advice

OneNote

Having used Trello, Notability, Google Drive/Docs, Evernote, iOS notes and countless other note taking apps and software products over recent years, I’d say I’m fairly well positioned to pass judgement on OneNote.

Made available freely by Microsoft (when?) there are different versions available as apps on iOS and android devices and Windows 10. The full version is available via Microsoft’s Office 365 subscription, or via older non-subscription installations of Microsoft Office – like the Office 2013 product I have.

So, what is OneNote? At its core, it’s a note-taking app, but it’s so much more powerful than that. It’s a collaboration platform; it’s a virtual, access-anywhere collection of notebooks; it’s a powerful, easily-searchable, online filing cabinet for thoughts, documents and ideas. And best of all for me, is the seamless way it integrates across devices.

A typical use-case for me will start with me capturing some ideas on my iPhone, writing out some bullet points. Then when I’m on my commuter train, I’ll pull out my iPad, connect to OneNote and continue expanding on those ideas, sketching out concepts or diagrams with my finger or stylus. Once in work, out comes the laptop and again, connecting to OneNote, my notebook will sync and I’ll pick up where I left off, refining the content I’ve been working on throughout my journey to work. There’s no complicated method of transferring files and thinking about file formats. It just works. Without any complications. And it’s all so very user friendly!

What does it look like? Take a look at this intro video from Microsoft…

There’s a simple but intuitive structure:

  • You have notebooks, which I equate to the likes of a physical ring binder or folder.
  • Within each notebook, you have sections. These are tabbed areas within the notebook. So again, continuing the physical metaphor, these would be the coloured dividers that are typically used in a ring binder.
  • Each section can then have a series of pages and sub-pages.

Features I think are important:

Collaboration

  • Not only editing the same document at the same time, but also version tracking and the ability to highlight changes made by others.

Screen clipping

  • Much more powerful than standard print-screens, especially with a dual monitor setup.

Offline editing

  • Start online, continue offline, or vice versa. The system flexibly syncs with devices so your content is available wherever you want.

OCR

  • Taking picture of a page of notes or a whiteboard discussion and converting that to OneNote text, which then, naturally becomes editable and searchable.

Embedding files

  • You can import content, or simply attach files – which is great if you’ve got source documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, etc. so all your reference material is kept in one place.

Printing from Word to OneNote.

  • If like me, you’ve got a lot of old Word Documents, you don’t have to convert these individually to be available in OneNote. You can simply print to OneNote (tip: change advanced options in OneNote so that it creates a single note, rather than individual pages for each page of the Word document!)

Print from OneNote.

  • The other way around to the point above, but OneNote’s desktop version allows you to easily export to PDF and Word, or even as a OneNote file to send to someone else if they’re not on the same sharing network.

Password protection (in full/desktop version only)

  • Lock individual pages or sections behind simple passwords.

Tags

  • Add tags to documents to assist with searching. There are a range of tags available, from critical items, remember for blog, phone numbers, addresses, etc. then once the tag is added, simply “Find Tags” on the menu bar will show these tags in your documents. Very quick and very easy to use!

Checkboxes

  • Actually a kind of tag, but really easy to use. Highlight a list of content and press Ctrl+1 and the list is instantly converted to a checkbox list. Press Ctrl+1 again and the checkbox(es) will be ticked, to mark as complete. And press Ctrl+1 a final time to remove the checkbox. Again, all checkboxes show up in the “Find tags” menu option, showing in the To Do list – across all pages and sections in your notebook. There is the option of splitting this by section or notebook too, in case you have lots of lists.

Keyboard shortcuts

  • There are tons of keyboard shortcuts available in OneNote (as with most Microsoft product). The checkbox Ctrl+1 is just one of them. For a complete list, check out the Microsoft page here.

Subpages

  • As your OneNote use expands, you’ll find that some sections end up having a lot of pages. To help manage these, it’s possible to nest some pages as subpages, underneath others.  And (see OneTastic comment later) there are also some powerful macros available to help with this too, like the very helpful automatic Table of Contents in current section, for example.

Powerful search (also integrates with Delve via Office 365)

  • The search facility is quick, accurate and powerful – and if you’re a full Office 365 user, your OneNotes will start being indexed and presented through Delve too.

Cloud based, so is accessible anywhere

  • This universal accessibility has to be one of the biggest selling points for OneNote. It just simply works. And although cloud based, syncs with devices so OneNotes can be edited offline too when you’re out of wifi range.

Integrates with personal OneDrive.

