OneNote for Projects

We all manage projects of one type of another. Some of us have the advantage of sophisticated software to manage resources, timelines and scheduling. For those of us who don’t, you may be using Excel to manage lists and tasks, Word to generate status reports and PowerPoint to provide information outside the team to customers or vendors. Meeting notes, communications, other artifacts each live in their respective places. Wouldn’t it be nice to have it all in one place, neatly organized, searchable and shareable? Well you can do that in OneNote.

This Microsoft Office application that ships as part of many Office suites is the perfect place to store and access all your project documentation. Here are two ways to set up your OneNote to help you keep your projects organized and on track.

Strategy #1 – Create one tab for each phase of the project and with separate pages for each task. These tasks can be flagged for follow-up and can appear in your Outlook Tasks folder. From there you can assign it to others and track it. The task will have a link to the OneNote page. On each page, in addition to the task description, attach any spreadsheet files, pdfs, documents or presentations that are relevant. Include hyperlinks to related websites. You can even make audio notes here.

Strategy #2 – If your project is simple and straightforward with only a limited number of people involved, you might consider creating one tab with a five-column table for tasks with column headings of task, due date, assigned to, complete and comments. Another tab can contain a document list with links to the actual documents. A third might contain a running wiki or diary type list of statuses and notes over time. If completion of task results in a file, or link or diagram, create that page in the notebook and link the task to it. Just use the Ctrl+K shortcut and connect to the page in the notebook with the information.