My adventures with OneNote as a grad student
Post dedicated to @babysociologist, @strange-particles, @thehistorygrad
Disclaimer: Iām using the Mac version which, from what I can gather, has some different functions than the Windows one.
Important: If you have a school e-mail, head down to Office 365 Education and find out if you can have free access to Microsoft Office. Thatās pretty much how I got OneNote on my computer and on my phone. Once you download it and sign in with your school account, OneNote will sync your computer notebooks to the OneNote/OneDrive system, so you can access them from anywhere.
Iāve been using OneNote to try and keep better track of my reading notes because I have the horrible habit of spreading them around a thousand different folders and then not being able to find them when I need them (this is literallyĀ what happened to me when I was preparing for my qualifying exams, and it was not fun). I was also looking for something that gave me some kind of remote access, kinda like Evernoteābut I had bad experiences with Evernote + iPad, and I wanted something easier than just sending everything to Google Drive.
* So basically, I decided to have 2 different notebooks: one for notes on bibliography and one for notes on primary sources.
* For my primary sources, I have sections on different kinds of documents (devotional manuscripts, account records etc), and Iām creating individual pages for each of them. Because I havenāt done much in-depth work on any one of them as of yet, Iām just adding the description of each of them that I had to write for my prospectus. The page title is the coordinates to the document:
* For myĀ āNotes on Bibliographyā notebook, I then created sections that, for now at least, organize some of the axes of my research. I also added a section for notes from classes, which usually compile or relate multiple texts, so it would be hard for me to pinpoint where they would fit:
(donāt they look pretty in all these different colors?)
* Whenever I add notes on a text, I add a page. The page title is the name of the author + the name of the text (article or book). Because I also added notes from texts read for classes or for my qualifying exams, I made sure to add that information right under the page title, so itās easy to see under which circumstances I produced said notes:
* And then I just write down whatever it is Iām writing! I particularly like that you can insert images and tables with relative ease, and that you donāt have to worry at all about margins but still get a fair amount of font and style choices - and it has OCR!
* A point that @dressesandalchemy has made hereĀ that I havenāt been able to test is the linking to files, but I haveĀ been able to link to other notes and itās glorious:
* And, like I said, I can have quick access to everything on my phone as well:
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
