I reached a few milestones setting up the new laptop. 1. All of my email was transferred over--not quickly or easily since it required me to import them into Windows Live Mail before exporting them to Outlook 2007--but that's done. And 2. my writing program is setup and ready to go. I was able to bring over my quick correct words (I use that a lot, including for character names, words I frequently typo, and for words I consistently misspell. There are a few of those, although once I enter them, I usually remember how to spell them. Go figure.) and I also transferred my custom dictionary. There are a lot of words in there, too. I couldn't figure out a way to bring over my macros, but I only use three of those so I just recreated them.
There's still a lot more to do, but the mission critical stuff is ready on the new laptop and so I spent Sunday night exploring my new program--OneNote 2007.
I'd heard good things about this program for a while, but it wasn't packaged with the Office 2003 suite and I couldn't see spending over $100 for it. This became my first new program that had to be checked out. I started with a video tutorial on integrating it with the Office 2007 of products including Outlook and just about found geek nirvana. :-) When I ran through the getting started screens, I hit writer nirvana. This is going to be a huge help when it comes to research. I can cut and paste in parts of web pages!
How awesome is this???
This has been one of my major headaches. I've tried bookmarking the pages only to have some of them go defunct, including some tremendous resources that disappeared when Yahoo closed down their free website service. (Sorry, I can't remember the name of it off hand.) I've tried printing the stuff out, but for some books the folder gets awfully thick and there have been times that I can't locate the information a second time even if I highlighted the important stuff. I've lost track of the number of hours I've wasted combing through the same pages again and again trying to find the one fact I need. Saving the page to the hard drive also doesn't work real well for me because unless I manage to name the page something that will ring memory bells, I can't remember what's what. It also junks up the hard drive of the computer and they slow down and get junked up fast enough as it is. And pasting into Word doesn't work either because the formatting is always wonky and I find that so distracting that I can't stand it.
The best part is you can search through all your notebooks from one location. That way I don't have to remember exactly which tab/folder I saved something in, I just have to remember a key word. There's also a tagging feature, but I didn't explore that too deeply yet.
I've been thinking how I'm going to organize my first notebook and I decided one tab for each main character (not just the heroes and heroines), but beyond that? I'm not sure. Maybe one tab for each book in the series for story specific research info as well as a tab for research that would encompass all the books. I need to play around with this a little, but I think it's going to be major cool!
Only issue? I don't have complete functionality in the program because I have a 64 bit operating system on my laptop and it's made for 32 bit. This is supposed to be fixed in the 2010 release, but it doesn't help me now.
