We are Paladin Consultants, LLC, and, for the past 20 years,  have been in the IT consulting business concentrating on developing custom software, and web services for clients in primarily the Ny/NJ metropolitan area.  As our website suggests (Http://www.paladn.com ), we have been involved in as diverse a mix of software and web projects as one might imagine one would find in a company which has been developing mission critical software for that period of time.  As technology has advanced, we have always been enthusiastic to see new applications and techniques developed.  And, when they offered real value. We have been quick to recognize their contribution to the growth of our industry.

One such candidate for recognition is Microsoft’s OneNote.

In the more recent and advanced versions of their Office program, Microsoft has added an additional offering called OneNote, to go with their Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access programs.  They (Microsoft)  have not done a very good job at marketing it, but it is a very powerful program.  Billed as a portable notebook, it is much more like an idea laboratory and collaborative resource.  I have found it to be extremely valuable in a number of applications, which I will try to explain in the article, and perhaps a few following it.

There are a number of quite good sites devoted to OneNote, such as www.onenotepowertoys.com, and www.iheartonenote.com which flesh out all the nooks and crannies of the product.  But here in a few humble articles, I would like to show how we use the product, and why we find it so powerful.  First of all, it is media agnostic: pictures, text, movies, sound – virtually anything available today will be accommodated in OneNote.  Second, it’s flexible: anything can be positioned anywhere, and moved at will – either in a document, or copies and pasted, or renamed to other notebooks, or pages.  Interoperability with other Office programs is simple and easy.  And you can copy and paste from any URL you can get on your browser (any browser ) either in whole or in part.  It’ll send and receive email, and interface with the tasks in Outlook.

Recipes

I enjoy cooking a wide variety of dishes, in various cuisines.  While recipes are available on line, and in many many cookbooks, I enjoy the creative expression that comes from ‘doing it yourself’.   But who wants to reinvent the wheel.  When I get a dish to where I want it (which may take several iterations), I want to preserve that knowledge.  I have found that OneNote offers an excellent interface to this process.

I start with a basic recipe, either from my own idea, or from another source.  Then, using a two column approach, I record the ingredients, and method in the right hand column.  Opposite the preparation, I record the critique.  Over several iterations of this process, I arrive at a satisfactory result, which I ultimately record in my database, but save the ‘experiment process’ on its own OneNote page.
The process looks like this:

The process looks like this:

The process includes as many steps as necessary to achieve the desired result, and frequently will include pictures. Here’s an accompanying image clipped from a OneNote recipe page on making salsa.

Market Techniques

I have been an active trader in the equity, bond, and futures markets for over 30 years.  OneNote has helped me categorize my knowledge of the behaviors of the markets.  I have written many software routines on the TradeStation platform which measure and predict the behavior of the markets.  As part of the feedback process, a large database of images and actions has grown over the years.  These images and accompanying indicator readings are then identified as categories of patterns, and each category has a OneNote page, which might consist of scores of examples of a pattern exemplified in various markets under various conditions over time.

A OneNote based system for visually categorizing market patterns.

In contrast to the recipe process, which seeks a perfect solution for each category, this process seeks a common denominator for each identified pattern, and seeks to isolate the seminal , or minimum characteristics which will successfully identify opportunities and risk profiles in each category.

The trick is in the software which identifies opportunities and categories of patterns, interaction between the software and the database, and between the database and the OneNote gallery of patterns and narratives.

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