Microsoft “One”Note Productivity
OneNote is a very useful application I used every day which associated with every aspect of my work and life: lecture notes, cheat sheet, diaries, travel plans, etc. Having the ability to understand good notes writing and organization can be crucial. Nowadays, it is hard to ignore technological direction toward digital storage of personal data. It is fast and convenient to read or write data at your fingertips and by leveraging them you can step up your game to access good quality data.
What I want to share…
To start with, I want to highlight the application usage and some note-taking fundamentals. Then, I will be covering some basic usage and shortcuts key in order to start taking notes super fast. Following with extra boost to share your notes effectively and utilization of addon tools to boost OneNote capabilities!
- Organizing Notes
- Useful Keyboard Shortcut
- Collaborate/Share
- Extras and Addins
There are many great things about OneNote out there. These are the core reasons: multiple devices support, sharing capabilities, office integration, and styling flexibilities.
I currently use OneNote 2016 since I am more familiar with its interface and function. Unfortunately, Microsoft will not be focusing on OneNote 2016 in the future, there are some differences between the new OneNote for Windows 10 and OneNote 2016. Full detail can be found HERE.
📑Organize
Segmentation
There are 3 levels in OneNote Notebook, Section, and Page with extra section grouping and page layering.
There are some factors that you should consider to segment notes into optimum manner. One is to make sure the section does contain the reasonable container that serves the pages in its logical group and is not over sectioned. On the contrary, if the section contains too many pages, the section will be crowded, slow to load, and hard to find a specific page. The pattern is not fixed and sometimes subjective, which mostly differs between usage scenarios.
Example: each semester for one Notebook. Each section portrays each course in the semester and a page represents one class or lecture slide for each week.
Use Consistent Headings / Style
Sometimes it is tempting to paint various color over the notes irrationally. Let's say there are over 20 colors in one note, in this case, the color might seems to be meaningless because there are too many colors. This will only hurt your readability and also undermine meaning extracting of the representation on these different styles. Therefore, just keep it simple and enforce consistency throughout your notes
💡 Tips: Using Ctrl + Alt + [Number] to set headings on that line quickly!
Use Tags
Text alone can be hard to skim for important concept or section. When making notes you should be asking if these notes will make sense by the time you look back at it in the future. This is why tags can really help to mark the portion of texts with different remarks.
These are some Tags that can be placed easily using the shortcut key by pressing Ctrl+[Number] shown below.
💡 Tips: There is also a handy search by tags feature. Allow you to search tags which will help you get back to your thing faster. Furthermore, you can also create a summary page for the whole page group, section, or even notebooks!
Tables
People might get intimidated by making table since making tables seem to be an arduous task in Word. It is hard to manage and align tables in Word document. However, in OneNote, it is very easy to work with tables, columns, rows, and cells. Now I always work with tables in OneNote because it makes thing more organized.
💡Tips: Creating a table at blink by pressing TAB. Move columns or rows easily by dragging them into a new location. Select different container level of tables: cell/rows/table by pressing ctrl+a multiple times.
Office Integration
You can easily attach any files in OneNote and even insert a printout from a pdf file or word. When inserting an excel file, OneNote supports various options to paste in the data. You can pick to display the whole spreadsheet or the selected a chart or table in the sheet as seen in the picture below. Diagrams made by Visio can also be attached to the notes, too.
If you want to update the printout content of your file, you can do this with ease by right click and choose refresh printout.
🚀 Keyboard Shortcuts
Using keyboard shortcuts is a time saver. Remember to take a few minutes searching and remembering the shortcut to specific tasks and try to use it often. Start with the tasks or use case you frequently needed. Be able to utilize them will grant you the ability to take fast and good notes.
Useful Shortcuts
- Ctrl+E : Open search tabs for searching and navigating for notes quickly.
- Ctrl+Shift+G: Open Navigation Panel while in full page view.
- Ctrl+L: Left align text.
- Ctrl+R: Right align text.
