Realize OneNote's huge potential as a student's software "hub"

J

J Wilcoxson

OneNote has huge potential to be "workplace central" for students and
scholars, as well as other knowledge workers who follow similar processes. It
just needs to build on its existing structure, giving a few more options as
well as connecting seemlessly with other office applications.

A couple examples:

1) Items on a page need to be able to be grouped together to form "notes" or
"cards" or "blocks" or whatever. One use: when researching and brainstorming,
small pieces of information could be kept, as with notecards, but pictures or
diagrams could be added as well.

These could then be arranged (possibly with an interface not unlike the
Canvas concept floating around a little while ago
http://www.officelabs.com/projects/canvasforonenote/Pages/default.aspx) and
rearranged, fitting pieces of research together in meaningful,
spatially-organized ways, and ultimately creating a "storyboard" for
paper-writing, etc.

2) Rapid automatic generation of pages or subpages would help remarkably.
For instance, if OneNote could "talk" to Access or Excel, a page (or the
aforementioned "notecard") could be designed based on a customized template,
and the fields could autopoulate from the spreadsheet or database.

This would be particularly useful in research. Since many scholars already
keep databases of books, articles, etc., one could make a OneNote notebook of
this information: a virtual card catalog that could be linked to notes in
other notebooks and to each other.

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B

Ben M. Schorr, MVP

#1 you can already do, sort of, with note containers. Granted it's a lot
more unstructured that you're probably imagining, but if handled with a
little care you could use it for that task I believe.

#2 sounds like something that perhaps a PowerToy or script could be written
to do. It's an interesting idea. Though perhaps the better solution might
be using OneNote linked Notes and maintaining that structured data in an
Excel spreadsheet (or Access table) that you link to from OneNote. Just an
idea.


--

--
-Ben-
Ben M. Schorr, MVP
Roland Schorr & Tower
http://www.rolandschorr.com
http://www.onenote-tips.com
Author: The Lawyer's Guide to Microsoft Outlook 2007:
http://tinyurl.com/ol4law-amazon
 

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