The lab notebook is an indespensible tool for every scientist or engineer to take notes, scribble down first design ideas and do calculations.

When trying to adopt this concept to the electronic world, other tools lack what makes the IPython notebook outstanding: The integration of text, math, interactive code and graphics in a document, coupled with the openness and strong background of a modern programming language like Python.

This talk will describe how a workflow using the IPython notebook can look like. It will introduce extensions made for IPython to significantly improve this workflow like: * using physical units in calculations * code folding in cells * adding Python code in markdown to allow displaying computation results or equation numbering * dragging and dropping images into the notebook * using the system clipboard to copy and paste single or multiple cells

Examples will show the real-world use of the IPython notebook as an electronic lab notebook.