Using OneNote to Package Information for Others

Being able to organize and share information easily and effectively is one of the core tenants of collaboration.  I've been applying OneNote as the main tool in facilitating a collaboration project for the end of this year. I'm going through the exercise of cleaning up a year's worth of engagement notes and turning them into something viable that can be used by other team members to support work done and work yet to be done.  Normally this would be a fairly convoluted exercise but by leveraging the capabilities of OneNote I'm finding some efficiencies I had not anticipated.

Gathering everything in one place

OneNote's easy drag and drop interface on the desk top coupled with the ability to duplicate pages is making the gathering of relevant information into one spot easier and cleaner. By creating a section in a notebook for all the transfer notes I am able to pick and chose what needs to be shared and what doesn't, all while retaining the original copies for reference.

Grouping and organizing

By taking content as pages in the section, I can drag and drop the order of the pages far easier than I could cutting and pasting in something such as Word.  Images, notes, diagrams, etc. are all treated equally.  It really is like organizing the chapters of a book more than it is reworking work notes.

Outputting for sharing

Since the notes are all winding up in one section, they can now be output as their own OneNote notebook (something I would use if the recipients were more comfortable with OneNote), as a Word document, or as a PDF file. Whatever works best is now a clean, organized deliverable.

Something to think about

It's important when using tools such as OneNote for note taking over an extended period of time to take into consideration not how easy it is to capture information but rather how easy it will be to retrieve that information and share it with others.