Friday
May282010
OneNote for book research: magical in the end
Friday, May 28, 2010 at 8:47AM
As I’ve said repeatedly here, keeping a book diary – for research, a daily journal, character and research details – is fundamental to the way I work. You can read more about it here, and even more if you search for ‘MacJournal’ in the sidebar.
But I’m now on Windows. Mariner have a companion app WinJournal which looks much the same. But Office comes with its own research app, OneNote. So it makes sense to test that first. Here’s a demo book journal I’ll be showing at my workshop for the Derbyshire Literature Festival next Saturday (sorry – the Saturday session in Bolsover is sold out, but there are still tickets for the general talk on Friday in Ilkeston I think).
My verdict on OneNote: it looks impenetrable to begin with. But beneath the first impressions this is one heck of a piece of software for authors – and comes bundled with Office anyway. This is the Office 2010 beta you see here by the way.
I first used OneNote years ago when I had one of the first Windows XP Tablet computers made by Acer. It was a wonderful little machine, though people used to laugh at tablets back then, honest.
OneNote is a kind of notebook, a place to store text, pictures, links, whatever, organised into sections, tabs and pages. Perfect for a book diary. On the Tablet you can write on those pages too, and OneNote will even find a handwritten word just as easily as if you typed it.
The Acer eventually died and I focused on the Mac more and more. OneNote has come on a lot in the meantime. OneNote files are stored wherever you want them on your PC. If you then sync and back them up through Mesh you can keep the same project in place on several different machines and filed securely on the web. At some point I gather there’ll be a web app too, at which point it’s probably bye bye Evernote for me. But not yet.
Two bad things about OneNote. It’s difficult to import data from other applications simply. No impossible but difficult. And the app looks a bit odd to begin with because there’s nothing else I know quite like it. But enough moans. Here is a fully-functioning book diary using the Hewson system, one that does everything MacJournal does and a bit more. My preferred option from now on. First the main screen.
Here you see everything that’s going to go into the left brain management of a book called Charlie and the Vampire (an imaginary book, mind. I’m not going to write it). The whole diary is a tab in the section where I keep information related to events I’m doing. If this was a real book it would be in a section or notebook dedicated to actual book projects. On the right everything is held in pages and sub pages. The top page described the project. Beneath we see…
Dead simple to write. The usual system – tab to demote, shift-tab to promote. It may just look like text but it isn’t. You can drag those headings around as the little icon on the left suggests.
You could do the diary the way I do it in MacJournal – as a set of separate pages. But my diary entries are short – ideas, observations and running word counts. It’s easy to write them in a single column, each fronted by a datestamp the app provides.
Note those little icons. They’re tags. You just click and insert one. The system comes with a variety of its own – here you see a check box for a to do and a question mark for a question. You tag anything you want as you go through your journal. At any stage you can simply say… show me all the tags and they appear across the sections like this.
Would be nice if that tag summary box gave you a preview of the tag context instead of simply taking you directly to each. But this is still beta… maybe things will get better in the final version. Still enough for what I need though frankly.
Research is handled very simply and effectively. Naturally everything is searchable too.
You can get things into the system in a variety of ways. Type or cut and paste. Hit Windows-key S and you can take a screenshot of anything in front of you. Here’s something very cool too. When you import a screenshot OneNote somehow ‘reads’ the text, even though it’s a picture. So a word within your screenshot will still appear in a search. This is incredibly clever and useful.
If you want to keep things as text though either cut and paste or print anything you like straight to a OneNote folder like this.
It will then appear in its own page wherever you want it. You can’t edit the contents but you can still make notes around it.
Handling characters is very straightforward. As with MacJournal I write some brief bio details but principally rely on pasting in actual references to a character in the book. The reader doesn’t see your character notes, only the words on the pages. It’s important to remember that.
