OneNote – Microsoft’s secret little pad

What is it?

Microsoft OneNote is a member of the Office family. It is a digital notebook that automatically saves and syncs your notes as you work. It helps improve your organisation as you can divide notes into sections and pages. With super easy navigation and search, you can always find notes quickly and efficiently.

OneNote can be used for information gathering and multi-user collaboration. It gathers notes, drawings, screen clippings and audio commentaries. Notes can be shared with other OneNote users over the Internet or within your organisations network.

OneNote provides seemingly limitless flexibility in creating pages themselves, letting you position text, images and tables anywhere on the page.

Keeping notes and collecting information can result in an unorganised mess of sticky notes; either scattered across a desk or virtually scattered across home screens. OneNote will eliminate all of this, providing a centralised hub for all your notes, which can be organised into separate notebooks, then individual sections within notebooks.

No more lost post it notes or “where’s that piece of paper?”!

So what are it’s features?

Easy Collaboration

You might be working on a project as part of a team; OneNote ensures everyone stays on the same page, wherever you are. As OneNote is tightly integrated with Outlook, you can send emails from Outlook to OneNote and you can also email your notebook pages directly from OneNote. Thanks to this handy feature, you can schedule a meeting, send a meeting agenda in a shared team notebook and make any change requests within OneNote. You can also create tasks in OneNote that are automatically updated to your Outlook, meaning you and your team members can work seamlessly without switching from one platform to another.

Record Video or Audio Notes

Got a long meeting with lots of conversational style learning planned?

It’s nearly impossible to write down notes as fast as your manager or presenter is speaking. With OneNote Audio and Video Recorder options, you’ll never miss a word!

Draw and Colour

A stylus or fingertip is great for highlighting what’s important, plus you can express ideas with colours or shapes. OneNote will let you draw, sketch, or write notes with your finger or your mouse.

Access from Anywhere

You can access your notes from any web browser, even if you’re offline. OneNote works on any device or platform, and with no download required you can literally use it from anywhere: at a friend’s house, at the airport or even on holiday by the pool. You can also access your notes on a device that doesn’t have OneNote already installed.

Secure Sensitive Information.

Like any program that stores information, it is vital that it has the security to ensure only those who should have access can access it. OneNote has the functionality to password-protect individual sections which secures information. If OneNote stays inactive for a specified amount of time, it automatically locks your password protected sections to ensure they are kept private.

You can even set up multi-factor authentication for extra security across your entire organisation.

So, in summary..

OneNote to me is a no brainer when it comes to staying organised, and anyone (tech-savvy or not) will benefit from it. I am often asked how I stay on top of my workload and how I manage to get things done. My answer is OneNote, and I wish I’d learned about it back in 2003 when it was first introduced. If only I had OneNote when I was organising my wedding! As a mother of three children, I also use OneNote at home to stay on top of the ever-growing list of things to do and remember; my daughter even uses it to stay on top of her school work. So, all in all, it’s pretty awesome!