A new way of using OneNote to keep myself from looking silly

 

A new way of using OneNote to keep myself from looking silly

As I've mentioned before, one of the techniques I employ with Outlook is a rule to delay all my outgoing mail by 2 minutes. It keeps me from sending mail too soon - for instance, if I misspell my own name and don't notice it until I press Send, I have a chance to stop the send and fix the error before anyone else can see it.

I'm going to take this one step further for the next few weeks. This article was in the Sunday edition of the Seattle Times, and this excerpt caught my eye:

" I advise my clients to take the time to write any important e-mails in a word-processing program where they will not be tempted to hit the "send" button in a fit of emotion. "

Pasted from <http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008719926_skube08.html>

This seems like a reasonable idea to me. Since you can email OneNote pages very easily, I decided I'll start doing this myself to get better "coverage" of the area. I typically prefer shortcut keys over menus, so I'll probably make liberal use of CTRL+SHIFT+E to open an email item instead of using the menu commands.

There are a few options I can set for how the email item is created, too. They are in Tools | Options | Sending email:



They are pretty self explanatory and I will work through the different permutations over time.

Going with the dogfood philosophy around here, I guess I need to admit I doubt I'll find any functional bugs with this. It's a pretty stable feature and I'm not really expecting to get any errors. What I will get is a different sense of using OneNote and a different viewpoint of tying OneNote and Outlook together. One of the things I've learned is that this will have some sort of a payoff in the future - it's just really hard to predict what that payoff will be. A new point of view to inject during a design meeting, a new test case related to performance or some other change may result from this experience over the next few weeks.

This completely misses the point of the author, though. Her point was that by using a "formal looking" word processor, I would get my mind into a more formal communication mode. OneNote is not designed to be a rich presentation application - we're all about quickly getting information together and stored. I may still make mistakes with the formatting and miss the benefits Daneen Skube stresses. We'll see.

I'll keep in touch about this.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Published Thursday, February 12, 2009 7:26 AM by JohnGuin

OneNote Testing : A new way of using OneNote to keep myself from looking silly