OneNote has a lot of little tricks up its sleeve, only a few of which I’ve discovered so far. One is that it understands wiki formatting. In the example above Mickey Framlingham just occurred to me as I typed that sentence so he isn’t in the character list. Here’s what happens if I go back and type his name with two square brackets around it – [[Mickey Framlingham]].
OneNote recognises that those brackets mean a link. If a page called Mickey Framlingham existed it would link to it automatically. Since it doesn’t it just creates a page with that name. Now that is nice…
Here’s another delight. You can dock your notebook to the side of the screen like this. Once it’s there you can write away in Word or whatever and refer to your notes very easily, writing and changing them as needed.
This really is the way I intend to work from now on. It’s simple, intuitive and immensely powerful. Thanks to the sync powers of Mesh I can work on the same two documents – a Word book file and a OneNote notebook – on multiple machines and have the results backed up and kept in the right state everywhere without a second thought.
One thing I should have mentioned about Mesh earlier. As I understand it the thing only syncs when you close a file. This may sound like a backward step. It isn’t. All of the sync problems I’ve encountered with service such as Dropbox and iDisk have stemmed from files that have been left open on one computer then opened for edit on another. You simply can’t do that with Mesh.
It took me a while to get to grips with OneNote. It was very tempting at times to give up and think…. meh, I’ll just get WinJournal instead. But this system is miles better than my old MacJournal setup. It lets me see and manage the info I want much more easily once I’ve now begun to get the hang of things.
There is, however, one huge downside. I now find myself lusting after a little Tablet like that old Acer I once had. In six weeks or so I will be sitting in the reading room of the Pierpont Morgan library in New York looking at something that will kick off the new book for 2013. It would be a wonderful note-taking gizmo for that.
But I’m now on Windows. Mariner have a companion app WinJournal which looks much the same. But Office comes with its own research app, OneNote. So it makes sense to test that first. Here’s a demo book journal I’ll be showing at my workshop for the Derbyshire Literature Festival next Saturday (sorry – the Saturday session in Bolsover is sold out, but there are still tickets for the general talk on Friday in Ilkeston I think).
My verdict on OneNote: it looks impenetrable to begin with. But beneath the first impressions this is one heck of a piece of software for authors – and comes bundled with Office anyway. This is the Office 2010 beta you see here by the way.
I first used OneNote years ago when I had one of the first Windows XP Tablet computers made by Acer. It was a wonderful little machine, though people used to laugh at tablets back then, honest.
OneNote is a kind of notebook, a place to store text, pictures, links, whatever, organised into sections, tabs and pages. Perfect for a book diary. On the Tablet you can write on those pages too, and OneNote will even find a handwritten word just as easily as if you typed it.
The Acer eventually died and I focused on the Mac more and more. OneNote has come on a lot in the meantime. OneNote files are stored wherever you want them on your PC. If you then sync and back them up through Mesh you can keep the same project in place on several different machines and filed securely on the web. At some point I gather there’ll be a web app too, at which point it’s probably bye bye Evernote for me. But not yet.
Two bad things about OneNote. It’s difficult to import data from other applications simply. No impossible but difficult. And the app looks a bit odd to begin with because there’s nothing else I know quite like it. But enough moans. Here is a fully-functioning book diary using the Hewson system, one that does everything MacJournal does and a bit more. My preferred option from now on. First the main screen.
Here you see everything that’s going to go into the left brain management of a book called Charlie and the Vampire (an imaginary book, mind. I’m not going to write it). The whole diary is a tab in the section where I keep information related to events I’m doing. If this was a real book it would be in a section or notebook dedicated to actual book projects. On the right everything is held in pages and sub pages. The top page described the project. Beneath we see…
Dead simple to write. The usual system – tab to demote, shift-tab to promote. It may just look like text but it isn’t. You can drag those headings around as the little icon on the left suggests.
You could do the diary the way I do it in MacJournal – as a set of separate pages. But my diary entries are short – ideas, observations and running word counts. It’s easy to write them in a single column, each fronted by a datestamp the app provides.
