OneNote as personal travel guide: Introduction

When going to travel then well done home work is must be – otherwise you spend a lot of valuable time on trip to find information and do time consuming planning. Poor planning means also way bigger expenses on mobile data traffic and most of your trip will be mess. I had problems like these when I was beginner traveller. For now I have elegant solution to this problem and here is how I use OneNote.

Yes, this is real! No bluf, no faking, no made-up demos. All you see and read here comes directly from my own life and experiences. Over years I have made improvements on travel planning and describing all tricks means a lot of work like writing a small book. I focus here on most important aspects of processes and tools so you can use all information provided here right from the moment the information gets up to my blog.

Travelling process

Here’s the high-level view to travelling process. Often the first steps are made by travel agencies but guys who want to get maximum for buck usually don’t use agencies as after little home work it is possible to get way better trip. 

Here is short overview of all these steps:

• Discover – find information about places you go (what’s interesting, where to go, what delicious drinks and foods are there, where are fancy places to go out, how public transportation works etc).
• Plan – make choice for every travel day where you go most probably and try to make very lazy schedule of these places.
• Act – go, live, hand around, have a good time – you did good home work.
• Finish – track down your experiences, gather photos, contact people, get ready for next adventure.

In this posting serie I will go through first three steps as last one is not directly related to OneNote usually. Yes, I may need some pieces of information from OneNote but it is not kind of heavy usage.

Posts in this serie

1. Introduction
2. Discovering places
3. Trip planning
4. Using OneNote on trip

Devices and technologies

As readers of this blog are bright guys with open minds I answer one question in advance: what devices and technologies you are using? Here’s the full list:

• Lenovo Z500 laptop with quad-core i7 Ivy-Bridge,
• Surface RT 64GB + 64GB microSD,
• Windows Phone 8X by HTC,
• SkyDrive,
• Office Web Applications,
• Office, Office RT, Office on WIndows Phone 8.

If it’s possible I don’t take my laptop with me but I often have to. It’s not possible to make any technical presentations so easily on Surface RT and, of course, I need powerful machine for writing code.

On trips most important players are Surface RT and Windows Phone but you can replace Surface RT with laptop. It’s not a problem, you lose nothing.

More experiments?

I’m sure that some readers are eager to find out if I have more human experiments going on with these technologies. Yes, I have. Although it’s not time yet to say what is the outcome of these experiments and it’s not possible to make any predictions about results yet, my other on-going experiments are here:

• using Excel web application to monitor travel budget,
• using PowerPoint to educate kids on things we got to see on trip,
• using PowerPoint RT and web application to prepare slides for my this autumn community sessions,
• using SkyDrive as family photo gallery.

When some of these experiments gets done and there are good results I will share them with you, of course.

But now, get ready for next posts about OneNote as travel guide.