- Ctrl+Alt+H: Highlight selected texts.
- Ctrl+Alt+D: Insert current date text.
- Ctrl + Alt + T: Insert current time text.
- Ctrl+Pageup/down: Navigating to previous and next page.
- Alt+[Left/Right] Arrow: Navigating back and forward the page history.
- [Table] Ctrl+Enter: Add New table rows.
- [Table] Ctrl+Shift/Alt+Enter: Add New Line in table cell (Prevent row added for last column).
- Windows+N: Open separate Quick Notes.
Bonus (OneNote 2016 Only)
Quick Access toolbar: quick accessible tools can be set up by right click on the tool you want to pin and choose Add To Quick Access Toolbar as seen in the picture below. This way I can apply styles to texts and create table much faster.
After adding the tools you can easily use them by clicking on them as it will always show on your top toolbar. Or you can quickly press Alt + [Number].
Note: that I have over 10 toolbar commands so when pressing Alt key the 10th command can be executed by pressing 0 and then 9 sequentially.
To remove them right click on the tool and select Remove to Quick Access Toolbar.
Another way to manage a quick access toolbar is to navigate to the options by going to File > Options > Quick Access Toolbar.
🏃♂️Collaborate/Share
OneNote allows us to share Notebook with other people in many ways. Here are some common ones.
Send Invitations to email
I often share notebooks via email when the team is small and we are closely working on something, especially for note-taking in a course or some projects.
Options:
- Set Read-only or Read-Write permission for each collaborator
- Requires user to sign-in before accessing the document
Link sharing
You can also create a link to share with many people, this is the easy way to distribute the notes without having to gather everyone’s emails.
🤗 Links for view only and edit can be created separately.
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is a collaboration platform by Microsoft which allows the team to work and share resources in a dedicated place. There are chatting room, meeting schedule, activity feed, assignments, and many other apps you can add to.
First, create a team and add a team member. On the top bar click + sign to add a new tab. Select OneNote and choose the existing Notebook or create a new one to share with your team. Done!
Work Together!
It is better to work on something together. From my experience, the syncing latency while working together is not bad at all. Sometimes merge conflict happens and the indicator bar will appear and let you access the copy of the notes. 👍
OneNote is a great tool to make a fabulous Cheat Sheet. Thanks to its flexibility in aligning text boxes and will power from friends. We are able to squash every single thing we need for the exam (maybe)! 😆
⚠️When moving a shared Notebook, make sure people who have shared accessed are notified and provided with a new link because they will not find the moved Notebook.
🤹♀️Addins / Extensions
To be extra productive and get access to other great functionality that OneNote does not provide, add-ins can be installed. Functionalities like ignore spelling check, daily planner, table of content, and more.
OneTastic (Don’t support OneNote for Windows 10)
First, download and install the software after that you will see the add-ins appear on your menu tab either in Home tab or new Macros tab. By clicking Download Macros, you can choose what macros or functions you want to add to your OneNote tab.
OneNoteGem
I haven’t tried out this one yet but I think the idea is pretty similar to OneTastic. More importantly, OneNoteGem supports OneNote for Windows 10. Check it out if this is for you.
OneNote Web Clipper
This is the web browser extensions you can download from chrome web store. This extension allows you to clip image, pdf, video, or small bookmark remark of the page you visited. There are several clip options for you to choose from.
Full page: Clip the whole page on that webpage. Sometimes styling and image will not produce the same output as you saw on the web.
Region: Allow you to select and drag the region on the page using a rectangular clipper. You can add/clip many regions before sending it to OneNote.
Article: With this option, it will capture the part where the content is indicated as <article> tag on the page. If you browse on cooking websites that contain recipes detail, it will automatically notice and display as Recipe instead.
📔 Enjoy Writing Notes and be Creative!
I hope you make use of these techniques, try to make a good habit of making a memo of lecture notes and life events in an organized and memorable way that fits you. I am sure that you will thank yourself later when looking back at these notes.
