I like taking notes, the old fashioned way (by hand in a notebook, on… paper), but I like finding them the new way (using search on my PC). I love OneNote and how easy it is to keep an online notebook with all sorts of data. For example, due to archival rules some of my email starts to “disappear” from my work account after a couple of years. But some emails I like to keep – little nuggets of wisdom, notices, personal information and such I like to keep around. So, I export them to OneNote, where I can keep them safe.
So, I was living this duplicitous life of daily note taking with pen and paper but also filling my online notebook with all sort of information. I wanted to find a way to bridge these two. A few years back I was at a Microsoft convention and ran into a member of the OneNote team that turned me on to a small startup firm called: ModNotebooks. Their website is now gone, this is all you see:
What they did was to send you a very high quality notebook, you would fill it up and ship it off to them. In the back of the notebook was a folder with a mail pouch and prepaid postage. They would receive it, scan it in for you and then dump the contents into your OneNote file behind the scenes. I filled 7 notebooks with them. But alas, their business model did not work, I am guessing, and they have gone out of business.
Now, I am left with my seeming duplicity again. 
How do I get back to having my handwritten notes in OneNote again? Enter, OfficeLens.
I have actually been using this app for some time to scan travel receipts to PDF to turn in for expense reimbursement. And while I have always known I can use it for OneNote notes, I never tried it – namely because I had a better thing in ModNotebooks – or so I thought. Being forced to use something is sometimes what it takes. So, I gave OfficeLens a shot.
First, you download it to your phone. It comes on all three platforms (Windows Phone, iOS, and Android). Next, you hook up your Microsoft account (Live/Hotmail/MSN) and then you start scanning. It automatically finds the page and draws a border around it:
When you click the button at the bottom, it shows you what it got:
In the lower left, you can click the (+1), to add more page (up to 10 at a time – my only complaint – more on that later)* Once complete with your scanning, you click Done at the top right. This will take you to the “Export To” page.
From here I select OneNote and it asks me where I want to put it in my Notebook and when I click Save, it begins to upload it to my OneNote notebook:
And once it is in OneNote, it is fully text searchable, based on my handwriting. Yes, I said “fully text searchable” from my handwriting. Here is what it looks like once it gets to the final destination and I perform a search:
Amazing, eh?
So, my only complaint is that the tool only allows you to scan in 10 pages at once. I wish there was a way to override this, for two reasons:
- I take a lot of notes and I fill 10 pages quickly. I have to get into the habit of scanning every week at this point to keep up. It is not impossible, but it would be nice to skip a few weeks and then scan them all in – in bulk. Right now, I have to upload it in several different batches of 10.
- I recently was working with legal documents and needed to print them out, sign them, scan them in and then send them off. The document had 11 pages. 11. 11! So, I had to scan 10 pages, then scan the last one and then find PDF merge software to merge them all together. That was NOT fun.
With that said, Au Revoir ModNotebooks. You were great while you lasted. I will likely be going back to using Moleskin’s and then using OfficeLens to digitize. We shall see… TUL (the “u” is long, so “tool”) has some nice notebooks too – I love their fine-point pen:
If you have any suggestions, please leave comments below. 
Going back to taking notes by hand…
Anyway, here are my reasons for choosing Nuvio (hopefully this will help some of the rest of you supernova refugees out there): 
It all started when our Water Heater blew up last week, and then one by one more and more bad things started to happen. My wallet is empty and the vacuum cleaner that so voraciously cleaned it out still wants more… 
The reason for this is because their primary business is not VoIP it is PBX installation, so they have more business customers. Since they are more diversified than Vonage and the others out there – like SunRocket – I think they are a better choice and I am planning on switching real soon. A co-worker of mine that I helped convert to SunRocket is already a Nuvio customer, so I am waiting to see how his switch goes before I make go full bore. 
Oh, and while the 