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Previously:
OneNote 2010 – Introduction

OneNote 2010 has been tightly integrated into Outlook, as well as Word, Powerpoint, and Internet Explorer. It opens up a completely new way to use OneNote – almost as an accessory to those programs rather than a standalone program, with all of OneNote’s power to hold different kinds of information (notes, pictures, links, screenshots) and link those notes to items in the other programs.

 

OUTLOOK

The easiest example: think about attending a meeting that’s on your Outlook calendar. When you highlight the appointment in your calendar, the ribbon bar includes a OneNote button, as shown above. Pushing that button opens a page in OneNote with the details of the Outlook appointment, and a blank space titled “Notes.”

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Use OneNote for your meeting notes. You can type in your notes, drop in bits of web pages, include a picture, link to a document – there’s no end to the information you can put on the page relating to that meeting.

The page in OneNote is linked to the appointment on the Outlook calendar. You can go back and forth freely. The next time you click the OneNote button in Outlook for that appointment, you’ll be taken straight to the same page; clicking the link on the OneNote page takes you back to Outlook. It’s completely natural – you’ll understand it the first time you use it.

You can do the same thing with your Outlook task list and you can have linked pages of notes about Outlook contacts.

 

WORD AND POWERPOINT

There are OneNote buttons in Word and Powerpoint on the “Review” ribbon bar. OneNote appears in a side bar for you to enter comments about the Word document or Powerpoint presentation. Each item in OneNote is linked to the specific line of the document that your cursor is resting on when you type the note. You can look at a line in your OneNote notes later and return to the exact place in the document that you had in mind.

 

INTERNET EXPLORER

Internet Explorer has two OneNote buttons. The first one (“Send to OneNote”) sends an entire web page (or a highlighted portion) to OneNote with a single click, including a link to the page so you can return to it later. Think about what that means for researching something! When you find a useful bit of information online, you can highlight it and store it in a safe place with a single click, including a link to find your way back later.

The second OneNote button (“OneNote Linked Notes”) is subtly different. It creates a link to a web page that works like the links to Word documents, allowing you to go back and forth freely between a web page and your notes about that page regardless of where you start. Go back to the same web page later and you can get to your linked notes in OneNote with a single click.

 

SEARCH

All this information can be thrown into OneNote because the Search features have been completely overhauled, making it possible to find your information later so quickly that it seems magical. The search bar in OneNote returns results literally as quickly as you type, with the search results grouped: pages that you used recently are at the top, followed by pages with the search word in the title, then pages with the search word in the body.

OneNote indexes everything put into it (even doing OCR on pictures to get what it can from the text in a scan or photo). You’ll be able to find your information regardless of whether you carefully organize the notebooks or pile everything into chaotic Unfiled Notes.

 

Tomorrow: more features of the new version of OneNote that stand out as some of Microsoft’s best work!

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