Research organization using OneNote

I think I can safely say that for the past 3 years I've been looking for the ideal way to organize my research materials. By the time I went to do my fieldwork in New York, I had already started on a big paper collection, and since that time it has only expanded. (Yes, how many people do you know that fly off with a suitcase of papers and journal articles. I am ashamed to say that has been me.)

In starting on the ethnographic work in earnest back in 2008, I did a survey of qualitative analysis software, and after testing Atlas.ti, MaxQDA and nVivo, I picked nvivo to work with. (I later ran across Qualrus, which some people like, but I had already bought nvivo so I didn't review it particularly.) Now nvivo is a very powerful tool for qualitative researchers and it definitely helps us to be better organized. But it wasn't quite the holy grail that I had been seeking for research organization, although I definitely will keep using this type of software.

I found that I wasn't using it quite as often as I would have imagined for a key reason: it takes a long time to load in XP, and having said no to Vista, I'm currently waiting to have the time to move over to Windows 7. So it wasn't the easy interface that I could just pull up to make notes with the same way as writing in a physical journal like I do when I'm out interviewing.

Now, to take on that function, I tried a few different things in the last few months - evernote, Mendeley, OneNote, back to Mendeley, and now back to OneNote. Now that I have been working with OneNote for a while, I have to say that I absolutely love it. It apparently was started as an initial technology for tablet PCs, and has great integration there (so I hear) but it is so much more. I suppose this is the kind of epiphany that mac users had when they stared using Devonthink, but for those of us who are on PC, there wasn't this great kind of option.

You can do an online search yourself and see all about onenote and why people like it, but let me tell you why I like it for research.
1. It's intuitive and easy to use
2. There are many more useful features once you get going with it
3. Easy searching in it
4. Easy to draw
5. Stays pretty organized by default
6. Easy way to hold all those notes and scribblings

Now, I won't say that there are no problems. It isn't great with PDFs, and does this silly 'print to OneNote' thing for those. If you make a table, you can't do an autosum, as one might expect. If you draw, there's no way to group the drawing objects like in word or powerpoint (sigh). There is no OneNote mobile for blackberry.

But regardless, it is making me so happy to use this and I feel that I'm now able to put together my research notes and quotes in a way that really makes sense, and is searchable. This is definitely worth the $80 or so that I paid for it, and to be quite honest, it should probably be included with all versions of Office, because it really is just that useful. But really, don't just take my word for it, download the trial version and give it a whirl.