I know most of you are probably working in places that you can run new tools and toys. Not everyone is so lucky! I find myself working on .NET 2.0, IE6, VS2005, and Office 2003. I am able to run FireFox so that takes some of the sting out of IE6, and I can cope with most everything else in the interests of getting a paycheck every month. But... I would dearly love to be able to run OneNote, they tell me they don't have it for Office 2003, and I've been told that they aren't even going to start looking at Office 2007 until probably the second quarter of 2009. Just saying that seems ridiculous :)
So... if you find yourself in such an anal-retentive a restrictive confining secure facility as well and would like to use OneNote, I think I can get you and me a little closer to our reality!
Yesterday, Microsoft Live Labs introduced Thumbtack. If you don't aggregate the LiveLabs blog, you should check it out. Lots of good stuff comes out of there!
So what is Thumbtack? Well... it's sort of a cross between the MSDN Social Bookmarks and one of my personal uses for OneNote.
Let's talk OneNote first... I have this open all the time on my laptop and my desk machine at home. My OneNote notebooks are on my LiveMesh, so they are in sync. If I open a post by Jesse Liberty, Justin Angel, Pete Brown, or whoever, and it's one I want to refer back to for the book or for a talk, I go to that particular section of OneNote, pick NewPage, then block copy the body of the post and paste into OneNote ... it takes it links and all, and gives a reference to the source and date/time I did the copy/paste. Only occasionally do I find a piece of artwork that doesn't come across and that's because the artwork is an external link, and a OneNote Clip takes care of that.
Now I can be on the laptop, flipping through articles without having to go to bookmarks, tag aggregations, or searches.
Obviously this is NOT the way to 'save' all your links ... just ones you're needing for a specific purpose... like the results of a big search.
I'll also type in notes, or outlines of things such as to-do lists, and OneNote offers much more than this, but I can only offer up solutions to so much :)
Without OneNote, I'm stuck with saving those pages in another set of FF bookmarks and remembering to 1) put them there, and 2) to get them from there, and who knows about personal notes... send myself an email that I'll forget?
Enter Thumbtack... I can mark a block on a page, press the "Collect with Thumbtack" button in FF, and it drops a header and synopsis into a list in Thumbtack. I can then move the item into a named collection. The header is a link to the original material, and there's a button that opens to the material I 'collected'.
I can also enter text of my own.
Now I can capture things at work and have them available elsewhere which was one big use for OneNote. If I want to push them into OneNote, I haven't tried, but I'm thinking copy/paste might work, but since it's on the web, the only time it isn't available is if I'm in some airport that doesn't have free wireless.
I can also make collections public so others can see them, and I can share collections with named other people so we can collaborate on a collection.
I've just barely started using it, I only have one item collected, but I'm pretty happy this is out there. Non-productive environments suck, so any productivity tool that I can get to help stave off the creep of non-productivity into my life is good.
Check it out, maybe it'll work for you too!
I mentioned MSDN Social Bookmarks above. If you're not familiar with those... check out mine. Looks like I've got a few over 1000 links tagged in there ... yikes :)
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Productivity
posted @ Thursday, December 11, 2008 10:27 AM