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Re: How to enter notes
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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.
Outliners.com Message ID: 4560
Posted by srdiamond15
2005-11-05 16:12:34
> First of all, ON only allows 9 tags
<Can you have more than one tag on an item? If not, is there another way to categorise an item in more than one categories?>
To the first question, yes. (Here’s MS on note flags: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010971731033.aspx.)
To the second, note flags are not OneNote’s main approach to categorization. In fact, they aren’t really intended for categorization, if you define categorization as an exhaustive procedure (as where everything falls _somewhere_ in an outline or gets at least one key word). Note flags are primarily for calling attention to a fairly small set of important things, with some categorization of kinds of important things, but not (by intent) for notes in general.
Of course you don’t have to follow MS’s intent; even less, my interpretation of its intent. But the main mechanism for categorization proper in OneNote is sections, which are sets of notes, and which physically correspond to files. Above sections, you can have a nesting of folders, which correspond physically to their namesake. This is a strict hierarchy, and is represented as an outline in part of the interface, but is not manipulable like an outline. To reorganize notes, you can select non-contiguously within a given section, and then “Send” them anywhere you like in your structure.
OneNote’s main strength isn’t in reorganizing notes but in organizing and reorganizing each note, in which you can but don’t have to use a somewhat enhanced version of Word’s outliner, but without lablels. You can also organize note anyway you want spatially on a give page, with outlining in each part. This is very good for annotation, among other uses.
I think the best use of OneNote involves putting a lot of information on each page, because OneNote’s strength is in the page, not in the overall structure. For collecting and analyzing law relevant to an ongoing case or brief, OneNote and the much more specialized CaseMap are the best tools I’ve found.
Stephen R. Diamond