  • Easily share content to/from OneDrive and with others. Your personal OneDrive has tons of free storage – as OneDrive comes with a very handy 15GB free for personal use. Which if you’re only using it for OneNote storage will take a very long time to fill up. If you’re using OneNote at work too, you can also easily switch from different OneDrive accounts, so you can (if you want) easily access your work-based OneNotes to continue that urgent writing when you’re out of the office – even on your iPhone/smartphone.
  • And if you need more OneDrive space, you can secure an extra 0.5GB of space for every individual you refer to the service, up to a maximum of 10GB. Here’s my OneDrive referral so if you haven’t already signed up, please do use my link! Thanks.

I haven’t taken the plunge yet and opted for a personal Office 365 account.  At £5.99 a month, it’s not exactly cheap… But that’s only for one personal computer. For a household (up to 5 computers + mobile devices), it’s £7.99 per month. As a Netflix and Amazon Prime household, that’s another subscription too far, especially with an older non-subscription version of Office working absolutely fine. The subscription model that Microsoft, Adobe and others are adopting is another story though…

There’s also a useful community around OneNote that has extended the platform with some very helpful macros and plugins. The very excellent OneTastic provides a very good selection of these that can easily be added to the desktop app (but as far as I’m aware, is restricted to the full desktop version (not the Windows 10, iOS or Android apps), but very helpfully creates some very useful shortcuts to make life even easier with OneNote.

So, to wrap up, I highly recommend getting to grips with OneNote.

Links to OneNote:

Windows app

iOS app

Android app

Changing Amazon delivery charges is a risky business

So as a one-time Amazon affiliate I received notification recently that the terms of the free delivery (Super Saver Delivery as they call it) in the UK was about to change (as of 1st May 2015). And in my opinion, it’s not a minor change at all, as they’re changing the minimum qualifying order from £10 to £20. 

Amazon super saver

Amazon super saver affiliate notice

It’s not the first change they’ve made, as the super saver delivery used to be free for all orders. They subsequently introduced a £5 cap, which quickly became a £10 limit – and this was just about acceptable, as it still meant a lot of orders could be considered impulse purchases. And if your basket fell below the £10 cap, sometime you might add something extra items that you knew you were going to use at some point (like a commodity item such as printer paper, or something that cost a couple of quid), just so you hit the minimum order level.

But at £20, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to reach that qualifying cap and it’ll take a good few commodity items to get close. 

I can understand why they’re doing it, as postage charges have increased, so they need to cover their costs. And the prices of many items has also gone up too, so from a consumer’s perspective maybe they’ll not notice the cap as much as I think they will. But from a personal perspective, I think it’ll definitely make me think twice about using Amazon if I know I have to pay postage charges. 

Forcing Prime

Some have said that in raising the limit, they’re trying to drive customers to opting for their Prime subscription. At £79 per year, that’s quite a leap of faith and an upfront commitment to the Amazon way of thinking. And for me, as a happy Netflix subscriber (better quality, more devices, better range of material IMHO) and having had the free trial of Prime – I found a worrying range of products that weren’t eligible for Prime delivery and also didn’t particularly rate their Prime TV/video services. I found their apps clunky (compared to Netflix), their range limited (although they do often have slightly better, more modern movies available) and generally the whole experience just felt a little forced.

I’d much rather they did one thing well, rather than many things in a mediocre manner. Netflix understand that and that’s why I’ve been subscribing for a while. eBay understand it too, and I think that with many of their lower ticket items continuing to be offered with free delivery (and no minimum order value) they might be the big winner as a result of this move by Amazon. At one time Play.com might have been a credible alternative, but since Rakuten have taken over, the platform has gone downhill and seems to be confused about what its raison d’etre actually is – not a smart move in such a fast moving, online, very visible world of online retail!

Convenience

So will I still use Amazon? Probably. Although the delivery charges will make me use it less. And less frequently too, which I think is an important consideration. I’ll not be going online and making an impulse purchase through Amazon any more, that’s for sure. Maybe that’s what they want? Maybe they want us to use their wish lists and basket facility more, so that they can have fewer, higher value deliveries. If that’s the case, then maybe this is a stroke of management genius.

But from a consumer’s perspective, I think they just might have shot themselves in the foot and opened the door to other, leaner, more customer-friendly operators that offer exactly what we want: flexibility, free/cheap delivery, and the ability to make impulse purchases when the moment takes us, not just when we have a sufficiently high value basket of goods.

Do comparison sites cost us more?

