OneNote for Woodshop Project Management?

[Foras Noir]

Anyone out there use Microsoft OneNote to manage their woodshop projects?

Biggest area of interest for me is managing work flow on 32 mm case work. I am a furniture guy. Cab work is a bit scary from a management point of view. Now I need to do about 50 boxes. Getting sick thinking of the piles of parts.

Thank for reading.

[Rich Konopka]

Why not use Microsoft Project? MS project or an open source project management software package will allow you to construct a plan with a timeline for the steps required to produce the cabinets. One Note is a great software product but I do not see how it can help you with this project.

[Terry Welty]

Rich, never heard of the software, but it sounds exactly what I've been looking for... If this works out, I'm going to name my next child after you...

Don't hold your breath!!

Thanks for the inspiration!!

[Matt Meiser]

Project isn't cheap, but does a great job of laying out tasks, resources, etc.

One Note is more like a traditional paper notebook. You can free-form write/draw in it and paste things in. For example, I've dropped an email into a notebook and added notes to the email. Another nice thing about one-note is that multiple people can work in the same notebook at the same time and see what each other is doing. We use it to document recurring team meetings at work.

[Lex Boegen]

I've used MS Project before, although not for anything woodworking-related. If you have a kid in college, ask him/her to buy Project using an educational discount. I bought my copy when I was working on my BS degree and I only paid $40 for it. If this is the only project that you'll need it for though, I'd take a pass on it. It has a bit of a learning curve (like any complex piece of software does).

There are quite a few open-source project management tools available at no cost. Just Google for "open source project management". Most of it will be for Linux, but you can find some MS Windows-compatible software too. I haven't used any of it after completing my degree, so I'm not up-to-date on which products are better than others right now. I'm just a hobbyist, so I use a drawing program and a spreadsheet to manage my cutlists. Time isn't as much an issue for me as cost is.

[Matt Meiser]

If you have a kid in college, ask him/her to buy Project using an educational discount.

Unless they've changed the educational license agreement, that would be a violation.

[Clint Winterhalter]

I was a OneOne user for several years. It was a good place to gather info. I switched to Evernote. It's free if all you want to store are PDF's. I pay the $45 per year for multiple file types. Very handy. You can put it on multiple machines, they will sync with one another. You can also pull info up on the web from evernote.com. If you have a smartphone you can pull info up from there as well. I'm not so sure how great either would be for project management but they both are great resources to organize info.

Good Luck
Clint