Effective Document Management with Microsoft OneNote

Microsoft Office 2007 contains the extremely useful OneNote, a document image making program similar to Adobe Acrobat. Documents, images, and web pages can all be printed to OneNote (which appears as an option in your printers list) and then stored away. These documents can be retreived for printing later if required or named and indexed using OneNote's useful tabs.

The OneNote application comes with all versions of Microsoft Office and comes with various useful features such as the ability to copy text using OCR, indexing of notes, voice and video clips added to a OneNote document, and support for tables and arithmetic expressions.

One particularly good use for Microsoft OneNote is as a printer substitute. Many people are currently spending considerable amounts of time conducting business and domestic transactions online, and it's always a very good idea to keep records of any changes to your online banking or shopping accounts.

While printing these changes to paper is useful and offers a tangible end product, it isn't always possible. For example, your printer might be out of action, low on ink toner or empty, or even short of paper. Therefore, printing to OneNote offers a great alternative, resulting in a document that is searchable, portable, with easily copied content, and compiled with other similar documents into a tabbed notebook.

Once installed, printing to OneNote couldn't be easier.

 For instance, if you're completing an online banking transaction and want to make a copy of the receipt that is currently being displayed, in your browser go to File > Print... and in the Printer Name drop down menu select Send to OneNote 2007.

OneNote will then generate an image of the page you're viewing and present a new version of the document to you in a OneNote window, complete with a field to name the document and various options to add notes and highlights to the document.

You can also save a Microsoft OneNote document in .doc format for opening in Word while the application is also compatible with Windows Desktop Search 3.0. Once this is installed, your desktop searches will take in the content of OneNote image documents and display these among your search results.

If you opt to print your OneNote document at some point, simply go to File > Print... and select your printer to output the document to paper.

Saving OneNote image documents involves a slightly unusual process: OneNote adds all "printed" documents to a virtual notebook, which means whenever you print to OneNote these documents will be added to your last used notebook. You don't have to save this as OneNote retains the contents; additional notebooks can be saved, however, allowing you to use different notebooks for different types of documents. Notebooks can also be split into sections and organised by tabs should you wish to keep all documents in easily accessible and well-organized files.