They’re often heralded as consumer champions, giving individuals access to the whole (or a much larger proportion) of the market than they would have been able to access independently. But I wonder how much the presence of the comparison sites has actually inflated the costs we all pay as a result of the fees that they charge (to the insurers and other financial services companies).

The main comparison sites: Moneysupermarket.com, Compare the Market, Confused.com and Go Compare are all very profitable organisations in their own right. They must be making their money somewhere and since they don’t directly charge consumers for their custom, they must be making money from the insurers and other providers that they work with. And this cost must be funded somehow… so I believe this ‘cost of acquisition’ of a customer must be being passed on to the end user. It therefore has to be a false economy of some magnitude, arguably with inflated premiums for an end user to accommodate the extra costs the organisations are paying to the comparison sites. We may be getting access to a wider array of deals, so we can see the best rates in the market – but if the rates are all higher as a result, is that really benefiting anyone – other than the comparison sites?

To soften the impact of the inflated costs, there are different ways to benefit from the sales process that gives something back to the consumer. I’ve listed a couple of examples below that I’m aware of, where you’re additionally rewarded for using the services. I’ve used the cashback providers repeatedly and I’d highly recommend them.

The recently launched Meerkat Movies is a good example of one of the incentives these comparison sites offer to tempt consumers to use their services. On the surface, it seems like a great offer. Buy an insurance product after having compared through the comparison site Compare the Market and then you’re eligible to 2-for-1 cinema tickets every Tuesday and Wednesday for the following 12 months. It’s a better deal than the Orange 2-for-1 cinema deal that was only available on Wednesdays, and it’s valid for the whole year – but what’s the hidden cost? 

My car insurance recently came up for renewal and we all know the advice is to shop around for a better deal than the one your insurer offers you, as you’re typically able to better it on the open market. However, having seen the Meerkat Movies deal and thinking I’d like to take advantage of it – my search on the Compare the Market website returned a deal that was over 16% more expensive than the renewal deal offered by my existing insurer. I guess this is how they’re able to fund the Meerkat Movies deal!

Having said that – Hot UK Deals – a money saving / deals website where individuals report back on the best offers, savings and deals they find in the UK as they come across them – has reported a workaround for the Meerkat Movies, whereby you can simply purchase a one day insurance policy for as little as £1.37 and therefore be eligible for the Meerkat Movies offer. If this works, it’s a great piece of advice. Check out the link here.

Alternatively, to claw back some of the money the comparison sites make out of you, consider using one of the cashback sites, like TopCashback. Depending on the policy that you’re looking for, you could save a lot of money! At the time of writing, More Than insurance is offering £106.05 cashback on Landlords insurance, for example. Quidco is the other main cashback site in the UK – and they offer similar, although not always the same, cashback deals on insurers and other online retailers. So it’s always worth checking both of them to see where you can get the best deal. Through Quidco, for example, take out a life insurance policy via the comparison site Confused.com and at the time of writing, you’re able to claim up to £127 in cashback. It’s free money, so you might as well claim it. All you’re doing is sharing the commission the insurer would typically pay to any referring organisation.

It would seem the comparison sites are here to stay – for better or worse. Going to the insurers direct offers no better rates than through the comparison sites, and in many instances you’re missing out on exclusive deals or incentives that are offered through those referral sites. Couple those incentives with various cashback offers (from the cashback sites) and it can soften the deal somewhat, but I just can’t help but wonder if the presence of the comparison sites is actually just costing us all more in the long run.

List of online courses, free training and MOOCs

I’ve been impressed with the pace of development of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and have even signed up for and studied some subjects through various platforms. But what I wasn’t aware of until recently, was that there’s a handy MOOC aggregator that’s been developed which looks across all the available courses online and presents a single interface for searching across them.

This resource is called Class Central and includes courses from the following providers:

Through Class Central, I’ve been able to discover a wider range of courses and have signed up to future classes as a means of continuing my professional development.  Most are free, although Udacity seem to charge for a lot of their content. The other suppliers typically offer an unverified programme which doesn’t cost you anything, but you don’t get the certificate at the end to demonstrate you’ve studied. The certificate is less important than the learning for me, so I wasn’t too bothered by this.

Many of the world’s leading universities and centres of higher education have made a selection of their course materials available online. Live courses offer an interactive element with assessed coursework and tests, whereas archived courses are still accessible with self-study being achieved through the blended learning approach of text and video material. 

