Work Smarter with Microsoft OneNote

Connie Clark

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781801074841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatique
• Subtopic: Applications de bureau

Organize work and home life using notes from your phone or computer to supercharge your productivity with this OneNote manualKey Features• Learn how to store notes that include images, audio, videos, links, files, emails, and web clippings• Unleash the magic of tags to make notes stand out and become more searchable• Discover the power of shared notebooks with your team or family to ensure everyone is in the loopBook DescriptionDo you want to take your information and note organization to a new level? This book will show you how to use Microsoft's organizational app, OneNote, to store endless amounts of information in a productive and organized way, including solutions for creating your notes and then sharing them easily with your team or department.You'll be guided through everything you need to set up a notebook and customize it to suit you or your team. The book will show you how to navigate through OneNote and search for virtually anything, as well as save time with all the shortcuts. You'll discover that inserting information into your notebooks goes far beyond text, images, and videos, and also includes emails, links to documents, and clippings from the web. But it doesn't stop there. Integration with other Microsoft products is key for making your experience successful, and this book demonstrates how to use OneNote with Microsoft Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams. Beyond instructions and essential topics, this book also provides you with the motivation you need to make OneNote a habit as well as real-life examples of notebooks you can use.By the end of this book, you'll be able to use OneNote for everything and from every device. Even if you start a notebook on your laptop and continue it on your phone, you'll find working with the app seamless.What you will learn• Understand how to create and organize notes in your notebooks• Discover how to turn handwritten notes into typed text• Explore how to access your content from anywhere even if offline• Uncover ways to collaborate with your team or family and stay in sync• Understand how to insert your emails, documents, or articles from the web• Find out how to integrate with other Microsoft products such as Outlook or TeamsWho this book is forIf you save notes on your phone, wear out more spiral notebooks than you can count, or if you're a Microsoft 365 user and need to keep track of information, then this book is for you. Beginner-level experience with OneNote is required to get the most out of this book.

Section 1: The Anatomy of OneNote

In this section, we'll learn about the OneNote screen and toolbars. You'll discover how to easily create a notebook with multiple sections and pages and find out how to add notes (typed or handwritten) and even customize your notebooks to suit your personal style.

We'll learn about the advantages of OneNote and find out about the different versions available to us and all the different devices that we can access OneNote from. We'll get comfortable with all the menus and features in OneNote so that you know what is possible.

We'll then learn how to create well-organized notebooks with the right number of sections and pages and identify all the different ways to add information to our notebook pages. We'll also see how we can handwrite in OneNote, as well as customizing the look of our pages and text.

This section comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, OneNote - How and Where to Use it?
• Chapter 2, Exploring Screen Layout and Toolbars
• Chapter 3, Creating Notebooks, Sections, and Pages
• Chapter 4, Entering Information into Your Notebook

Chapter 1: OneNote - How and Where to Use it?

OneNote is a Microsoft program like no other. However, before you can truly get a feel for OneNote, it is important that we identify why it is worth investing in.

There is an ever-increasing amount of information coming at each of us every day in many forms. With this information overload comes practical drawbacks: Where do we record this information? How do we remember what is important to us? Jotting down notes is usually a good solution to these issues, and in this chapter, we'll cover exactly why.

Microsoft OneNote is an application that is perfect for notetaking and capturing information in one place. Some examples of its usage are presented here:

• Projects and meetings: You can use OneNote to capture everything that you need to run a project. Things such as your notes from meetings and emails can be stored side by side with drawings or images, document attachments, and links to pertinent files or websites; best of all, this information can be shared with everyone on that project.
• Ideas: As ideas pop into your head, capture them in OneNote. Organize these ideas and get working on them quicker because they will all be together and easier to retrieve.
• Personal information: Track any medical information for yourself or your family by taking pictures of prescriptions or writing down notes during doctors' visits. You can also include research done on the web as links in these notes. Recipes are another perfect example of ways to use a OneNote notebook. You can capture recipes easily by using the built-in camera feature and taking a picture of an existing recipe card or page in a book. You can also link to a website for your favorite recipe, jot down notes, or record a conversation about recipe ideas or ingredients.

In this chapter, we will discuss why we use OneNote, and how to get started with it. We start here so that you can set yourself up to take full advantage of the power and flexibility offered within this program. In particular, we will cover the following topics:

• Why use OneNote as your digital notebook?
• Differences between OneNote and OneNote for Windows 10
• Notebook storage options
• Accessing your notebooks from different devices
• OneNote web application

A goal for this chapter is to get OneNote installed on your computer as well as on your smartphone and tablet. This way, moving forward, you can follow along with the instructions in this book.

Why use OneNote as your digital notebook?

In this section, we will start by looking at why it's worth using OneNote as your digital notebook. Before we get into that, though, let's get a full understanding of what OneNote actually is.

OneNote is readily available to anyone. This application comes with Microsoft 365 and Windows 10, and you can also download it for free from Microsoft's website. Whether we take notes for ourselves or for the purpose of sharing with others, OneNote is an amazing solution that is an integral part of Microsoft 365 and integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams. Instead of using Outlook to send information about a project, use OneNote to capture all updates and references on a project shared with others. This is just one example of OneNote's ability to provide great solutions.

Aside from OneNote, our other methods of notetaking include old-fashioned pen and paper, the note-taking applications found on our phones (such as Apple Notes), and competing products such as Evernote. The downside of using these other note apps is the fact that they may not be available to you when you need them, or they may not be as integrated as OneNote can be with your current work.

In this section, we will focus on why OneNote may just be the best notes solution for you.

Advantages of choosing OneNote

Without further ado, let's look at the advantages of OneNote, assessing and comparing alternative options along the way, as follows:

• Searchability: Find anything fast in OneNote is my motto. In OneNote, we can quickly search for a word or phrase, or even a special tag such as important or question. In this case, if you tag a number of notes as important or question, then you can find all those tagged notes with ease in the future.

The Evernote search feature works much the same as OneNote in terms of searching for words, phrases, or tags, showing the clear benefits of opting for digital notetaking applications such as these. Searchability is one of the big roadblocks we face with pen-and-paper notetaking: searching through your notes that were taken a while ago can be a time-consuming and laborious task. Furthermore, while the Apple Notes app does let you search for words, you cannot search for important notes or any other special category of notes.

• Organization: Being organized is what OneNote is all about. You have many ways to organize your notes so that they are easy to see and retrieve. Not only can you easily retrieve notes by the title or page name, but you also have sections that help you organize similar note pages together. You also have the search feature, as mentioned in the previous point, that can help you to find almost anything.

In contrast to this, most other notes apps do not provide organizational options—it is up to you to make your note heading as specific as possible so that you can easily find it again in the list or gallery view. In Evernote, there is also a lack of organization by sections and pages; each notebook in Evernote has pages only, with no ability to divide notebooks by sections.

Going back to our physical notebooks, we simply jot down everything on the next fresh page of the notebook, with very little ability to revisit those notes quickly to organize them by category. This method of notetaking, which is sequential regardless of the topic, does not help us when we are looking for all the examples that meet the same criteria or all the information on one topic.

• Cros...