Any OneNote senseis in the hive?

I was recently issued a Surface Pro 9 tablet and I'm looking into ways I can make it earn its keep for work.

Primarily I work from a honkin big desktop machine with 2 giant monitors, so the Surface is mostly intended to be carried in the field for meetings, note taking and such.  The Surface has a keyboard and pen.

Never really poked around with OneNote but it seems like a good way to replace the traditional steno books I usually carry for each project.

So if anybody uses OneNote, please chime in with tips, tricks, and best practices.  Thanks!

In reply to Duke :

I used it for a couple of months and ended up back at a notepad.

I couldn't take notes fast enough to keep up with a meeting because the screen keyboards suck and hauling a Bluetooth keyboard was impossible when walking around a job site. Writing and sketching neatly with a stylus was a skill I never mastered. Something about the screen being too slick. 

At any rate, I gave up and went back to a leather binder and a legal pad. 

As a company we do use a Trello board to keep up with service calls and such. It allows the guys in the field to take pictures and notes and have them instantly available at the office for estimating and invoicing. I think it would be a little unwieldy for a larger project though. It's more like a series of to-do lists. 

Screen shot of my trello setup including calendar. This is 2-30" monitors and a wall-mounted TV. 

Not a fan of it for taking notes like you're describing. It works, but you have to open the tablet case, unlock the tablet, open one-note, find the right one, save it, etc. 

Pen and paper is much easier. 

It is really good for processes, outlines, etc. I like the way it can organize thoughts and ideas, very useful as a documentation tool. 

Also... FWIW, I have a Surface Go that I'm using as my only computer right now. I hook it up to a Dell dock via USB-C, and it basically becomes a desktop. Probably not powerful enough for an architect, but for me, it is just a computer. 

I love using a Surface Pro with One Note.

Mine is a pretty old model, but it still works great for me.  I've got a tab for pretty much every topic so things stay organized.  I don't bother with trying to do any sort of handwriting-to-text conversion, I just have handwritten notes that work out just fine for me as long as I set the view to include nice wide lines:

You probably can't read my handwriting, but I can and that's what's important to me.  I find that I can get faster and better notes by writing them out like that as opposed to typing.  Also, before I did this electronically, I had drawers full of notebooks that I'd have to dig through.  And trying to keep one notebook per topic or even per customer was just no good.  This way I always have all of my notes everywhere all at once.

If I wind up in a meeting where someone tries to give me a piece of paper, I can take a picture of it with the Surface Pro and put it in the One Note notebook section.  Then I can mark it up if I need to or just go back and reference it later.  And as much as "The Cloud" irritates me in general, it is very nice to be able to have my notes on my tablet, on my laptop, and available through any web browser.

In reply to wae :

This is what I envisioned. But I would try to read my notes and they would be terrible. I'd end up rewriting everything. Walking and writing on a tablet just didn't work well for me. Is the surface a slick screen or more paper like?

I was using a Lenovo 10" tablet and it was so slick the stylus was difficult to control. 

In reply to Toyman! :

Have you tried writing on a Remarkable2?  It sounds like the perfect solution for you (and it is possible to integrate with OneNote)

Toyman! said:

In reply to wae :

This is what I envisioned. But I would try to read my notes and they would be terrible. I'd end up rewriting everything. Walking and writing on a tablet just didn't work well for me. Is the surface a slick screen or more paper like?

I was using a Lenovo 10" tablet and it was so slick the stylus was difficult to control. 

My experience with the Surface Go (different model, maybe it has changed) is similar to yours. Took me 4 tries to get my signature to look remotely like my signature yesterday. I'm actually really curious how wae is doing that - what stylus are you using?

The Remarkable2 is impressively similar to writing on paper- including the texture. 

In reply to Toyman! :

It is a slick screen, but I really like the way the pen feels.  I used a Samsung with the S-pen for a while and it was pretty good but the Surface Pro pen blows it away.  They have different tips you can put on the pen, too.  I've got a real fine point, a larger and rounder one, and a couple others.

In reply to SV reX :

I have looked at them but never tried one. After the last expensive failure I have just stuck with note pads.