At least two of the MOOC providers listed above – Coursera and edX – offer iOS apps which I’ve found particularly good, not least because they allow you to download course material to the app so that you can watch videos and read documents offline when you don’t have an internet connection. 

So, if you haven’t explored the world of MOOC’s yet, I implore you to give them a go. Challenge yourself and learn something new!

PDF splitter free online tool

Occasionally I have to work with some huge documents, typically as PDFs, but I don’t always have my laptop with the full Acrobat package on it. When that happens, and I need to break the PDFs up, I use a free online PDF splitter tool called PDFSplit! – which is available here.

It can extract all pages in a PDF to individual PDFs, or just grab a certain section of a PDF and save it into a new file. It’s quick. It’s online. And it’s free.

Video download tool

Continuing the theme of highlighting free online tools that I’m finding useful, there’s a tube downloader that’s got a great range of download options and approved sites. It’s called Tube Offline and is a firm favourite of mine.

Obviously you need to check the legality of downloading and storing videos that are available online, but it’s been very helpful to capture some online videos so they can be watched offline, when I don’t have an internet connection. Kids’ cartoons, training videos, fitness lessons – download them for free with this tool and they can then be stored on your iPad, iPhone or other mobile device to watch when you’re on the go. 

And if the file you download isn’t in the right format, this file converter here is pretty handy too, which also includes a download option to grab videos straight from online streams. Or the online converter tool – here – which I’ve highlighted previously.

Free, online file converter tool

Although I’m a big fan of Calibre and use it to manage the bulk of my e-book collection, occasionally, I just want to quickly convert individual documents or ebooks. And for this purpose, I’ve come across a helpful free, online book converter tool – cunningly called “Online Converter Tool” – and you can access it here.

Just saying it’s an ebook converter tool is a little misleading though because it can do a lot more than that. It can convert to most of the main ebook and document formats – including ePub, mobi (for Kindles) and PDFs – but it will also convert audio files into different formats too, including to AAC, MP3, OGG, WAV and WMA (among others). 

Similarly, there are video converters – think AVI, MKV, MOV, MP4, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and WMV – as well as device-specific settings for iPhone, iPads, Android devices and others. And there are also free online converter tools for images (BMP, EPS, GIF, JPG, PNG, etc.), documents (DOC, DOCX, HTML, PDF, RTF, TXT, etc.) and even archive converters (7Z, ZIP, etc. – but no RAR). 

Considering it’s a completely free resource, the few files I’ve thrown at it were dealt with quickly and produced flawless PDFs from ePubs, with no watermarking or other additions to my document. So it’s earned a place in my bookmarks and will no doubt be a tool I continue to use in the future.

The difference between imply and infer

I have to confess this is one of the set of words I’d used interchangeably previously, without appreciating the difference between them. But having been picked up by someone about this recently, I wanted to share the learning with others – and for my own future reference.

If someone implies something, they’re suggesting a point in an indirect way rather than stating something specifically. An individual who implies a belief, opinion or fact is attempting to convey this information, but it’s up to the listener to interpret what is being meant.

However, when someone infers something, they’re reaching their own conclusion about what someone has said. 

So, the easy way to remember this is that if someone is implying something, you (as the listener) infer what they say. Or, written another way, you infer a meaning from what someone else has implied.

 

Easy laptop upgrades

Lenovo X201I’ve just had to go through a full install of Windows 7 on my refurbished laptop in the process of upgrading it, and either I’ve become more competent, or it’s a lot easier than it ever was previously (with earlier versions of Windows and other laptops). After years of swearing by desktops and the ease of replacing components as a means of upgrading and squeezing that extra period of life out of the machines, I opted for a refurbished laptop earlier this year. I’ve actually bought exactly the same model as the laptop I use at work, a Lenovo X201, as I’ve been so impressed with its robustness and balance of size, speed and performance. But I knew, from some casual research online that it was also relatively easy to upgrade.

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The difference between raisins and sultanas

raisinsJust this morning as I was adding some dried fruit to my breakfast cereal, I wondered what the difference is between raisins and sultanas – so I decided to check it out with the ever helpful Google. For those that want to know, the difference is as follows:

  • Sultanas are dried white grapes but from seedless varieties. They are golden in colour and tend to be plumper, sweeter and juicier than other raisins.
  • Raisins are also dried white grapes which are dried to produce a dark, sweet fruit.
  • Currants are dried, dark red, seedless grapes. They are dried to produce a black, tiny shrivelled, flavour-packed dried currant.

So there you have it – not so complicated after all, and now I know for sure if I’m ever asked!