IT Tips - July 2015

IT Tips – July 2015

This month’s for ‘Merica.  

 
What’s Inside:

Tech Section

·         What the heck is OneNote?

o   The Basics: Creating notebooks, sections and pages

o   Adding content to notebooks

o   Collaborate in OneNote

o   Something especially for the BCs (drawing!!)

 

What the heck is OneNote?

I thought you’d never ask.

Just kidding! I know you’re asking. Now that we’re all upgraded to Office 2013, it is only a matter of time before you start to notice that new purple “N” icon on your PC. I’m trying to shoot first like Han Solo.

Han shot first!

This is that purple N OneNote icon. He’s very friendly and enjoys long walks on the beach.

I came to our own Keri Ann with a vision of a living
OneNote icon. She did not disappoint with this stellar rendition.

OneNote is what you get when a mad scientist crams all of the great things of Microsoft Office into a single program. It’s a program with a familiar Microsoft interface that you use to organize your thoughts and ideas.

What can OneNote do? You’re about to find out. This tip is an all-inclusive guide intended to make you a lean, mean OneNote-using machine. 

OneNote: The Basics

OneNote is more than just a text editor like Word. It’s more like a filing cabinet that can contain as many notebooks as your heart desires. Forget about taking notes in Word, Notepad or on millions of little sticky notes; OneNote is your one-stop note-taking shop.

The layout is pretty simple: your notebooks are on the top-left, the sections of the selected notebook are on the top (tabs), and the pages of each section are on the right.

Think of OneNote’s layout like a stack of physical notebooks. You can create entire notebooks which have sections, and within those sections are pages. It’s pretty simple once you navigate around a bit.                                                                                                                        

OK, I see you have an established notebook. How did you do it, though?

Normally, I use the force, but I’ll show you the non-Jedi method since your midi-chlorian count is inferior to mine (oh, snap! Star Wars burn!).

Creating a notebook is easy!

1.       Click File.

2.       Click “New”.

3.       Click on “Computer”.

4.       Name your notebook.

5.       Click on “Create Notebook”.

Like this:

OK, now that we have our super important Star Wars notebook created, let’s cover sections and pages.

Sections are just that: the sections of your notebook. Creating a new section is as simple as clicking the little + on the top of your workspace. Like this:

You can name your sections by right-clicking the section and choosing “rename”. Watch me!

Finally, let’s talk about pages (no, not the Apple knock-off of PowerPoint).

Pages are the actual pages contained within your notebook sections. As mentioned previously, the selected section’s pages are listed on the right side of your OneNote window.

Pages get their name from the title provided in the title field. 

Creating pages is as simple as clicking the “Add page” button. Watch me create some!

Whoops, got a little out of control there; too much Nespresso

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don’t like the name of my notebook, can it be changed?!

NO!

On second thought, yes. Changing the notebook name takes just three simple steps:

1.       Right-click the notebook on the top-left and click “Properties”.

2.       Change the “Display name” to your desired name.

3.       Click OK.

Watch me!

 

OK, Keith. I understand how to make a notebook. How do I actually add content?

That information will cost you. The going rate is $50 per word… Sorry.

Adding content in OneNote is going to blow your mind.

There are two things to remember when adding content into a OneNote notebook:

1.     You can click & type, drag & drop and jam information into OneNote with incredible flexibility.

2.     You don’t have to save! That’s right, OneNote automagically (see what I did there) saves your content as you enter it.

When you add content, it will be contained in a little box. This box is known as a “content container”. You can click and drag these containers to rearrange them or click them and press the Delete key on your keyboard to remove them.

Watch this demo of me adding content via several different methods.

Now I want to show you how those content containers work. Here I rearrange and delete content:

You can format the text in your notebooks like you can in Microsoft Word. You can even add spreadsheet cells, Outlook tasks and to-do checklist checkboxes! Explore all of the features for yourself by playing with the “Home” and “Insert” tabs.

 

Does OneNote have collaboration features?

Indeed it does, fake person. Indeed it does.

