A new way of using OneNote to keep myself from looking silly

  • Article

  • As I've mentioned before, one of the techniques I employ with Outlook is a rule to delay all my outgoing mail by 2 minutes. It keeps me from sending mail too soon - for instance, if I misspell my own name and don't notice it until I press Send, I have a chance to stop the send and fix the error before anyone else can see it.

  • I'm going to take this one step further for the next few weeks. This article was in the Sunday edition of the Seattle Times, and this excerpt caught my eye:

  • " I advise my clients to take the time to write any important e-mails in a word-processing program where they will not be tempted to hit the "send" button in a fit of emotion. "

  • Pasted from <https://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008719926_skube08.html>

  • This seems like a reasonable idea to me. Since you can email OneNote pages very easily, I decided I'll start doing this myself to get better "coverage" of the area. I typically prefer shortcut keys over menus, so I'll probably make liberal use of CTRL+SHIFT+E to open an email item instead of using the menu commands.

  • There are a few options I can set for how the email item is created, too. They are in Tools | Options | Sending email:

  • They are pretty self explanatory and I will work through the different permutations over time.

  • Going with the dogfood philosophy around here, I guess I need to admit I doubt I'll find any functional bugs with this. It's a pretty stable feature and I'm not really expecting to get any errors. What I will get is a different sense of using OneNote and a different viewpoint of tying OneNote and Outlook together. One of the things I've learned is that this will have some sort of a payoff in the future - it's just really hard to predict what that payoff will be. A new point of view to inject during a design meeting, a new test case related to performance or some other change may result from this experience over the next few weeks.

  • This completely misses the point of the author, though. Her point was that by using a "formal looking" word processor, I would get my mind into a more formal communication mode. OneNote is not designed to be a rich presentation application - we're all about quickly getting information together and stored. I may still make mistakes with the formatting and miss the benefits Daneen Skube stresses. We'll see.

  • I'll keep in touch about this.

  • Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

  • John