Using OneNote For Research

My favorite Microsoft application after Outlook is OneNote. It's simply the best application that has come out of Redmond in a long time. I use it for everything. One of the coolest things you can do with OneNote is pull information from the Internet directly into your OneNote notebook pages.

This is very easy to do. First, go to the web page that you want to use the information from. Next select a graphic or some text from the page. Once the object is selected, right click and select copy. Now open the OneNote page that you want to gather this information in. Right click in the page and select paste. The graphic or text will be pasted directly into the page. In addition, a link back to the web page will be included. Of course you can also use drag and drop to accomplish the same task if you would like.

I use this all the time. I have a page in my Notebook labeled Things to Checkout. Whenever I come across anything on the Internet that I want to spend more time checking out but don't have time at the moment, I post a piece of the article on the page and later, when I have more time I can simply go to the Things to Checkout page and get back to where I was. Of course I can add my own notes as well.

But I Don't Want To Capitalize That!

I have had several people complain to me that Word automatically capitalizes words when they don't want them to be capitalized. You can actually control how Word decides what to capitalize very easily.

When you are in a Word document click Tools - Autocorrect Options. Click on the Autocorrect Tab if you are not already there. Here you can change how Word handles capitalization. My favorite one to turn off is Capitalize First Letter of Table Cells. You can even click on the Exceptions button and fine tune the rules even more.

More on Email Attachments

I observed a user the other day that made me realize that some people really don't know how to handle email attachments. This user had received a copy of a form letter created as a Word document. They used this form to send letters to their Clients.

Each time the user needed to send one of these letters they would open Outlook and search for the email message (another problem in itself), open the document, make changes to the document, and print the document. They indicated to me that they were having trouble saving the documents.

What's wrong here? Well, first obviously the document should not be accessed via Outlook. This process wasted space within Outlook, made the customized letters impossible to find, prohibited others from using the same form document, prevented the documents from being backed up. etc, etc, etc.

What needs to be done? It's simple. Right click on the attachment within the email message. Click on Copy. Open a folder on your server where the form should be properly located. Right click in that folder and click Paste. A copy of the document will now be in the folder. I would also suggest you go back into the Outlook message, right click on the attachment and select Remove. (Or delete the message itself) This will remove the attachment from the message therefore saving space in your email data location.

With the file properly located in your server file system, it can be shared and backed up. Also saving and finding those individualized letters will be much easier.

Don't Email That File!

The speed and capabilities of Internet email programs have increased dramatically over the last few years. In the past one would never send a large attachment with an email message because it would almost always hose up the user's email and cause various problems. Today it's a different story. Sending a 5 or 10 meg or even larger attachment almost never causes any noticeable problems. I say noticeable because even though the file may leave your Outbox, it can cause many problems along its way to the recipient. And many recipients are restricted from receiving large attachments if they are able to receive them at all. Because of the high risk nature of attachments, many companies will not allow users to receive any attachments via email

There is a great alternative. It is a web based service called YouSendIt. You simply log into the website, give the email address of the person you want the file to go to and select the file you want to send. YouSendIt then sends an email to the recipient which includes a link to download the file from. The file never goes through the email system. I have used the system myself and find it works very well. You can send files of up to 1 Gig.

Of course, make sure you have virus scanning software running the latest virus definition files on your workstation whenever you work with foreign files.

Click here to go to the YouSendIt website.