Keep everything in one place with Microsoft OneNote

We will be talking about software for making your experience in the lab more productive - or, failure of that, just a tad more interesting. You can, of course email me or send comments on your favorite toys that make your work easier. If you don't, I will just write what I want anyway, which was the original plan.

I decided to start off by talking about my favorite application of all time - Microsoft OneNote. OneNote is your one stop for all your notes, lists, ideas etc. For me, it is the one application (outside of system and security software) that is always running on my pc (which is conveniently tablet, so I can handwrite). OneNote allows you to open several notebooks, create different sections within a notebook and pages within a section (see below). This makes navigation very easy.

OneNote’s functionality is even great for surfing. While surfing the web, you can paste information of interest into your OneNote (rather than saving web pages, which is really old school). If you are trying the Office 2010 beta (you can find it here), you will notice that OneNote 2010 has a docking feature which allows you to dock it to the desktop, so that you can drag and drop stuff from other applications (mostly you will like to do this while surfing). If you get into the habit of throwing things into your OneNote portal (and then going through them end of week when you, hopefully, review your week), very few things will slip through your fingers. One of the things you will like about OneNote is that once you type (or paste) something in, it is there - no need to save.

If you haven't tried it yet, give OneNote a try. OneNote is part of the Microsoft office suite and is not free. The 2010 beta is free until October 2010.