Drawing Pictures in OneNote

One of the advantages to OneNote is that it's largely free-form. You can enter text and images, paste content from a variety of programs, and even draw pictures. If you're using OneNote for business, you might be thinking the only pictures you'll ever draw in OneNote would be doodles during a particularly boring meeting. However, pictures play a role in all sorts of notes from business to academic to personal. Once you explore the drawing capabilities in OneNote, you might find you'll use these tools more than you ever expected.

You can obtain additional hardware to draw pictures and take handwritten notes on a laptop or desktop. A Graphire tablet allows you to use a pen device with a laptop or desktop computer.

The majority of this chapter focuses on using OneNote on the Tablet PC. While the majority of the information contained here can be adapted to a desktop or laptop, it's often significantly harder to draw pictures with a mouse than with the Tablet PC's pen.

tip

If you're having a hard time drawing pictures in OneNote, adding rule or grid lines to your page might come in handy. These lines can serve as guides to help scale your drawings. For more information on adding rule or gridlines to your pages, see “Using Rule Lines and Grid Lines to Keep Your Information Neat” in Chapter 11. If you merely want to draw your own line on a OneNote page, see “Adding Lines, Tables, and Charts,” in Chapter 16.