Note those little icons. They’re tags. You just click and insert one. The system comes with a variety of its own – here you see a check box for a to do and a question mark for a question. You tag anything you want as you go through your journal. At any stage you can simply say… show me all the tags and they appear across the sections like this.
Would be nice if that tag summary box gave you a preview of the tag context instead of simply taking you directly to each. But this is still beta… maybe things will get better in the final version. Still enough for what I need though frankly.
Research is handled very simply and effectively. Naturally everything is searchable too.
You can get things into the system in a variety of ways. Type or cut and paste. Hit Windows-key S and you can take a screenshot of anything in front of you. Here’s something very cool too. When you import a screenshot OneNote somehow ‘reads’ the text, even though it’s a picture. So a word within your screenshot will still appear in a search. This is incredibly clever and useful.
If you want to keep things as text though either cut and paste or print anything you like straight to a OneNote folder like this.
It will then appear in its own page wherever you want it. You can’t edit the contents but you can still make notes around it.
Handling characters is very straightforward. As with MacJournal I write some brief bio details but principally rely on pasting in actual references to a character in the book. The reader doesn’t see your character notes, only the words on the pages. It’s important to remember that.
OneNote has a lot of little tricks up its sleeve, only a few of which I’ve discovered so far. One is that it understands wiki formatting. In the example above Mickey Framlingham just occurred to me as I typed that sentence so he isn’t in the character list. Here’s what happens if I go back and type his name with two square brackets around it – [[Mickey Framlingham]].
OneNote recognises that those brackets mean a link. If a page called Mickey Framlingham existed it would link to it automatically. Since it doesn’t it just creates a page with that name. Now that is nice…
Here’s another delight. You can dock your notebook to the side of the screen like this. Once it’s there you can write away in Word or whatever and refer to your notes very easily, writing and changing them as needed.This really is the way I intend to work from now on. It’s simple, intuitive and immensely powerful. Thanks to the sync powers of Mesh I can work on the same two documents – a Word book file and a OneNote notebook – on multiple machines and have the results backed up and kept in the right state everywhere without a second thought.
One thing I should have mentioned about Mesh earlier. As I understand it the thing only syncs when you close a file. This may sound like a backward step. It isn’t. All of the sync problems I’ve encountered with service such as Dropbox and iDisk have stemmed from files that have been left open on one computer then opened for edit on another. You simply can’t do that with Mesh.
It took me a while to get to grips with OneNote. It was very tempting at times to give up and think…. meh, I’ll just get WinJournal instead. But this system is miles better than my old MacJournal setup. It lets me see and manage the info I want much more easily once I’ve now begun to get the hang of things.
There is, however, one huge downside. I now find myself lusting after a little Tablet like that old Acer I once had. In six weeks or so I will be sitting in the reading room of the Pierpont Morgan library in New York looking at something that will kick off the new book for 2013. It would be a wonderful note-taking gizmo for that.
Reader Comments (10)
Thanks for the info, David.
NoteTaker handles this and waaaay more for Mac users who are not willing to go to the Windows route.
And it has a server product that makes your stuff available anywhere in the world, using your own computer as the server, which I like.
The most interesting thing about NoteTaker, which I abandoned when I did my Go-To-Win moment a few years ago (I'm back with Mac), is that when you come back to it, the organization of your previous notebooks is stunning. NoteTaker has incredible audio and video support.
I did try Circus Ponies notebook which came from the same Next heritage I think. Never quite felt convinced somehow. The Mesh solution does leave a copy on the server too with OneNote of course (and I guess it would with Notetaker on OS X since Mesh works with that too). At some stage MS are supposed to flip the switch on a web version of OneNote as well which would let you open the same notebook in a browser, Sounds clever but I can't quite see any use for it personally, though doubtless others will feel differently.
I had the same experience with Circus Ponies, David. [God, how many programs I've tried or used.]
