PowerNotes

 

To begin, make sure that PowerNotes is enabled inside of your browser. The details of how to do this can be found at the beginning of the "Creating a Project" tutorial. Once PowerNotes is enabled, open up the side panel and select "Project Outline". You will be taken to the page for your project.

 

 

 

 

Below the title and description for your project, there are two options. The one on the left is for sharing your project. Select the option on the right to export your project.

You will have several options available that will be described below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first option available will export your project as a Microsoft Word document which you can open in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or another word processing application of your choice.

The second option exports your project as an Excel file which can be opened in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. There are several options available for how the Excel document can be exported: "Topic - Source", "Source - Topic", "Source Report", and "Research Log". These will be explored in more detail below.

It is unlikely that you will need to use the last option: "Export sources (.ris)". This is a file format mainly used by specific citation software. 

 

 

 

 

 

Word documents that are exported from PowerNotes should have this general format.

At the top of the page, the title and description of your project are centered, followed by bolded subheadings for the topics in your project.

You can see the quotation and citation we gathered in a previous tutorial. The quotation is listed first (note that there may be some issues with the formatting so pay close attention, especially when placing in your paper).  The next line is a link to the source. If you are in Microsoft Word, use "Ctrl + Click" to follow the link. The last element is the citation itself. Any notes you took will also be grouped under topics in your paper.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As stated before, there are four different options for exporting to Excel. While it may seem counterintuitive to look at your sources and your project in Excel, the table based format makes it easier to navigate your sources when you have many of them.

 

Below is the formatting of the first option: "Topic - Source".

 

 

 

 

Next, the formatting for the "Source - Topic" option:

 

 

 

 

 

The main difference between the two options is whether the topics are displayed as rows or columns, so your choice between these two is purely cosmetic. Below the third option is displayed: "Source Report". This option contains more detail. If you find that this formatting works for you, it may be a good idea to format your project so that each of your topics focus on a particular issue within your paper, as the topics you created are listed in the "Issue" column. Alternatively, you could rename that column to "Topic".

 

The last option available is "Research Log". This format is primarily useful if it is important for you to know the date and time that you found particular sources.