This is where OneNote really starts to show its power. You can save a notebook on your departmental shared drive and anyone with access to that shared drive can contribute to the notebook! Best of all, OneNote has change tracking features! The change tracking allows you to search through the changes others have made.

Important note: If you do not work in the home office, you will need to be connected to the VPN to access OneNote notebooks stored on a shared drive. 

How can I create a notebook for collaboration?

Great question. The steps are nearly identical to the steps outlined above for creating a new notebook. The only difference is that you’ll have to choose your network drive location. Like this:

1.       Click File.

2.       Click “New”.

3.       Click on “Computer”.

4.       Name your notebook.

5.       Click on “Create in a different folder”.

6.       Browse to your desired shared folder location and click “Create”.

Watch me!

This is now a “live” notebook. Everyone who has access to the folder will be able to add or change the notebooks contents. There may be a slight delay but multiple people can work in the notebook simultaneously! 

How can I see the changes that others have made?

You can see what other people have done in multiple ways. First, the initials of whoever made the edit, will be displayed next to the content container. You will also notice that notebooks, sections and pages containing unseen edits will show up bolded.

 

However, the most efficient way to view edits is to use the “History” tab in the OneNote ribbon. The History tab provides several useful ways to view notebook changes.

The “Next Unread” button will cycle through unread notebook changes. Like this:

You can also find changes by date. To do so, simply click on the “Recent Edits” button and choose your desired date range. Here I choose to view today’s edits:

Finally, you can find edits by author. This is very useful when you start to get several people working on a notebook. Watch me use the “find by Author” buttons:

 

What if someone accidentally deletes an important section or page?

Off with their heads!

…Or just use the “Page Versions” and “Notebook Recycling Bin”.

OneNote checkpoints changes and allows you to view those checkpointed previous versions with the “Page Versions” button. Simply click the “Page Versions” button (again, under the History tab) and you will see a list of the page checkpoints on the right. Keep in mind that the versions displayed on the right are for the page you’re currently viewing.

Watch it in action!

Obviously, if a page has been completely deleted, you won’t be able to click on it and view its previous versions. If you’re missing a section or page, take a look at the “Notebook Recycling Bin”.

As you can see, some buffoon deleted a section clearly named “NEVER DELETE” (spoiler alert: I’m the buffoon).

Thankfully, as you can see above, it’s very easy to recover the notebook. This is what I did:

1.       Go to the “Notebook Recycling Bin”.

2.       Find the page or section that you want to recover and right-click it.

3.       Click on “Move or Copy”.

4.       Choose the notebook you wish to move the section into and click OK.

 

What if there is a section that some people shouldn’t be able to see?

Again, notebooks on shared folders will accessible to anyone with access to that shared folder. With that in mind, you may want to password-protect some sections of your shared notebook.

How to password-protect a section:

1.       Right-click the section and choose “Password Protect This Section”.

2.       Click the “Set Password” button.

3.       Enter the password and click OK.

How to access a password-protected section:

1.       Navigate to the locked section.

2.       Press the “Enter” key on your keyboard.

3.       Enter the password and click OK.

Look how easy it is:

Two things to note:

1.     If you forget your password, that section will be lost forever.

2.     This isn’t a place to store passwords, credit cards, social security numbers or any other obviously sensitive data. It is used to keep your peers out of the section, but a hacker could break that password in no-time.

 

A special feature for BCs who’ve made it this far!

OneNote has one special feature that will be very interesting for you BCs out there… You can draw in it!!

Your Yoga has a stylus pen stored in the front right side. If you’re thinking, “Huh, what stylus pen?” this is how to remove it from your Yoga.

With stylus in hand, you can just start writing in any notebook! Watch my hairy arm write:

Last but not least, you can convert handwritten text to computer text. No lie! You can select text that you’ve written by hand and convert it to computer text with the click of a button.

1.       Highlight the text you wish to convert.

2.       Click the “Draw” tab.

3.       Click on “Ink to Text”.

Like so:

 

 

Have a great month, everyone!

-Keith

Please don’t hesitate to shoot me an email if you have a something that you think will make a good tip. You’ll get credit on the blog for your contribution and I might give you a high-five