Remember the days when work was primarily 9-5? You’d be out the door when the big hand strikes and your brain would switch off from business. You’d head home, switch the jug on or pop the cork and that was your working day over.
Fast forward to 2018, we’re surrounded by devices and cloud apps, our world has opened up to online 24/7, working from home, working late at night or working before the hens start clucking. The generation evolving now may never know what it’s like to sit in a meeting room, as the world is spinning to digital, workforces need to keep up with the pace.
Microsoft have been investing heavily in designing new apps that support this future growth. The aim of the game is to streamline tasks and give you back as much of your precious time as possible.
OneNote has become the go-to for organising electronic notes. Generation Millennial and Generation Z were born into a digital world, they communicate via social media, apps and 75% of millennials want to work remotely whilst being connected at any time.
OneNote is an app that has evolved to make this new way of working seamless. Microsoft have created a space that allows you to have digital notes arranged into sections, pages and sub-pages that you can colour code, add text files, pdfs, voice recordings, draw mindmaps, add photos and infographics, convert handwritten notes to text and much more. OneNote is a game changer due to its ability to synchronise and file share across any number of devices.
The traditional office days will become a distant memory, where you all have your own desktop computer with your own e-mails and files, in the corner is a big grey filing cabinet, you pull the draw out and it’s labelled alphabetically with individual pieces of information about a specific project or clients.
In 2018 offices, teams need access to all their files on the go, from home or the coffee shop where they’re meeting the next client. Organisations need those same files and emails stored within the organisation and backed up. Microsoft Office 365 has created the cloud-based space to allow this and OneNote, offers you the advantage of collaboration, accessibility and search-ability – all in one app and accessible through all your devices.
Why I love OneNote 2016:
Everything Available in One Place
No more searching for emails or looking through files you have stored but can’t remember the name; nor trying to find the notes scribbled on notepads. Take your meeting notes electronically, insert a photo of accumulated networking business cards, take a pic of the whiteboard at that meeting, forward an email and attachment to your electronic notes, insert that spreadsheet… All filed in one section, with pages and sub-pages ordered so you have it all at your fingertips.
Searchable
Imagine being able to do a search on a handwritten notebook. Well you can! Ask OneNote to search for a word/phrase, in the whole notebook, a section or a page. And if you wrote any notes on your tablet – just get OneNote to convert them into text for you!
You can also tag items in your notes and ask OneNote to find and summarise them on a new page for you.
Integrates with my Tasks
So I’m at my meeting and I’ve got a few things to do from the meeting. I’ve been writing them all up in OneNote and I’ve tagged them as a ‘to do’ so I can find them again. But get this, I can flag them so they appear on my task list in Outlook… And when I mark them complete in Outlook, the complete status is updated in OneNote!
Collaborate with my team
Set up a notebook for the team project and share it. You can all access and contribute to task lists, spreadsheets, links to other files, meeting notes and all the things relevant to your project.
No More Typing up Notes After a Meeting
Write notes with your stylus on a tablet and convert handwriting to text, quickly add a couple of notes from your phone or just photograph the paper notebook and file with a title that you can easily find again later. With just a click, email your notes to others.
My Notes are Always on Hand
Because I’m storing my notebooks in OneDrive (yes I have several notebooks) they’re available on any device. All changes from any device will sync back to my notebook in OneDrive making it easy to capture whatever I want. Photograph an article in a magazine while you are on a flight, store it in OneNote and find it again later from your tablet. Or hop on a friend’s computer, login and open notes.
Password Protected
You can password protect a section of a notebook to store any sensitive info. Even on a shared notebook you need the password to access the section that is protected!
Excellent Research Tool
Have you ever been online researching something, copied some text from somewhere then run around trying to find the website you found it on? OneNote can create linked notes which means you can copy and paste information and OneNote will add a link to the website. Organise your research into sections, pages and subpages. Add your own notes or tags and then search or summarise your tags later.
Now allow your mind to expand on how many ways you can use this app, not only as a work base platform but personal too. You can create files for your exercise plans or recipes; sub-categorise them into different cuisines with images, links, how to, costings and share with your household or gym partners. I’ve even seen it used for a shared grocery list!
Want to see OneNote in action? Give us a call on 0800 491 017 or email us at admin@simplytraining.co.nz and organise a presentation for your team and start getting the best from your Office 365 subscription.
