it is really like a big bucket of data and on top of it you have search capability which makes it very easy to find what you are looking for.

However, it is very powerful and can be used in many ways depending on what you are looking at getting from it. For example I use it to help onboard new employees and give them the information they need to get a good overview of the company, and also around the solutions we have to offer our customers, and partners. OneNote is a great way to share the knowledge you have with others and provides an easy method for others to access the information. Even though you may have data stored in other places for example SharePoint for a document repository, etc. Having OneNote be an interface for people to start with and have this point them to the other locations seems to work well.

Let’s take a closer look at OneNote and see some of the functionality which is available and how powerful it is.

OneNote Notebooks are very easy to create, and you are also able to share these out and set different levels of permissions:

One you have given the NoteBook a name and shared it out to the relevant resources, you can then start to set up the framework you want in place, for example:

As you can see from the item above you can create sections as seen here called “Sales, Product Management, Marketing, Development, Finance and Organization”. Once you have created all of the sections you need you can then create pages under each section, just as in the example above.

This as I mentioned at the beginning provides that big storing bucket for knowledge. Which as you see can have many different sections, and even more pages for storing the data in each section. You would think this would make it hard to navigate however you have the search option at the top of the NoteBook which really makes it easy for finding that important piece of knowledge you are looking for.

Now this is one business case for the use of this product, but I also find OneNote very useful in my personal life. Now when I

started a new running program to train to run a 5K race in 8 weeks, I found the article from researching the Internet on my laptop and it listed out the schedule I needed to follow for each day over the 8 weeks so I created a section in OneNote and added a new page for my 8 week program.

Now as I have OneNote on my cell phone once I have completed a day, or a week of the program I am able to check this off on the cell phone. Now this is where it is cool as I can access and update the NoteBook from all my different devices, oh and I forgot to mention you can add images, tables, rich text and more to the pages you create.

As you can see two different ways to use this program but both very effective and this program has become a very useful utility for me in business, and my personal life.

This is all made possible by being able to store items in the cloud thanks to Office 365.