Will Kelly

One of the most exciting developments of the Office 2010 launch in my opinion is OneNote 2010 joining the regular Office suite line up. Users now don’t have to purchase it separately because it is already part of Office putting this powerful note taking and organizational tool onto enterprise desktops.

While I am a confirmed Evernote user, I was a longtime OneNote user prior to making that move and still keep some work in OneNote. It’s an under appreciated application that is perhaps one of Microsoft’s best efforts to date and I hope its inclusion in Office 2010 is going to help its standing.

Here are five ways I use OneNote:

Create client or project notebooks. I’ve always been better organized electronically than I ever have been with dead tree documents so I like to setup a project or client notebook for each major project I am working on at the time. The addition of the OneNote 2010 Web App means I can now sync those folders to the web and access them from my iPhone with OneNote for iPhone. Putting OneNote on the web has yet to tilt me away from Evernote but we shall see.

Capture email. Keeping my email organized when life is busy is never a fun task so I got into the habit of capturing important project emails into OneNote from Outlook. It’s as easy as clicking a button.

Capture article and post ideas. When I was pursuing a lot more freelance writing projects, I would capture any article ideas into OneNote (or into Evernote or whatever Mind Mapping app I was using at the time). I also kept a file of article ideas based on press releases sent to me by PR folks. Stashing that information is OneNote makes it easily searchable and accessible.

Capture membership information. In previous chapters of my life, I did travel, and OneNote serves as the repository for all of my frequent flyer and hotel bonus cards.

Capture notes about documents. Now that I am using Office 2010 at home, I like being able to click the Linked Notes button on the  Review Ribbon to open OneNote ready for note taking on the right side of Word 2010. I expect to be using this productivity feature a lot more as I get back to more freelancing and Office 2010 starts to become more common out in the workplace.

OneNote has a lot of merits and the OneNote 2010 Web App means its parity with Evernote is growing. At some point, I may have to retire either OneNote or Evernote and merge the data. However, I like both applications enough that I don’t see that happening in the near future.

How do you use OneNote 2010?