How to Capture Meeting Tasks in OneNote

Many of my tasks come from meetings with customers, partners, and other business associates. To capture these actions, without annoying everyone in the meeting, I use my table computer and Microsoft OneNote 2007.

OneNote is a really cool application that is specifically designed to capture freeform notes. It provides multiple notebooks and each notebook is divided into tabs (you can even have sub-tabs) and pages. I write my notes, drawing pictures and adding photos. Then I press the Convert to Text button and all of my writing is converted to text. The conversion is nearly perfect and I don't have great hand writing.

When it comes to the actions from the meetings, I highlight the text and press the Make Outlook Tasks button. The tasks are automatically transferred to my Outlook Tasks List and the two list are automatically linked. I can mark the tasks in either location and the completion is set in both applications.

In addition to making highlighted areas tasks, you can also mark them with custom flags. OneNote comes with a set of pre-configured flags, but you can change them to whatever you would like them to be. I have flags for Research, Ideas, Books to Read, Websites to Review, Interesting Quotes, and Jokes. You can then open the Flags Tasks Pane and it automatically create a list of all of your flags for all of your notes across of of your notebooks. Very useful.

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