Note taking project will One Note do it?

[Ted7]

Hi,

I'm looking to write a book and will be doing a lot of research.
I used to use 3.5 cards. I will probably have 10,000 notes that
will need to be shuffled into right categories with keyword headings.
Is One Note up to such a project? If so, any suggestions how to
set it up?

Thanks,

 

[Josh Einstein]

Absolutely. OneNote is very open-ended about how you organize, but the basic
idea is that there are three levels of hierarchy (and optionally a fourth).

Notebooks (Think of this as a traditional wire-bound 5 subject paper
notebook)
They have a name and they contain a bunch of sections. There's not much else
to a notebook, but they are the top-level container of any notebook
sections. You can have as many notebooks as you want and you can open or
close them as needed. On disk, a notebook is simply a file folder.

Sections
These are colored "subjects" (if you're still thinking about the paper
notebook metaphor) that are basically colored tabs with a name that contain
pages. So if this was a paper notebook with those yellow divider tabs, the
section would be one of those tabs. It keeps the pages separated. On disk a
section file is represented as a file with a .one extension and the folder
it exists in is the notebook. Optionally, sections can be grouped into a
section group if you have alot of them. These are just additional folder
levels under Notebook.

Pages
Pages are where you write everything. Pages exist within a section and you
can use subpages kinda like a marker tab.

So how you choose to organize your notes is up to you but it should fall
within the above breakdown. For example, I have the following notebooks:

Business
- "Business Info" such as web host info and dns entries
- "Financial" information such as copies of tax returns
- "Software" serial numbers and download url's for software I own
- "Hardware" specifications on computers that I buy
- etc

Customers and Partners
- This notebook contains a section for each customer or partner I work with

Development
- "Articles" printouts of development-related articles or blogs I find
- "Documentation" usually short documentation or excerpts that are easily
printed
- "Code Snippets" short pieces of code either by me or others that I want to
keep
- "Tablet PC" development stuff related to tablets
- etc

Products
- "DotOffice"
- "TEO"
- section for each product or service that I'm working on

Personal
- "Personal Info" bank account info, social security numbers, etc
- "Baby Stuff" articles like what to do if your kid swallows a battery
- "Health" information about prescription drugs and doctor visit notes
- "Vacation" printouts and info about vacations I've taken or will take
etc

So as you can see it's really up to you how you go about categorizing your
info but it helps to think about how you would do it if each notebook were
really a paper notebook.

 

[Carmen Gauvin-O'Donnell]

Hey Ted... let me give you a personal example for Josh's explanation:

I study the Bible every day, and I'm in a Master's program. So I've divided
ON into two separate notebooks, Bible Study and MBS.

The Bible Study one has tabs for each book of the Bible. Those tabs are each
broken down into two sets of pages: My Mon-Sat study and a separate Sunday
study which is usually more involved and which I discuss with my Bible study
group, so I want to keep it separate to kae it easy to find.

The Master's notebook has Tabs for each module I'm studying. Each module is
then broken down into four "page" sets: Textbook, Summary Notes, Commentary
Notes and Typed Summary.

Pretty simple. Hope this helps! I personally can't recommend ON enough... I
just love it!

C.