Have you ever experienced a moment where you feel like you have discovered something completely new and then you realize (or someone bursts your bubble) that the thing you’ve discovered is not so new and that people have known about it all along? It reminds me of those Geico commercials where two people are talking and one says, “Hey do you know that 15 minutes can save you 15% or more on your car insurance?”, and the other person says, “Yeah, everyone knows that.”
I just recently experienced one of those moments. I was reading through Microsoft’s Office 365 blog and came across one in particular that caught my attention. The post was announcing the Onetastic sort features and I thought to myself, “How cool is that?! That would help me so much!”. In the post, the author made reference to their previous blog introducing Onetastic. Since I had never heard about it before, I figured the post would be from no more than a month or so prior. Wrong! The previous post was dated August 1, 2013…a year ago! Where had I been?!
So in an effort to help prevent someone else from experiencing “that moment”, I wanted to share Onetastic with you.
Onetastic was developed by Omer Atay, a member of the OneNote team. It is a OneNote add-in that gives us even more reason to use OneNote. I’ll let Omer tell you all about in his video. Last week, new sort macros were released for Onetastic. The macros now allow you to sort your pages, sections, notebooks and even paragraphs.
Since learning about Onetastic, I’ve installed it and have integrated it into my daily use. The OneNote calendar is already my favorite feature. It shows you when you created your pages on a calendar and you can navigate to the page you need by clicking the link. So if you wanted to quickly go to the notes you created last week, the calendar allows you to do just that. There are several other macros besides the new sort macros that you can choose from based on your needs or you can create your own.
OneNote in itself is a great tool. It gives you the ability to do much more than just take notes. You can share your OneNote Notebook in a Lync meeting so that everyone can see notes being added in real time. You can send a page to your colleagues by email either by embedding it in the body of the email or adding it as an attachment. When a Project Plan is synchronized with SharePoint and a new site is created, it automatically creates a new notebook in OneNote that everyone involved will have immediate access to.
Onetastic enhances OneNote. It really is fantastic. However, don’t take my word for it, try it out for yourself. You have nothing to lose since Onetastic will not cost you anything.
