I ditched pen and paper over five years ago in favour of digital notes. In this video I tell you why and demo some features through Office 365.
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Transcript:
“Morning everybody and Happy Monday. In this week’s short video, I’m going to show you how and why I use Microsoft OneNote to take digital notes and why I’ve ditched paper forever.
Taking digital notes for just about as long as I can remember but it’s probably only the last 18 months where I’ve got my tablet out and started to write on the screen and people often thought I was a complete nerd. And that’s because people are becoming switched on to be more efficient and getting digital with things and getting rid of paper. I started it because I used to use those A5 notebooks that you see people use all the time, but the problem is I would leave them in the office and go home and not have access to the notes or I’d lose them and that kind of thing. And when I was writing down bits of information like phone numbers and stuff like that, I’d write it on scraps of paper and I’d lose the piece of paper and lose the phone number. So I just got sick of not having access to the information that I needed when I really needed to get at it. And so I went digital quite some time ago.
My choice of digital linking app is Microsoft OneNote. It’s heavily integrated into the Office 365 suite. So it’s completely free of charge and it’s dead easy to use. So there’s some really nice little features. This is the Microsoft OneNote app on my Surface Book, tablet screen but you can use it on a mobile phone or on a tablet. My choice of hardware if you don’t want to spend a lot of money on a Surface Book is to use a Microsoft Surface go. They’re about the same price of an iPad, but you get full Windows operating system, and it’s really portable. It’s the perfect form factor about 10 inches in diameter in a diagonal side to side screen. It’s just a really good device for making notes on. There are some really useful features in Microsoft OneNote. So one of the big problems obviously, with handwriting is, you know, I’ve not really wrote since I left school and got into IT about 20 years ago. So over the years, my handwriting is deteriorated. But OneNote if I write on this screen, Microsoft OneNote, you can lasso the text that you’ve wrote into text, it’ll instantly convert all of your terrible handwriting, and mine’s pretty poor. It does a really good job of translating mine into text that you can copy and paste out of OneNote if it was necessary.
If you’re going into a meeting, you can bring the meeting details in. So I can click the button here and it’ll go off and look at my Outlook calendar and grab the meeting details that I’ve got today and I can bring the meeting details in. And that also means that those meetings, the notes that you make are available in the calendar entry in Outlook so you can easily get back to your notes. If you like, and your audience is comfortable with it, you can hit the audio button, and instead of making notes in the meeting, you can just leave your device quietly in the corner. And, obviously, it can be a mobile phone or your iPad if you like, go off and leave it in the corner and let it record the whole meeting. And you can just go and re-listen to the whole thing to find your action. So that’s quite cool, but obviously, not everyone’s comfortable with you recording their meetings. You can do nice little things like bringing in pictures. So I can bring in pictures from the web, for example. It brings a search dialog box and I can search for “Everything Tech” and it will bring back images that I can stick in and bring into my OneNote as well.
So there are some of the good stuff as well in my notes. This is a test notebook. But my notes are organized down the left-hand side. So this one is got brainstorming, expenses, to-do lists, meeting notes. I tend to have one for meetings. So each meeting will have a new page, and I have one for drafts. So just for jotting things down when I need to write down a phone number or something like that. And obviously, it still works, if you want to attach your keyboard. If you prefer to use a keyboard, you can do that. And like I said the other thing is, my notes are always available on my computer, on my tablet, and on my mobile phone. I can always get to them. I can go to a browser on any computer in the world and get access to my notes and they’re always there. So just a little tip maybe make you a bit more efficient. Stop with scraps of paper, stop with the notebooks that get lost, and start making digital notes. If you want to know more about Office 365 and how we can help get more efficient and get you into the Microsoft modern workplace then give us a shout 0161-452-3233.
Thanks a lot.”
