Microsoft started a weekly 15-minute webinar in March that is hosted by Doug Thomas (the Office Casual guy).  I discovered these just recently and put it on my calendar to watch and listen in. It’s just a quick 15 minutes and he starts and finishes on time, but stays on longer to answer specific questions from viewers.

He did one last week (June 12, 2012) on 5 Things About OneNote 2010 I especially wanted to see. I’ve been a bit slow in using OneNote, so I thought this would give me some good ideas and insights on how to best use it. The link above will take you to the video if you wish to watch along, or I have some of  his points summarized below and some things I wanted to highlight:

Even if you don’t have OneNote on your computer as part of Microsoft Office, you can still use Microsoft OneNote 2010 for free using Web Apps. All you need is a Microsoft Live ID to get to OneNote, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

OneNote Quick Tasks from System Tray

Did you realize the OneNote icon resides in your systray? Take a minute to check it out. I have a screenshot below of the things you can do with 2 clicks:

• Quickly Start OneNote from your System Tray

This is a quick way to open OneNote when you want to start note taking – fast.

• Start Recording Audio from your System Tray

Yes – you can record an audio clip and store it right in your OneNote notebook. If you’re at a presentation, open up OneNote and record it!

• Start the Screen Clipper from your System Tray

This is the same Snipping Tool that is in Windows Vista and 7, but easily accessible from OneNote

Easily Search and Find a Note

When you open OneNote, you have instant access to all the notebooks and pages you’ve created. Perhaps you have many notebooks and pages and there’s something buried in there about rentals that you need to access quickly. There’s a great search feature in OneNote. Just go to the upper right corner and look for the search box. Type in the word or words and all your notebooks will be search and you’ll get results similar to what I have below with your key words highlighted. Easy!

OneNote Templates make your Notebooks Stylish

Here’s one I wasn’t aware of – templates to make your notebooks uniform or just stylish. To access this menu, simply look over to the right and click the drop-down arrow next to the ‘New Page’ and select ‘Templates’. There are categories and then many choices within each category.

Email a Page, Set up a Meeting or Task from OneNote 2010

If you have Microsoft Outlook, there are so many integrative things you can do between the two of these programs.

From your Home screen, you can email a particular page, or put your page into an Outlook task.

The Meeting Details tab is handy – this is how it works. When you click the Meeting Details, OneNote goes and looks for meetings on your calendar for the current day. If you have multiple meetings, it’ll present a list. If this is a meeting where you want to take notes, simply click on the meeting and it’ll put all the meeting details from your calendar into OneNote. Then you’re ready to take any notes while your meeting is going on.

So these are some really cool things you can do with OneNote, Do you have any tips you’d like to share? Please leave a comment.