Capture and Organise Your Ideas with OneNote!

In my role, I use my Microsoft OneNote (part of the Microsoft Office 2013 suite) as a scrapbook and research tool. For me, it’s a source of inspiration, consisting of competitor research, promotional ideas and thoughts for business development. The beauty of Microsoft OneNote is that it’s a tool you can use however you like and for whatever you like!

When I’m doing online research the ‘Send to OneNote’ tool is indispensable, I can clip a section of interest from a website, whether imagery or text and send it to the relevant section in my notebook. What’s great is that Microsoft OneNote can also convert the text within any image back into text so that your research is easy to edit and use. If there is a lot of information or I want to capture I can even print directly to OneNote.

Of course using OneNote with a cloud service such as Office 365 or Microsoft SkyDrive means my work is continuously saved and synced to my other devices, meaning I can access my notebook from my Windows Phone when out of the office too! Microsoft have made a number of templates available for download to help you organise your OneNote for a research project. They provide hints and tips on how to use the tool to its full potential; using sections to manage different areas of a project, creating to-do lists and including‘tags’ to highlight, assign a contact and more.

You can even cross reference items with your outlook account by ‘flagging’ certain notes as ‘Outlook Tasks’ which will then appear in your outlook calendar/to- do list and automatically remind you when an item is due to be completed.