Charles Darwin's love of note-taking would have certainly made him a true lover of Microsoft OneNote. This is how he would have used the app to organize his work and further his research. We'll even show you how you can use the app, too.
Between 1831 and 1836, Charles Darwin filled out 15 notebooks while traveling aboard the HMS Beagle, voyages that took him to South America, the Galapagos Islands, and Australia. During the rest of his life, he filled countless more ..
This meticulous and obsessive habit of taking notes was not limited to his studies and discoveries. Doodles in notebooks are much more mundane aspects of life, from tracking expenses to shopping lists.
However, it is this incessant need to take notes and keep a journal. Start This Simple Habit To Jumpstart Your Productivity:Journaling Start This Simple Habit To Jumpstart Your Productivity:Journaling is an underrated professional tool and a foundational habit of many successful people. From increasing productivity to staying accountable, we explore why you should consider introducing journaling as a productivity tool in your workday. Read More In his own words:
If Darwin were alive today, the deluge of information available at his fingertips would no doubt have filled him with excitement. But also the anguish. For such a voracious consumer of information in all forms, he probably would have needed something more powerful to record his thoughts and findings than a notepad and 6 papers. Simple Reasons Paper Can Still Be Your Killer Productivity App 6 Simple Reasons Paper Can Still Be The Paper Killer Productivity App Can Be A More Powerful Tool For Productivity Than A Computer Or Touch Device , and should not be discarded immediately. Not convinced? Here are six reasons why the role is still relevant. Read more . Something a bit more like Microsoft OneNote, maybe.
In this article, I'll introduce you to OneNote and show you how Darwin could have used this tool to store, classify, and use all of his research and thoughts. Maybe in the end, you'll even be able to use OneNote How to migrate from Evernote to OneNote, and Why should I migrate from Evernote to OneNote and why should I think Microsoft OneNote is better than Evernote? Or maybe it just suits your project management style. Either way, here's how you can easily migrate all your notes from Evernote to OneNote. Read More
OneNote is a digital note-taking app that works on all your devices. It offers an efficient way to record, organize, and sort all forms of information, and arrange it in a way that turns your notes into productivity aids.
Before you write OneNote down for being a member of Microsoft's notoriously poorly designed family of tools, give it a try. The user interface is simple and intuitive. And the user experience design is. away better than Evernote (a similar app I've been working on for years).
Once you start storing your notes in OneNote, you can access them from all your devices, including desktop and web apps (unfortunately, Mac users have fewer OneNote features) The Essential Guide to OneNote for Mac The Essential Guide OneNote for Mac OneNote is a free, cross-platform note-taking app for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Our short guide summarizes everything you need to know. Forget your Microsoft hate and try OneNote with us today. Read More You can easily search your notes and organize them. You can even collaborate in real time on your notes.
But these are mostly features that can be accessed in tools like Evernote, too. Rather, it is the way in which you can structure and organize each of your notes within OneNote, which would have made it a great choice for Darwin. Or, for that matter, anyone with a diverse range of interests and a healthy appetite for consuming content in all its forms.
Our speculations on how Charles Darwin might have used OneNote to organize his observations will give you a glimpse of OneNote's potential and spark ideas for managing his own work.
One of Darwin's most famous notebooks:the "Red Notebook" - It was filled with notes on a wide range of subjects. Later notebooks, however, were more meticulously arranged. Notebook "UNA" It was dedicated to geology, notebook. “north” To the mutability of the species. The alphabetical list continued.
OneNote is particularly well-suited for this type of subject-based organization.
As you can see in the image below, within the app you can launch multiple notebooks. Within your notebook, you can add different tabs (or "sections"). Your notes are stored as separate pages within these sections.
If Darwin started a OneNote notebook called "Red Notebook", he would have opened a new section For each topic, such as species identification, or geology. With the previous section, he may have had a single note dedicated to each species (see above). Each of those notes acts like an expandable notebook page, where you can insert, annotate, and drag and drop all sorts of information wherever you want.
As you can imagine, being able to visually organize content exactly how you want it is much more useful than just having tons of individual notes.
