Collecting Your Notes and Information

Where you find your information has a lot to do with how you record it. If you are in a business meeting, you can click and type notes in your Office OneNote 2007 notebook. If you are researching a topic online, you can clip and save Web addresses, quotes, statistics, or more from the Web pages you visit. If you are assembling information you’ve used in reports, worksheets, or business correspondence, adding those existing files to Office OneNote 2007 is one way to pull together the information you want to work with. This section shows you various ways of incorporating notes and information in your Office OneNote 2007 notebooks.

Start a New Notebook

You can use the New Notebook Wizard in Office OneNote 2007 to create a new notebook from scratch or to base it on template. Start the notebook by opening the File menu and choosing New Notebook. In the New Notebook Wizard (see Figure 8-4, enter a name for the workbook, choose a color (to distinguish it from other open notebooks), and, if applicable, click a template; then click Next.

The New Notebook Wizard asks you where you will use the notebook and where you want the notebook to be stored before creating the notebook. After you click Create, the new notebook is displayed. Several tabs are added by default as section placeholders, and tips and suggestions are displayed in the notes area.

Type Anywhere on the Page

When you jot notes on a scrap of paper, you probably just put the pen on the page and start writing. You can add notes to your Office OneNote 2007 page with the same ease—just click anywhere on the page and start typing. Clicking and typing creates a “container” that stores the note wherever you add it.

You can easily group similar items by dragging one container to another; you can also move containers in the notebook by clicking the note in the Outline and dragging it to a new location. The notes you create are even more flexible than the handwritten notes you scribble on the back of an envelope—as electronic information, you can move, reorganize, edit, use, copy, and flag the notes in your notebook for use in an unlimited number of projects.

Blog This! An exciting new feature in Office OneNote 2007 enables you to blog about a feature, idea, or product you have included in your notes. When you’re working with an object on a notes page, right-click the object and choose Blog This. The feature works with Office Word 2007 to enable you to get the message out quickly, easily, and with a minimum of effort. [View full size image] The blogging feature that has been added to the 2007 release is a late-breaking feature that the developers are saying “is still hot.” It’s very much a beta release (with some great functionality and huge potential), but you may run into some glitches during beta 2. Here’s a workaround that Office OneNote 2007 program manager Chris Prately posted on his blog (blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2006/05/12/596010.aspx) to get the blogging feature working smoothly in Office OneNote 2007: “FYI ... to get the OneNote 2007 feature to work you will need to perform a little workaround: Copy Blog.dotx from C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeTemplates1033 to C:Documents and Settings\%username%Application DataMicrosoftTemplates.”

Insert File Attachments

The types of files you use in your note gathering are likely to extend beyond the scanned images and picture files you could insert with the previous version of OneNote. In Office OneNote 2007, you can add files of all types directly to your notes pages by simply dragging and dropping a file onto the page—or by choosing Files from the Insert menu and selecting the file(s) you want to add. The files are added as shortcuts, as shown in Figure 8-5. You (or those who share the notebook) can view the files by double-clicking the file icon.

Collecting Web Research

When you’re using Internet Explorer, you can gather information from Web pages by clicking the Send To OneNote button in the Standard toolbar. Doing so saves the content of the page to your current note page.

Office OneNote 2007 also includes a new Side Note feature that makes saving and incorporating information from the Web a simple two-step process. When you are browsing a site from which you want to clip information, right-click the OneNote icon in the system tray and choose Open New Side Note. A small note window then opens on top of the current display. Type your note and click the close box, and the item is added as a new page in the current notebook.

Printing Information to Your Notebook

A new import feature enables you to print other files directly into your Office OneNote 2007 notebook so that you can review, mark up, and share the document with others. Simply go to print a document or worksheet as usual (by choosing Print from the File menu). In the Print dialog box, click the Name down arrow and choose Microsoft OneNote Import. Click OK, and the file is printed to an electronic file and incorporated directly as a graphic image on your notes page (see Figure 8-6).