Let's talk (or clip) turkey!

Last week, you saw how easy it is to set up a OneNote notebook on SkyDrive for you to share with others. This week, let's learn more about putting that holiday notebook to good use.

As you may recall, I'm a big fan of prepping way ahead for the holidays so I can limit any additional chaos in my already chaotic life. In keeping with the holiday theme, I'd like to talk a bit about how you can use OneNote 2010 to capture your favorite Turkey Day recipes, build shopping lists, and then share these with your friends and family.

Save for those vegetarians out there (you know I love you!), turkey is a no-brainer for Thanksgiving, so let's find a recipe that we can clip. Personally, I like Cooking Light, but you can use your own favorite food site. When you find a great recipe, you can grab it using the handy Screen Clipping tool in OneNote, which lets you capture anything on your screen and then add it to your Holiday Planning 2010 notebook.

Insert a screen clipping into your notes

1. On your favorite recipe Web site, open the page you want and then scroll to the area of the page that has the information you want to capture (for example, the Ingredients list).
    
2. Switch to OneNote 2010, open the page where you want to add the screen clipping, and then click where you want the information to appear.
    
3. On the ribbon, click the Insert tab, and then click Screen Clipping.
    
   
    
4. When OneNote hides itself and the screen dims, move the mouse pointer where you want to start the screen clipping and then click and then, while holding the left mouse button, drag a selection over the part of the Web page you want to capture (in this example, the Ingredients list).
    
5. When you release the mouse button, the clipping will appear on the notes page — complete with a date/time stamp and a link back to the original site. 

 
Here's a 60-second video that shows you what this looks like, from start to finish: 

 
Personally, I prefer to clip several things separately — 1) a clipping of the photo showing the final dish; 2) a clipping of the Ingredients list; and 3) a clipping of the Preparations section. By clipping multiple smaller screen regions separately instead of one large screen clipping, I can do more with my recipe pages in my notebook, such as moving clippings around on the page and positioning them where I want them.

While you can simply copy text from Web pages and paste it into your notes, I often prefer the screen clipping method for text that I don't need to edit further. This is because a screen clipping always preserves the original formatting and keeps the clip as one object that I can easily move around. Having text in images isn't a problem when searching your notes either. That's because OneNote's excellent Search function can find text even in images, including screen clippings.
 

Extract text from a screen clipping image

In most cases, screen clippings of text can be left "as is." If I do decide that I want to edit the text from a screen clipping, OneNote lets me extract the text with a simple command. Staying with the Ingredients list example, let's copy the text from the screen clipping so we can add it to my shopping list.

1. On your notes page, right-click the Ingredients screen clipping (or any other screen clipping image of text), and then click Copy Text from Picture.
    
    
    
2. Next, click anywhere you want to paste the text, and then press CTRL+V (or click the Paste button on the Home tab).
    

Look over the pasted text and make any small corrections, if necessary. Text recognition from screen clippings and other images depends on the quality of the image. Smaller font sizes and script-like fonts may not yield the best results. In most cases though, this saves a lot of time and avoids you having to manually type out a lot of text. Again, if you need to copy a lot of text for editing, a simple Copy and Paste job is probably best. But when you want to capture text and pictures together and retain their appearance and formatting, you can take a screen clipping and still use its text when needed.

Now you have your recipe picked out and you know what ingredients you’re going to need to get to pull off your turkey masterpiece. Your next step is to create a shopping list.
 

Use note tags to create a shopping list

In OneNote, note tags let you flag important notes for follow-up. You can use them as search criteria when searching your notebooks or use them to keep track of action items. In this example, we'll use the To Do note tag for our shopping list.

1. In the text that you copied from the Ingredients screen clipping, put each ingredient on its own line by clicking at the end of the line and then pressing ENTER after each item.
    
2. When the text resembles a line-by-line shopping list, select the entire list, click the Home tab, and then, in the Tags group, click To Do. (You can also simply press CTRL+1 on your keyboard to apply the To Do tag.)
    
3. Voilà! You now have a shopping list with a checkbox in front of every item. You can click the checkboxes of items you've bought to check them off your list.
    
   

OneNote 2010 comes with several pre-defined note tags that you can use to categorize and mark your notes. In the Tags group on the ribbon, click the small downward-facing arrow in the Tags list to show a full menu, which also reveals the Customize Tags command. There, you can define your own icons and tag text to suit your needs. If you do a lot of entertaining and event planning, for example, you could create tags for your appetizers, side dishes, desserts, and anything else that you’ll be preparing for the holidays.
 

 
Don't forget the benefits of working in your shared "Holiday Planning 2010" notebook on SkyDrive, which you learned about in my previous blog post. There's no need for you to do all the work. If you're sharing your holiday notebook with your friends and family, keeping track of your shopping and planning can be a lot easier because you can see others checking items off of your lists in real-time. OneNote continuously syncs shared notebooks, so everybody is always on the same page. You just can't do that with paper and sticky notes.

Let me know if you found this useful. Next week I’ll spend some time talking about dealing with those wish list oddities with OneNote's new Linked Notes feature.

-- Ayça Yüksel