So, I’m experimenting with OneNote for my research. I did some background work, reading lots of tips at Chris_Pratley’s OneNote WebLog and watching Channel 9 video next to browsing through the menus and options… Some things work, but there are others that I can’t figure out so far.
Audio
I tried recording interviews and it worked well (even without any external microphone), but there are a few problems.
- During one interview the recording stopped after a few minutes. I didn’t notice what happened – may be I switched to somewhere or had a pause long enough for the laptop to start going in a sleeping mode. The problem is that I didn’t notice in time that it wasn’t recording and switched it on only 15 min later :( Wondering how to avoid it in the future.
- Somehow with that recording the cool feature of jumping to the text to get the audio playing from that moment didn’t work. Again, I could do something wrong, but I have no idea what it was.
Inc input
So far OneNote tries to recognise all my inc input as I write and I hate it. I’m still not happy with “one the fly” hand-writing recognition Tablet does and I prefer not to use it. I’m perfectly fine with storing my notes as handwriting and converting them into the text if/when I need it. I looked at all options I could imagine, but didn’t find how to keep OneNote away from recognising my handwriting.
Knowing about this problem I ended up typing my notes instead of handwriting them. This takes more energy than handwriting, so I can’t listen as attentively as I want to. On the top of that the main reason I bought this Tablet is avoiding the visual barrier and intrusiveness of typing that an open laptop creates.
Clippings
Since I started this study I’m reading increasing number of weblogs by Microsoft people. One of the things I started to do is collecting relevant quotes from weblogs to use as a background info for interviews with bloggers. I use clipping feature of OneNote that allow selecting part of any screen and adding it to OneNote page with link to the original document (loved this – I don’t have to copy link/post title with the quote).
There are a couple of things I can’t figure how to do:
- OneNote automatically adds clippings to SideNotes page and then I have to move them manually where I want them to be. Would be much easier if clippings would be added to the current page/place I’m editing.
- References to the original from where clippings come are added under those clippings and I want them above. Didn’t manage to find a way to edit it as a setting…
The bottom line
In spite of all those things so far I’m pretty happy with using OneNote. Just have to figure out how things work and what is a good way to organise all my notes in pages and folders…
Tags: methodology, Microsoft, OneNoteArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/07/28.html#a1624; comments are here.
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