OneNote for Event Collaboration
It is three days before the event. You are frantically trying to gather attendee lists, catering orders, room arrangements, speaker itineraries, agendas, presentation slides and meeting notes. Some are in documents on your hard drive. Other information is available on a website. Countless documents and notes are in your email inbox, somewhere. Sound familiar? You may have an application already installed on your desktop that can rescue you from all that insanity. It’s called OneNote.
OneNote is a Microsoft note-taking application which is distributed with many installations of Microsoft Office. It sits on the ribbon in Outlook and is available as a print option on your other Office applications. Imagine that you could simply reach up on your shelf and pull down a binder that has all that event information arranged neatly in one place, organized by easy to find tabs and color-coded to your liking.
Start by creating your OneNote notebook in the overall structure you think will work. OneNote is flexible, so you can move things around after it is created. As you begin to put content into OneNote you may find it useful to add new pages, subpages or sections. Do this before attaching or printing content into your notebook from other applications. You can even link pages together, as we’ve done here on our Overview tab to each other tab in the notebook.
Now you’re all ready to begin filling your notebook. From Word, Excel or PowerPoint you can choose to print to OneNote. You will have the opportunity to identify exactly which section or page of the Notebook you wish to print to. Again, it is very important to create the target page or section first. You can also attach a file or create a link to the information you printed. This is good to be able to refresh pages with new information.
If you will be collaborating with others for this event, save it on SkyDrive and share the folder. Others will be able to use the OneNote web app even if they don’t have access to OneNote on their hard drive.
