Note taking hack
In my work I often have to troll through long lists of pages of material looking for patterns and noting significant trends. I largely don’t like doing this, as it often requires switching back and forth between the document I am reading and the one I am taking notes on and something about that bugs me.
Today though, I am working on a report and I inadvertently discovered a hack. I started entering notes at the top of the document, but as I paged through, I noticed that my notes were appearing on every page. I had accidently been typing them in a header window which repeated over every page. This was very cool! As I read each page, I just kept adding notes to the header window without ever having to scroll back to the top or go to another window. When I finsihed, I just copied the text to a new document and started writing my summary report.
Thought I would share this little hack. I never thought about using repeating elements in a Word or OpenOffice document like that before.
A happy accident ”” I love it!
If it’s a Word document, you can also import it into Powerpoint in “outline” mode, which is sometimes easier for doing “presenter notes”.
Or, if Word / Open Office, then there is the “add notes” function 😛
Yeah but that puts little notes along side the document, I think. THis method creates a document within a document, and one that is easy just to vacuum up at the end and move to a file of its own.
Don’t most people just split the window pane in half using the page divider and navigate two sections of the document independently?
Thanks for sharing that Chris – I can see lots of ways to use it. I normally do the side by side page editing and often get lost as I page back and forth within the doc.
It’s a great idea. Thanks for sharing!