NoteTaker (by Aquaminds) has an intermediate learning curve. This is another program where a B&W print-out of their PDF manual is useful.
But you know how you can come back to programs you've abandoned four or five years ago and everything about them seems so static and worn-out?
No so with NoteTaker. They have a free NoteTaker Viewer (something like that) that allows Mac, Win, and (I think) Linux aficionados without NoteTaker to view the notebooks. No forced upgrade path.
I did a Spotlight for a lost doc and discovered it was in an old NoteTaker notebook. I was really shocked at how easy the notebook I created in 2002 was to access, understand, export from, and USE.
MacJournal, which I use, relies on the organization in the left panel. NT has the look and feel of a real notebook with section tabs, an index of the entire notebook with page numbers, great Services and contextual menu help, and so many features that I'd forgotten.
This was a recent re-discovery, and I am seriously considering going through the pain of switching over to it again. The secret to NoteTaker, if anyone is interested, is in creating templates up front for the types of material you'll be dumping into it. Doing it on the fly as you bumble through the program is a PITA. I am a big web clipper and I hate the sprawling mess of html and other detritus that clipping can produce in MacJournal and other programs. NT templates puts a halt to that.
Also, NT is dead simple with audio annotations on the fly.
Aquaminds is also extending their server product to work on the iPad, which I dont own. I'll be anxious to see if that server can still be your own computer as it is now. [No Facebook-like interference in your life.]
I really understand David's thrust to get the best tool experience for himself. I've ricocheted between Mac and Win for two decades, and I finally decided that the paperwhite screen on the Mac is the reason why I stay.
I can read for 24 hours straight on a Mac, with a little help from Mr. Coffee and Mrs. Wine. I fall asleep reading a cream page in a book with 10 pt type that is badly inked within 15 minutes. This is such a sadness for me. I have a library of 5,000+ books that I will never get rid of. I love books, the paper, the arc of an open book in front of me, the smell of ink. I own a Kindle and an iRex, but the light-grey/dark-grey contrast bugs me, and I can't read easily on a plane or in a pub. Don't have an iPad yet, but some e-reader with a white screen will eventually appeal to me.
I'm going on and on about this in the event there is a Mac user who would like the One-Note experience that David writes about in this post. NoteTaker is one product to look at. View the tutorial first to get an idea about it. (aquaminds.com) and no, I have zip to do with the company.
Janie, I'm a Mac user interested in the OneNote experience - I'll certainly have a look at Note Taker.
Although I've found the jamming-photos-and-text-and-pdf's-into Scrivener a very useful functionality.
Jonathan, I separate the wealth of research I do from the "jamming-photos-and-text-and-pdf’s-into Scrivener," which I do as well.
I've been using MacJournal, but David's post made me ding/think back at my shock at revisiting NoteTaker as few weeks ago. I realize, as a result of reading David's post, that can do one book diary with the research stuffed into each chapter...really easy to do with its section tabs.
I am also partial to pretty tools. I like the tools I use to look good. So shoot me, I like colors.
I like MacJournal, but if I relearn NoteTaker (and there is a learning curve for efficient use) it is going to be a lot better. You can export to RTFD (with attachments) or print to PDF, which for me is useful to have beside my computer when working on chapters because I am sloppy about recording attribution, I'm writing non-fiction these days, and I absolutely cannot risk one word of plagiarism.
jezeez, sorry for the typos. I'm listening to the reports coming out about the flotilla massacre, and not paying attention.
I found jamming photos and text into Scrivener distracting. When I'm writing the right brain's active - hopefully - and doesn't want to know about that stuff. That's why I like to keep it separate - though the OneNote dock thing is pretty tempting I have to say.
David - what are you now using to write on 'in the office'? Or do you use the Thinkpad for everything?
Right now I'm using the Word 2010 beta on Windows 7 on my MacBook Pro in Boot Camp, attached to my old Apple LED Cinema Display. Works fine (apart from the odd sleep problem). And I can go back to Mac when I want to.