Google Notebook is a very versatile organizational tool. Combine that with an amazingly smooth interface, and you have an application that's very fun to use. Notebooks' ability to quickly gather your ideas, thoughts, or notes is what makes it useful. However, the interface is what makes it the best.
So what can Notebook do?
I've found that Notebook is useful for two main things:
Clean up your hard drive of miscellaneous text files, documents, and any text that can be transferred to Notebook, for use anywhere with an internet connection. This could include anything from software registration codes that you can never find when you need to; phone numbers, addresses, or documents of any kind.
Keep giant (or small) lists of just about anything - URLs you want to recall later, to-do lists, reference sites on a particular vacation spot, general thoughts on something, and just stuff you want to quickly jot down for later reference.
Specifically, you can do a number of different things with Notebook:
Looking for a job? Create a Notebook for your resume, current job duties, and job leads.
Play fantasy football? Create a Notebook that tracks week-by-week progress of your team; URLs from fantasy football blogs, or articles about players on your team.
Organizing a family get-together? Create a public Notebook that shows people information about the event.
Clean out your inbox. Got some emails that you just can't delete, because the information contained within might be useful later? Create a Notebook for those emails, and finally delete them out of your inbox!
Writing a term paper? Create a Notebook for reference sites, articles, and any materials that you'll use to write the paper. You could even go as far as writing the paper itself, in Notebook, since it has general formatting capabilities.
Manage Christmas lists, for yourself or others.
Keep a list of passwords for various web sites or applications you use.
Jot down confirmation numbers from payments you've made - over the phone, or online.
Using Notebook
Organize your notes by easily dragging them around - based on priority. To drag many notes at once, hold SHIFT while you select multiple notes. Then drag everything at once!
Create sub-headings for more extensive notebooks, allowing easier differentiation. For example, if you have a Google Notebook "To-Do" list, you can create sub-headings in that list called:
Main List (this is your "overall" main section for To-Do notes - a complete picture of everything)
High Priority (these notes could be things that were recently "prompted" for your attention)
Not Urgent (these notes could be things that need to get done soon, but not right this second)
These are just a few examples. You could even get more organized with it, if you want.
Does a particular note have a lot of information on it - absorbing a lot of screen space?
Hide or show (minimize or maximize) notes by clicking the arrow next to them. You can do the same thing for sections (sub-headings).
Move notes from one notebook to another by simply dragging it to the target notebook.
Search your notebooks for the information you're after.
The extension sits quietly in the bottom-right corner of your Firefox browser window.
Simple click to open it, or use the keyboard shortcut - Alt + N.
The extension window allows you to manage your Notebooks as smoothly as the web page itself. You can create new Notebooks, and edit existing Notebooks. However, you cannot drag-and-drop within the extension window.
Bottom line
Google Notebook should meet most of your note-taking needs.
About the author(s)
Matt Thommes is an independent publishing enthusiast, mobile blogger, content creator, informative writer, web developer from a suburb of Chicago. Never one to conform, Matt intends to promote the effect the web has on our lives, in an effort to intensify, instruct, and clarify all that is happening around us.
Comments
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And the most important thing that it can't do is EXPORT. Second most important: It can't integrate with anything else, unless you happen to be a Python hacker with a tolerance for incomplete and undocumented APIs.
To be fair, I use it daily, and have just used it three times in the past five minutes. I can get HTML out of it at any time. But if I could just get a bloody RSS or Atom feed out of it (which should be child's play for Google), I could integrate it with my desktop apps. Even if I could shoot the notes over to Google Documents (nee Writely), that would be a reasonable workaround (and a good thing in itself).
But right now, Google Notebook is basically unfinished, and shows no signs of progress toward completion.
You can export to Google docs now. Not the individual notes, but the notebook. Google docs is much more useful as a writing tool.
Many more useful additions to Notebooks, the star for me is the ability to move to other notebooks in their corresponding sections.
Make a point of exploring the updated version.
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