Quick Update

Next Week, I hope to resume my reading through Calvin's Institutes.

Until then, I will be working on becoming familiar with Microsoft Office 2007. I have the Home and Student edition: Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote. It was on for $50 instead of $150 at Futureshop on boxing day (and since I couldn't sleep for some reason, I was there at 6 am, along with about 100 other people, and back home at 6:30…hooray for being in Orangeville!).

Right now I am trying to figure out how to use OneNote efficiently for sermon preparation. Up until now I have used pen and paper for the process until coming to the outlining stage, when I jump into Word. I find that I cannot type while trying to hold a book open (especially some of these thick theological tomes!), so I just use a pad of paper and a pen.

The problem is searching through notes. I can't do it well because of its format. Another problem is legibility. My handwriting, while getting better is not great. I can read it. No one else can unless I take the time to write well.

Perhaps my next laptop will be a tablet pc, which would mean that I can use it as a pad and pen anyways, and OneNote will be that much handier. Until then, however, I will try to work it out with the keyboard.

It will take some practice, I think. But now I have the time to fiddle with my method and see what works best and most efficiently.

Are there any OneNote users out there who can give me some hints?

And, in Tigerdirect yesterday, I saw this neat little gizmo, which got me thinking as well. Perhaps a tablet mouse will do?

I just wrote and published this post from OneNote--another handy little feature! I now have a Blog OneNote workbook, which has three stages: Ideas, Intermediate posts, Finalized Posts. And I can post from there with one step in Word. Neat-o.