MS Office users migrating to Mackintosh computers will note a number of immediate differences as compared to their programs running on a PC. For PC users, the latest version of Office is Office 2010 while for Mac users it is Office 2011.

Office for Mac has a number of restrictions that are not found on a PC; the most immediate of these is the absence of a database such as MS-Access. However, the topic we want to address here is that of Word and in Word 2011, Microsoft have added a ‘Notebook Layout’ gallery to the various options as well as a ‘Publishing Layout’ view. To me, the Notebook view makes up for not having OneNote included as an application as it performs many similar functions (albeit not entirely), while the Publisher Gallery contains useful templates that were previously only found in Publisher.

In this blog, our concern is only with Layout View since it is a useful tool and one that is often overlooked.

The Notebook view in Word has a number of uses:

• Students for note taking
• Office workers for note taking
• Writers for sketching out a writing project (prewriting)
• Authors taking notes for the chapters of a book
• Minute takers for recording meetings, and so on.

I am sure there are a lot more.

Opening a notebook

To open a notebook, choose File à New from Template and navigate to the selection in the Notebook Gallery. (Figure 1). It does not matter much which template you choose as you can change it later from the Appearance ribbon within your Word window.

You will notice immediately that the screen is somewhat different to the one you are used to in Print Layout view (which is the default screen I use). For a start the document has the appearance of a college notebook – complete with ring binder and tabs. The ring binder and the ruler lines can be turned off and are there only to ‘pretty’ up the screen, as is the background. More on that in a moment.

Figure 1: The Word template Gallery for Notebook view

Each page of your notebook has its own tab and each tab corresponds to a section of a standard document. Indeed, if you open a notebook in an earlier version of Word then it will become one continuous document with a section break at each tab.

You will also notice that in this view, there are no paragraph styles although you can still customise your font or character styles. Your ‘notes’ are recorded as bullet points with up to nine ‘Note Levels’ (Figure 2). You can also increase or decrease the level as well as move groups of text by using the arrow keys below the dropdown menu.

Before you commence your note taking, you can give your page a title (this serves as your header) and also you can choose between setting a date attribute (date created or modified) or alternatively you can set the author attribute.

Figure 2: Setting note levels

The Appearance ribbon

The second ribbon in this view is the Appearance ribbon. This allows you to play with your document by changing the ‘type’ (with or without notebook rings etc.), background colour and so on. For young people to whom ‘style’ is important these are quite nice features but they add no special functionality.

Now had the desktop background been live such as is the case with Publisher whereby you can drag items onto the desktop until such time as you want to use them, that would have been really cool, but sadly you cannot. Interestingly, the Publishing Layout view does have this feature – that will be the subject of a further blog.)

You can of course, drag material into your scrapbook but that seems to be a more complex option.

The Audio Notes ribbon

The third ribbon you have available in this view is that of ‘Audio Notes’. In this view you can record audio notes that you place strategically in your text as you review your notes. These are in addition to Note Flags and Scribble that are accessed from the Home ribbon. I have found though that sometimes, turning on the audio and attempting to record hangs the system and you have to use ‘Force Quit’ to restart the application. And that is on an iMac running the Lion OS and with 4GB of memory.

How useful is it really?

At first I was sceptical but I have come to find notebook documents very useful in a number of niche areas. One such area is in gathering ideas for blogging.

I blog in two key areas. For a UK group, I write a series of monthly blogs on political and economic developments in Asia. For each country I keep a notebook with 12 tabs—one for each moth. That way I can add as I need to and keep track of previous notes. The second area of course, is my own blog on effective writing where I deal mainly with office productivity, writing and editing. You will probably be reading this on my own blogsite at www.thecreativegenie.com.au. In this instance I have one tab for each draft topic I am working on.

There are probably a number of other areas I COULD use notebooks such as to further develop the courses I have written. I am not yet that organised but I have made some new year resolutions in this regard so I hope I am not a hopeless case.

View the video tutorial