OneNote

[Katie2014]

I was curious if anyone has used the Microsoft Office program OneNote in regards to Stage Management?

If so how have you used it and what benefits of using it have you had on your production process?

Any tips or suggestions about using it are greatly appreciated.

[dallas10086]

I toyed with the idea of using it for blocking and to call a show, but in the end I decided against it. I am really detailed when it comes to the formatting of my scripts and OneNote is too basic in this regards. I did like that I could add notes on the sides for blocking or cues, but it was very time consuming. Hope this helps.

[KMC]

I used the program briefly for a show I stage managed while in college.  I had a hybrid tablet PC and thought this would be an excellent program, however I found the program very clunky and difficult to use effectively.  I was spending more time on making the program fit my needs than it was worth and I quickly abandoned my attempt to use it for Stage Management...

Now, this was the earliest version of One Note (back in 2005 or so), so the program could quite possibly be a much better solution now, however my experience with the program was not terribly productive for Stage Management.

[BLee]

OneNote works really great if you are the type of person who likes to keep a second binder with all the production paperwork. I used to have a tablet, but I found that function to be non-functional. The writing feature wasn't as sensitive as it needed to be so I gave up on that aspect of OneNote, but organizationally it worked well.

I set up the tabs as I do for any production notebook with all the departments having a tab plus a tab for schedules, contact sheets, check lists, etc. Then I just transfered a copy of all paperwork into the "binder" for easy reference. It was actually very useful in that regards, but it is very simple and wouldn't have been useful for much else.

That being said, that was with the 2005 version on my old tablet PC. Now I have a Mac without OneNote and have not missed it yet. Maybe if they had a nice version for the iPad I would reconsider trying to use it again and fine tune its uses.