Using Microsoft One Note

Whenever I mention Microsoft One Note on twitter, I get a resounding "what?!" from most people, so I decided to write a tutorial/post about it!

Microsoft One Note came with my Office Suite so I have no idea if you can buy it separately or not. I have Microsoft Office 2010 so if you have an older version, yours may look different and I'm not totally positive that the older versions can sync like the 2010 version can.

Why would you want to use One Note? It's a great program where you can essentially have online binders for your classes, your blog, whatever you want to have a binder for! It's amazing, but there is a bit of a learning curve and it took me awhile to get used to using it.

When you first open your One Note, you'll have a blank section that says "Start Notebook" or something like that. Obviously, I have notebooks so I can't make mine say that.

Across the left hand side, going down, are your notebooks (aka "binders"). Across the top, you have the sections of your binder and across the right hand side are the pages within each section.

For this tutorial, I have my 4th Semester Nursing "Binder" open. In that "binder" I have four sections: med surg 2, community health nursing, research, and old MS stuff. 

I have my Med Surg 2 section open and the page "Critical care nursing" open.

To start a page, you simply click where the title is and title your page. Then you can click your "tab" key on your keyboard to jump to a textbox or you can click where you want your textbox to start. You can adjust the size of your textbox.

In one note, you can only type where there's a textbox so I typically just make a large one at the beginning.

If you want to create columns, you have to have two textboxes and line them up next to each other (this is that learning curve I was talking about)

After you've got your binder all set up, you're going to want to share you binder. This is what makes One Note great. I use a tablet at school, so all I have to do is have my one note app on my tablet and as soon as I sign on the wifi at school, it syncs any changes I made on my computer. It does the same if I make changes on my tablet, but changes the files on my computer instead.

To share, click on "file" and then "share" It should ask you to sign into a windows live ID. If you don't have one, it will lead you through the steps to make one. You can click to share on "web" or "network" I share on web so I can access it anywhere.

Then you select what folder you want it in in your "sky drive" I have mine set to "documents"

Once you have your shares set up, you can simply go into "file" and then "info" and then simply click "view sync status"

You'll get a pop up and then you can click "sync all." When you sign on to your other device, either a tablet or a phone, your "binder" will be right there! Handy, right?

As I said, there is a bit of a learning curve. I was used to microsoft word and it took awhile to get used to One Note but the pay off has been awesome! It's amazing to be able to take all my binders with me.
Like any other word processor, you can change the font size, color, add tables and pics, etc. The only thing I've really noticed missing is a "columns" option and like I said above, the way to do that is to simply make two text boxes. 
To move things within the drop box, you can high light them and then just use your mouse to drag and drop! It's really handy!
I hope this has helped clear up some of the confusion about what one note is when I talk about it on twitter!
Have you ever used one note? What for?

Have you met this amazing blogger?