An open love letter to Microsoft OneNote

 

This is an open love letter to Microsoft OneNote.  I finally get you.  I have struggled with you for years, never quite seeing the power of your platform.  I am not sure that I have the best organization for the data that I collect with various sections, pages and notebooks.  I have created various entries and collected some somewhat useful data, but honestly until recently OneNote has been my second or third choice for saving research.  What recently changed for me has been connecting the OneNote clipper extension.  The OneNote clipper extension has enabled me to capture an entire article as searchable data.  In the past, I generally found that I needed to copy and paste to have all the text saved to OneNote.  I did try the print to OneNote printer driver, while it did capture all the data of the article it seems to be an image file.  I was not able to copy and paste text from a printed article and the title is simply printout on my OneNote book.  Clipper seems to address both issues allowing text or another image format and the page is saved with a descriptive title.  I believe the data is saved to the cloud and does not seem to tax the limited resources of my PC.  I now have a workflow that captures text data and stores it in the cloud.  It includes a built-in search function and it documents the source of all the data that I capture.  In my case, this has been my goal for years. 

  

Solutions that I have tried and abandoned include Evernote, Zoho, Notion, RSS solutions, print to google drive, IFTTT combinations, print to PDF and even the print to OneNote for windows (also the email to OneNote).  I have explored if I could figure out a solution of printing or saving to Google Docs, but I always seem to be limited to a short intro and then a link to the original article.  I scoured Reddit to find a solution, but always came up empty.  While looking for the right solution, I relied on the pocket app and printing to .pdf files.  I have printed so many web articles to .pdf files but this have never really worked as my preferred solution.  The biggest drawback has been research from multiple devices needs to be saved to a cloud location with a powerful search tool.  I generally find the Windows search tool slow and limited to my computer which is limited.  My PC is several years old and limited to its 32 GB drive which makes basic windows tasks quite limited.  I have gone through several Android phones and found the print option to be quite slow.  However, I still use this process for several documents that I want to keep access to.  In the last few years, I have grown reliant on the Pocket app but its just not quite right.  I have utilized the free version of the app and looked at upgrading to the premium features for $45 per year.  I think I would really appreciate the premium version which would probably check all my boxes, but I simply have a difficult time justifying that payment every year to continue the features.  If Pocket had been about $10 a year, I would have stopped my quest and signed up for premium.  My free pocket account limits the number of articles it stores, and I am sure that I am well over the threshold in less than two years of use.    I think I have tinkered with OneNote for 8 years now, it hardly has any data stored in it until recently.  I feel confident that this workflow will continue to work for me for years.