How OneNote made me famous

I became famous this year. Not I-cheated-on-Sandra-Bullock or made-a-wacky-viral-video famous. Just a little famous. I started making the Office Casual videos for Office.com, and they caught on. But every month I had to track the exposure the videos were getting to justify doing more videos. That’s a pain, because my memory is a blank by the end of the month when it's time to file my monthly report. 

Here’s where OneNote comes in. Besides gathering what numbers I can, I need to show where and when one of my videos pops up somewhere. Screen capture in OneNote allows me to cut and paste anything—web pages, quotes, email. So I simply cut and paste them into OneNote using the Window logo key+S.

For example, when I see something I want my manager to know about, I capture it with that one keyboard command.

Now look at the information below the image to the right. OneNote stamps the URL and the date/time I grabbed the snapshot—sweet. That’s also an instance reference. That means that at the end of the month I can simply look for all the images I grabbed that month (via the search in OneNote) and add them to my report about, well, me. And that makes me a hero with my manager, who then lets me make more videos.

Cut and paste and organize later—or don’t organize at all. With OneNote search, you can instantly find all instances in your notes of whatever you're searching for.

OneNote 2010 is included in every suite of Office 2010. That’s new. That means you should learn how to use it. Or you can just follow Michael Oldenburg's new OneNote blog and watch a video.

--Doug Thomas