Ready to work OneNote on Surface with an iPad pen.
WEEKS OF HEAVY archiving have shown me real value in a workflow involving Microsoft OneNote and Office Lens on Lumia. The workflow is like having a high resolution OCR scanner in your pocket.
I am breaking down and archiving 15 years of notes scattered throughout four rooms in our home and my office. Those notes need to be indexed or thrown away. Holding them in my hand makes the process easier than I had ever imagined because if I think there's any value to the hard copies, I simply snap them and the Lumia 1020 sends them automatically to OneNote where many of them are indexed. In actual practise, more than half of all my notes are discoverable after I've archived them this way.
I've backtracked on much of what I've done during the past three weeks and I know that every newspaper item or magazine snippet can be found by searching OneNote for them. I know that 70% of everything I've printed as block capitals in my Moleskines is findable. And at the very worst, 30% of my scribbling is discoverable. This is remarkable.
I'm telling all my packrat friends to trust OCR inside OneNote or to leverage OCR inside Evernote Premium. And I've started slowing down my speed of note taking so I can print key items in clear black ink. Doing that makes my work exceptionally memorable (if you consider the value of making something discoverable when using built-in search).
I'm going to test Google Image Search results by exposing some of my academic work to Google crawlers during the revision cycle of the current spring semester. If you're interested in the results, please check back on my InsideView blog during the third week of June 2015.
[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative multimedia in the Limerick School of Art & Design.]
