Over the years, I have owned many versions of Microsoft Office and related applications. However, it wasn’t until recently that I discovered an application that shipped with the latest versions of Microsoft Office. This application is fast becoming my most essential application for both business and personal use. I am talking about Microsoft OneNote. This application is the best way that I have found of organizing and storing my personal and business documents before publishing them. As a matter of fact, I am typing this post in OneNote before transferring it to my blog. In this way, I keep an organized history of all of my posts for all of my blogs in one location.
In my job as a Technology Business Analyst, I receive literally hundreds of emails, Word documents, Excel sheets, screenshots and various other media daily. I needed a way to organize all of these media formats into a single thought pertinent to a project so that I could determine the best course of action to take for the business. OneNote gave me this and more. It allows me to transfer email and all of the other document formats into a single page under an organized structure, then I can move things around until they make sense. Once I have completed this organizational step, I can transfer my OneNote page to any of a number of other programs, such as Microsoft Word, for final editing and publishing, or I can simply cut and paste my work from OneNote into another application, such as WordPress.
Another great feature of OneNote is that it saves your document literally as you type, unlike Word or Excel that only make periodic saves which leaves you open to losing work. I have always hated formulating a great sentence to express my thought just to have it disappear due to a computer glitch at the wrong moment.
I also do most of my work on my laptop which doubles as a tablet. OneNote allows me to take full advantage of my tablet’s handwriting capabilities. I can either write and let OneNote convert my handwriting into text or for quick notes, I can leave my notes in handwriting format, like a picture, on the OneNote page.
There is one drawback to writing the articles that I publish on my blog in OneNote first. Pictures do not transfer from OneNote on my local laptop directly to WordPress when I cut and paste the document. I still have to upload the pictures and place them in the proper location in the document, But this is a minor inconvenience as I would have to do this anyway even if I was only using WordPress’ editor. By storing all of my posts in OneNote first, I can be sure that if my blog ever crashed and I had to restore it, I would not lose any of my posts since the last time I backed up my MySQL database. I could simply restore MySQL from the last backup, then reload all of my latest posts that were missing using the posts that I stored in OneNote. OneNote also helps to prevent me from repeating posts. I can look back at all of my previous posts quickly to see what I have talked about, which helps me to focus on writing new articles rather than spending a lot of time researching what I have already done.
