Practical Productivity
Where do you keep your "Junk"?

By Jane Cage
Heartland Technology Solutions COO

I have one – and I bet you do as well. When I look in mine I see some instruction guides, a box of tic-tacs, a golf ball, a pad of personal checks, loose change, some paper clips and a bottle of vitamins. What’s in yours? In your junk drawer, that is!

Everyone needs a place for items that don’t fit into any other category. And that’s true for your computer too. What do you do with information from the web that you want to remember, a recipe that your mom sent or notes from a meeting you attended? Could there be a better place to keep information you receive in an email than stuffing your Outlook to overflowing? I’ve found a piece of software that I can’t live without – Microsoft OneNote. Many of you may already have OneNote depending on you’re the version of Microsoft Office that you own. If you don’t – the purchase price is under $100.

What is OneNote? It’s a program that gives you a free-form way to store information from almost any source. You can set up sections and folders just as if you were going to organize a paper file cabinet. Right now, I have sections for WORK, HOME and MGMT MEETINGS. Inside the WORK section I have folder for projects that I’m working on and my areas of responsibility. I put in notes from meetings, ideas that I read on websites, portion of emails – anything that’s pertinent. One great feature is that if I cut and paste from the web, not only does it bring what I’ve copied, but it also inserts a link at the bottom to remind we where it came from.

I can “print” a report into OneNote using the OneNote printer that the program installs, so if I need to remember something from accounting I can have it at my fingertips. On top of everything else, you can move and rearrange information in any way that you want. I can also send a OneNote page by email to someone else in the company. If they don’t have OneNote, the information shows in the body of the email. If they do have OneNote, it also send a OneNote file that as soon as they open it, saves itself automatically into their OneNote as well.

If you’re a tablet user – OneNote is the program that you’ve been waiting for. As a matter of fact, OneNote may be just the reason you need to invest in a tablet computer. Have you ever wished you could just handwrite information that you could retrieve later? Maybe you’re onsite and want to draw a sketch of floor plans or dimensions – OneNote saves your handwriting on a notebook page – and best of all, saves it instantly.

And what do I like best? OneNote saves instantly – all the time. I never have to “SAVE”, I just close the program. The next time the program opens, I’m right where I was. You may be wondering – what do I keep in my HOME section? Here’s a recipe for crab dip from my aunt – copied right out of my OneNote.
 

See – OneNote can keep anything – it’s another great example of practical productivity!