[Tech] Using Microsoft Onenote to organize your study-notes: Image to text, Audio notes and more

1. Why Microsoft Onenote?
2. Step 1: Creating a new notebook
3. Step 2: Basics (Sections and Pages)
4. Step 3: Audio-notes for working Professionals
5. Step 4: OCR (Image to Text)

Why Microsoft Onenote?

Microsoft Office comes with a program called Microsoft Onenote, that provides very convenient way to organize notes. In MS Word, you’d need to create new file for every topic, in long run it leads to creation of many folders and files, however in MS Onenote, you can organize them all in just one “Notebook”, under various sections and pages = way easier to navigate, search and take backups. Observe this demo image:

1. Automatically saves whatever you type or paste. So no need to hit save button/Ctrl+S every few minutes.
2. When you copy paste text from a webpage, it also preserve the URL address of that webpage, for future reference.

Step 1: Creating a new notebook

1. Goto Start Menu> all programs >Microsoft Office >Microsoft Onenote.
2. The Onenote window opens.
3. Goto File > New >Select “My Computer”
4. Give name for your notebook,
5. Finally Click on “Create Notebook”.

Step 2: Basics (Sections and Pages)

Observe this screenshot.

Step 3:Audionotes

• Onenote’s Insert Tab, allows you to do many useful things, such as scanning images, recording Audio Notes-if you’ve headphone with microphone
  
• You can then copy those audio-notes into your mobile and listen them during office recess, bus travel!

Step 4:OCR (Image to Text)

Biggest Advantage of Onenote=Converting Image into text. For example, you download a question paper (PDF) but its text is un-copyable (due to low-resolution scanning).

1. Open PDF usion Adobe/Foxit reader.
2. Come back to Onenote, click on Insert tab> Screen Clipping. Now draw a rectangle around your PDF file. It’s copied image will be pasted here.
3. Select on that image (in onenote page)> right click “Copy Text from Image”

4. then place your cursor anywhere on the page and press “Ctrl+V” (or right click>Paste).
5. The text will be pasted. Although text-recognition depends on many varibles such as resolution of input image, number of colors, background etc.

There are many other useful features too, such as tagging, unfilled pages etc. The best way to master a software is by using it. So go ahead and try all buttons.