The range of thoughts and ideas that Darwin wrote was amazing, from beautiful sketches to cryptic and abstract sentences that only he could understand. But no matter how Darwin chose to capture his thoughts, chances are OneNote can handle it.
Each note can contain a wide range of content types, from easily formatted text, images, and tables, to voice and video notes, maps, checklists, and even handwritten doodles.
Once a piece of content is added to a note, it can be dragged and dropped where it is most useful.
Whether conducting research by highlighting articles and books, watching videos, taking photos, or exchanging emails, it can all be captured with OneNote.
If Darwin had recorded the sounds of birds, or videos of the Galapagos, this would have sat perfectly alongside detailed annotations within a single note.
If he had been in the field, his handwritten notes might have been uploaded. If he needed to work on basic math, this could be done without leaving the grade.
This ability to use a single program to keep track of a wide range of data types is one of the reasons OneNote is becoming so popular.
As Darwin was an avid reader on a wide range of subjects (probably just like you and me), the need to keep track of what he had read, and what he had found interesting in that content was compelling..
Fortunately, if any of that content was in the form of a Visio chart or diagram, he could have been inserted into his notes. If you needed to save a paper document, OneNote Optical Character Recognition 4 free online OCR tools put to the ultimate test 4 Free online OCR tools put to the ultimate test Editable text formats made easy . We tested some free online OCR tools so you don't have to. The Read More (OCR) function would allow you to search for a scanned version.
Alternatively, by installing the OneNote browser extension, content can be easily clipped from websites and remove distracting elements such as ads.
And if you liked reading articles on Instapaper, Pocket, or Readability, integrating your accounts with IFTTT or Zapier would mean you could save entire articles or just their highlights directly to your OneNote account.
OneNote's real-time collaboration features let you invite others to view and edit your notes. As they work on your note(s), you can see those changes in real time. For students working on courses, or colleagues working on a project, this can be a boon.
For Darwin, being able to invite some of his mentors to leave notes, questions, and points of consideration for his notes is a feature he would have loved (although for this to work, the notes must be shared on OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint). ). 
He no longer would have had to write long letters and wait impatiently for a reply. Instead, he could be advancing his theory of evolution through real-time collaboration with his closest friends..
And if his colleagues haven't used OneNote, sending an email with the full note is as simple as a single click.
What good are notes if you can't find what you're looking for? Darwin's response to this was to have a notebook for each topic. Mimicking this organizational structure in OneNote is fairly easy, but when you start to have hundreds of notes, things can get a bit complicated.
In these cases, different parts of different notes can be easily “tagged” so you can find what you need by categorizing (see these tags below). For example, if you have a lot of to do articles or questions spread over several notes, you can easily extract them (this search function is not available in the Mac version).
If you want to search multiple notes, CTRL + E searches for phrase words in all open notebooks. CTRL + F finds only the note you are currently reviewing.
For Darwin, this would have meant that he could instantly get all the relevant information he had, say Woodchecker Finches within any of his notebooks. In the same way, if he had marked any questions that he still had to answer before his theory was correct, all of these could have been shown so that they could be worked on one by one.
I personally love using OneNote to collect research and organize the articles I'm working on. Quotes, images, links, and highlights can be moved around the page, which means I can plan an article much more easily before I start writing.
But there are many more uses for OneNote. 10 Unique Ways to Use Microsoft OneNote 10 Unique Ways to Use Microsoft OneNote OneNote is one of Microsoft's most underrated apps. It is available on almost all platforms and can do a lot of tricks that you would not expect from a note keeping app. Read More Microsoft's note-taking app is designed for both students and teachers. Go ahead, organize, collaborate, and share with these tips for taking better notes. Read More 5 Tips for using OneNote as your to-do list. 5 Tips for using OneNote as your to-do list. Are you making a to-do list on your to-do list? Set it up in OneNote to make things as easy as possible. Read more . Darwin's note-taking habit was a vehicle to show you the main features on offer OneNote is now truly free with more features than before OneNote is now truly free with more features than before Evernote no longer rules out the few apps to take grades. Microsoft recently announced that OneNote would be freer than ever. Let us show you what this means in terms of features and functionality. Read more . How you choose to use those features is up to you.
What would you use OneNote for? And if you already use the software, what tricks could you share?
