feature article let’s plan a birthday...

Having a party is lots of fun, but planning one can be cHallenging. tHis feature outlines HoW Microsoft® office onenote® 2003 can Help Make planning a birtHday party More fun and More MeMorable.

read HoW one MotHer Was able to use onenote in order to capture Her ideas and to do´s and organise tHeM into a plan. learn HoW to use onenote to Make events a success and tHen sHare tHe special day WitH faMily and friends.

�Feature article: Let’s have a birthday party!

Planning my daughter Kate’s yearly birthday party has always been a disorgan-ised process. With multiple to do lists and contact numbers scattered about the house, I’m always left feeling stressed and wondering whether I have remembered to take care of all the important details. This year, armed with my Toshiba Qosmio notebook running OneNote, I maximised both my effectiveness and my efficiency by capturing, organising and reusing key information to plan a birthday party that Kate and her guests thoroughly enjoyed!

let’s Have a birtHday party!The first thing I did was to create a master to do list in OneNote. Using OneNote’s built-in stationery templates greatly simplified this task. I just launched the Stationery task plane from the tool bar, navigated down to the Planners section and clicked on Simple To Do List.

A template was automatically loaded into OneNote, which I quickly filled in. Reorganising the order of my list was easy and didn’t require any retyping. I just moved my cursor over the item and dragged it to a new location in the list.

WHo to invite?The first item on my to do list was to generate a guest list for the party. I created a new page, which I named “Guest List” within my “Kate’s Birthday” folder in OneNote. I then clicked my cursor anywhere on this page to begin typing the list. In the end, I decided to create two separate lists: one for Kate’s friends and one for the family.

feature article let’s plan a birtHday party

Easily create To Do lists



To ensure that I wouldn’t forget to invite the guests closer to the party date, I tagged the Guest List page with a “To Do” flag from the Note Flags option in the Format menu. This simple step added the action item of inviting guests to my master To Do list, which I could revisit at any time during the planning process simply by checking my Note Flags Summary task pane. During the party planning process, whenever I completed a “To Do” flagged item, I simply checked the box beside it. My Note Flags Summary list was automatically updated as well, giving me an instant view of which items still required my attention.

planning tHe partyIn the days following the creation of my initial party lists in OneNote, I found that details, such as ordering the cake, choosing entertainment and ensuring guests sent back their RSVPs, would suddenly pop into my head. In previous party planning years, I would have scribbled these random thoughts down on whatever piece of paper was handy at the time and ended up with a pile of scraps to sort through in order to create a master list. This year, with my Toshiba Qosmio notebook, I had the flexibility of jotting down my thoughts using the Side Note feature in OneNote. Using a keyboard shortcut (Windows logo key+N), or right-clicking on the OneNote icon in the sys-tem tray, would automatically open a smaller OneNote window on top of whatever application I was using at the time—almost like a sticky note for my notebook! As with all other content in OneNote, the “a-ha” moments that I captured on these

Gather Note Flags into summary lists



side notes were automatically saved within the OneNote section tab called “Side Notes.” This left me secure knowing that these additional thoughts would be wait-ing for me when I was ready to integrate them into my overall party plans.

sorting out tHe cHaosWhen I finally had a few minutes to spare, I went through all of my side notes and other pages and took advantage of OneNote’s Note Flags function to tag items as either To Do, Important, or Remember for Later. This captured all of my action items from the different sections into one summary page with just a single click of my cursor. This summary page instantly became available to me as a tab within my “Kate’s Birthday” folder to refer to at any time during the planning process. Of course, for those times when I didn’t want a big picture view of the party, I could still use the Note Flag Summary function to review only the action items within each individual tab. sending out tHe invitationsA few weeks before the party, it was time to send out invitations. I thought it would be fun to send an electronic invite that included a photo and audio of Kate. I easily accomplished this using OneNote’s stationery templates. The OneNote stationery template categories range from decorative and planning, to business and academic. Kate wanted a colourful design on her invitation, so I went looking in the Decorative category where I found a template called “Rainbow.” Once selected, it automatically opened up a new, rainbow-themed page in my notes. From there, I simply typed in the information that I wanted to convey to the guests, used the format menu to polish up the fonts and dragged the different elements around the page until I was happy with the layout. I also took advantage of the built-in microphone on my Toshiba Qosmio note-book to record a quick audio clip of Kate saying, “Please come to my birthday party!” I then incorporated the clip into the invitation using OneNote’s easy-to-navigate menus. Once I was satisfied with the invitation, I saved the page as birthday invitation template to use in the future. Finally, I selected the e-mail option from OneNote’s Share With Others com-mand on the File menu to send the invitation out electronically to all the people on our guest list. This automatically formatted the information on my invitation page as HTML code and put it in the body of my e-mail message so that recipients didn’t require OneNote in order to read the message.


capturing tHe eventKate’s big day finally arrived and the party went off seamlessly, thanks in large part to my Toshiba Qosmio notebook and OneNote keeping me organised throughout the process. Armed with my digital camera, I captured many special memories from the party. I was also able to upload some great images that my family took with their own digital cameras via the USB port on my notebook.

I used my digital video camcorder to record all of the guests singing “Happy Birthday” to a beaming Kate. I simply connected my camcorder to my Toshiba Qosmio notebook, clicked on the Record Video button in the standard toolbar and OneNote did the rest.



Once all of the guests left, I created a new tab in OneNote called “Photos and Video.” I organised all of the memorable snapshots and video from the party in this tab, enjoying the spectacular clarity of the multimedia images as experienced through the TruBrite screen on my Toshiba Qosmio notebook.

tHank you cardsMany of Kate’s guests commented on how much they enjoyed the invitations we sent out for the party. We decided that her thank you notes should be just as impressive. Again, I accessed OneNote’s stationery templates, this time choosing Postcard from the Blank menu. I then inserted one of he best photos from the party and started typing and formatting Kate’s personalised message for each guest’s card.After completing the cards, I emailed them out to the guests with the same func-tionality that I used for sending out the invitations.


Record audio and video with OneNote

and share multimedia files by sending

your notes to family and friends.

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Feature article: Let’s have a birthday party!


©2005. Toshiba Europe GmbH. While Toshiba has made every effort at the time of publication to ensure the accuracy of the information provided herein, product specifications, configurations, prices, system/component/options availability are all subject to change without notice. For the most up-to-date product information about your computer, or to stay current with the various computer software or hardware options, visit Toshiba’s Web site at www.toshiba-europe.com.

sHaring MeMoriesBefore I could write Kate’s party off as a complete success, there was one last step I wanted to accomplish.

Some of our friends and relatives couldn’t attend the party, either due to schedul-ing conflicts or distance. I really wanted to give them a glimpse of what the party was like and knew that the powerful combination of my Toshiba Qosmio notebook and OneNote could make it happen. First, I created a “Kate’s Party Highlights” page in OneNote, where I posted the original invitation and audio recording along with photos and video captured during the party. Next, I created a single-file Web page using the Publish Pages option on the File menu in OneNote. This created a copy of my OneNote page in a format that included the HTML, graphics, audio and video in a single file. I uploaded the file to my family Web site and notified everyone via email to check it out. With the final chapter finished on Kate’s birthday bash, I closed OneNote, shut down my trusty Toshiba Qosmio notebook and put up my feet for a few min-utes of well-deserved rest.

feature article let’s plan a birthday...

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