How many Note Books can the program handle?

[Tax Lady]

I handle aprx 1500 clients. I would like a NoteBook for each client. Has
anyone handled that many notebooks? Are they easy to find? Does the program
slow down any?

 

[John Waller]

I handle aprx 1500 clients. I would like a NoteBook for each client.

Out of interest, what would you use the Sections and Pages and Sub-pages for
in each Notebook?

 

[Patrick Schmid [MVP]]

To add to that: 1500 notebooks are a mess to navigate inbetween. I would
say it won't be manageable for you.

Patrick Schmid [OneNote MVP]
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[Ilya Koulchin]

I handle aprx 1500 clients. I would like a NoteBook for each client. Has
anyone handled that many notebooks? Are they easy to find? Does the program
slow down any?

That many notebooks will certainly be completely and hopelessly
unmanageable from the organizational perspective. 1500 sections however,
probably would be manageable, provided they were split into several
well-organized notebooks and section groups.

You could perhaps make it work by closing each notebook when you're done
with the client and opening it later (assuming you don't work with more
than a few clients at any one time), but then you lose the integrated
search, navigation, etc., and you'll have to completely sync the
notebooks each time you re-open them.

In case you're wondering, I currently have about a dozen notebooks open,
ranging from 3 to several dozen sections each, with a total of about 200
sections (and probably several thousand pages). However, most of these I
don't actively use on a daily basis, and tend to have just for
reference, or because I'm interested in just a part of the notebook.

Ilya

 

[Toddard]

Organized properly, 1500 client entries shouldn't be a problem for OneNote to
handle.

I agree with the other responses, however. It all comes down to the best way
to organize the notebooks, section groups, and sections.

1500 notebooks would be difficult to work with. 1500 sections shouldn't be a
problem if they are organized into meaningful (for you) section groups or
notebooks.

For example, you could have a notebook for each letter of the alphabet, and
create a section for each client in the appropriate notebook. The 'S'
notebook would have a section for every client who's last name begins with
'S'. This is only one example. You could organize by region, type of client,
or anything that has meaning to you.

I personally find that a group of about 20-30 items is about as large as I
can easily manage. The rule of thumb that I use is that when I get more than
30 or so items in a particular group (be it a favorites folder or a OneNote
Notebook), I force myself to either archive old items or reorganize to create
sub-groups, be they folders in the case of internet explorer or section
groups in the case of OneNote.

Fortunately, OneNote allows you to modify your organizational structure at
any time. That way, if you start with one way to store your entries and
decide that it is not working out, you can always change it.

 

[xTenn]

I handle aprx 1500 clients. I would like a NoteBook for each client. Has
anyone handled that many notebooks? Are they easy to find? Does the program
slow down any?

As long as the notebooks in bulk are closed after use there will be no
program degradation. As others have said you will not have the
capability to search across closed notebooks, and there will be a small
performance hit as it syncs when you open a given notebook. However, I
think these might be minimal.

If you really want to use separate notebooks for each client (which may
make sense, if you use a section for each year, etc.), you may find it
best to use the file system itself to organize the notebooks. Maybe a
directory for each letter of the alphabet corresponding to the last
name, etc.

One thing that is worth mentioning is that a section can contain other
sections. This may help organization at some point if you decide to
combine notebooks for convenience (i.e. like the directory structure you
would have, just a notebook for each one, a, b, etc.)

If you are truly paranoid separate notebooks do offer file level
integrity for each client, but OneNote's caching and backup is one of
the strongest in the office family. Still, seeing it in individual
files gives some people a warm fuzzy.

Well, seems like you have plenty of options, the hard job is to
determine what works best for your uses.