Instead of scratching ideas for activities on pieces of paper, printing screenshots from websites, or emailing bits of information, guest bloggers Janice Croze and Susan Carraretto organize all their summer planning research into a OneNote notebook.  Janice and Susan are identical twins, work-at-home-moms, and founders of the top Mom Blog, 5 Minutes for Mom.)

One developer has a sofa in her office for quick snoozes; a tester has a pyramid made of Red Bull cans. We're working overtime and need a break. It's up to me and my co-workers on the morale committee to figure out how to relieve some stress.  Since I am a self-professed Office geek, I know that OneNote on SharePoint will make a great collaboration tool. Each time one of us adds or changes the content in a OneNote notebook, OneNote will automatically save and sync the notebook on SharePoint. And, we can set up SharePoint to alert us when changes occur.

Rome, the Eternal City! I studied Latin for five grueling years, but somehow never managed to visit the Etruscan peninsula. A couple decades later, I'm going!  But first I need a way to plan the trip with a bunch of friends. We could use email, but that doesn't let us collect and refine our ideas in one place. That's where OneNote on SkyDrive is super-handy.

One of the oldest recipes ever to be discovered is a 4000-year-old beer formula recorded on a clay tablet. Those brew masters would envy the ways we catalog recipes today: a scrawled family recipe on an index card, bookmarked recipes from Allrecipe.com, or the batter-splattered page of your mom's cookbook.

But how the heck do you organize them so you can find one when it's time to cook?

It's really easy. You put all of them (except for the 4000-year-old clay tablet) in OneNote. It lets you drop in screen clippings, scanned images of handwritten recipes, and even recorded reminders to go slow on the hot pepper sauce.

Our introductory webinar on OneNote was popular, but lots of you wanted to know more than the basics. In this week's webinar, you'll learn five cool things most users don't know about. We will also go over a few basics for the beginners. We start at 9:15 am Pacific Time with a Q&A to follow. Click the link below or go to http://aka.ms/offweb for more information on how to join the series.

What you will learn at Tuesday's webinar:

Did you know OneNote and Outlook are well connected? You can send emails via Outlook right from OneNote. And you can track your To-Do list in both of them at the same time. This post shows you how.

Now that you know how to set up a notebook, add stuff to it, and find everything fast, what other useful things can you learn to do in OneNote? How about the fact that you can record and add audio? And video? In this post you'll learn how to do both.

Sometimes you put so much stuff into an OneNote notebook you can't find something--even though you've organized the notebook into well-labeled sections and pages. If you're a big traveler, for example, you might have packed it with menus from exquisite restaurants in Paris or notes about the Egyptian Pyramids you visited last year.

One really fast way to find pretty much anything, anywhere in OneNote is to search for it. Just type a phrase in the Search box.

How often can you get to Key West when you’re from its opposite corner—the Pacific Northwest? I went to Key West to dry out, see wildly different flora and fauna, and sample southern and Cuban cuisine. 

I wanted to remember every last second so I created a running travelogue in a OneNote notebook with photos, favorite restaurant info, and my notes. I’ll walk you through my notebook to show you how to add that type of content to your own.

Want to get started using OneNote? This post is the first in a series covering OneNote basics. 

Some of you might want to know what OneNote is. It's the ultimate digital notebook. Think of it as a giant container where you can collect and organize all sorts of information. You can use it as a scrapbook, photo album, research notebook, and more. Today we show you how to set one up.