How to organize notes with OneNote ?

OneNote is certainly not the Office application in 2007 the best known and most used. But this software note-taking is particularly useful for collecting all kinds of elements, images, extracts from web pages in one place when carrying out research on a subject or when working on a new project. An extension of the Office Labs improves the display and arrangement of notes.


Step 1: Generating Canvas

The Office of the Lab is a research lab Microsoft is experimenting with new ideas and new concepts that office will sometimes be incorporated into future editions of Office. Regularly, the laboratory offers the following extensions in order to present the views of users on some new features under development.

The Office Lab has just released a new software extension for the collection of notes and ideas: OneNote 2007. Called "Canvas For OneNote", this extension modifies completely new access to notes by proposing a new form of navigation. The idea here is to have a broad canvas on which you have the notes and the pages and full freedom for zoom in and zoom out.

- First, you must of course have Office 2007 with OneNote.

- In a second step, you must download and install Canvas For OneNote.

Once installed the extension, instead of directly launching OneNote, run Canvas For OneNote from the Start menu. The software displays a box asking you to host the experiment. Click on Let's Do It to activate the Canvas, or No Thanks to return to normal mode.

After clicking on Let's Do It, the software asks you what notebook the Canvas must be applied. The software will then create a copy "as a canvas" of your notebook.

It is essential to understand that the original notebook will not be deleted automatically, but you must now use its "Canvas" rather than its old version, because any change made in the old version will not be postponed in the Canvas.

Therefore select the notebook you want to work in Canvas mode. It takes a few minutes to generate the first version of Canvas.

Step 2: Addressing the main Canvas

Canvas Once generated, the software offers an overview of your notebook with thumbnails of all your pages grouped under the tabs (the "Sections") that made up your notebook.

The operating principle of the Canvas is the following:

- To zoom in on a group of pages (equivalent to a tab "Section" in OneNote), simply click on a blank area of this group with the left mouse button.

- To zoom in on a page in a group (ie, on a page of a section), simply click on a blank area of this group with the left mouse button.

- To zoom out one level, simply click the right mouse button.

Note that you can Zoom in and Zoom out anytime with precision using the scroll wheel on your mouse.

The Canvas also offers other exhibits:

- Click and hold the left mouse button down on the title of each group or each page to rearrange freely in the space of the Canvas.

- In zoom mode, press the left mouse button pressed on a blank area to move the view in all directions.

- You can resize a page or group by clicking the lower right corner of components with the left mouse button. This allows for more clearly some groups than others.

Step 3: Options of groups of Canvas

To assign a color to a group or change the title of a group, do the following:

- Move the mouse to the upper right corner of the group to edit.

- A new icon (an arrow up) appears, the Options icon.

- Click it to display the Group Options box

- Here you can edit the group name and assign a background color for this group.


Step 4: Edition under Canvas

Many editing functions are of course available:

- Double-click on a page to display in "publishing" as in OneNote. Toolbar OneNote is displayed and you can access all the usual editing features of the software.

- To exit the edit mode, simply click the Return to Canvas in the upper left.

- Double-click a blank area of the Canvas to create a new blank page.


Step 5: Functions of the Chrome bar

The little bar of icons located in the lower right corner of the window called "Chrome". It provides access to different functions (listed here from left to right):

- Zoom icon

- UnZoom icon

- New Page icon, which creates a blank page in the middle of the Canvas

- New Group icon to create a new group in the middle of the Canvas

- Activity View icon for identifying at a glance pages recently modified but also by adjusting the sliders on the time scale, to identify which pages have been changed in the time between such and such date.

- About icon that displays some information on the classic program.