Dump your notepad for 2022: Start with OneNote
I have been using OneNote as my primary notetaking tool for many years, variously with a stylus on screen with 2-in-1s or tablets, or typing. I am not a neat notetaker and I find organizing paper notebooks difficult, so the digital configurability and search options that OneNote provides helps me feel on top of my notes.
If you need a better notes management solution for 2022, then perhaps it's time to try OneNote. The tips below can help get you started!
Notebooks, Sections, and Pages
OneNote desktop showing sections and pages
Your notes are organized into various notebooks, sections, and pages. You will most likely keep your personal notebooks in your OneDrive, but you may also have shared notebooks for projects or groups stored in SharePoint or under Teams.
Sections logically divide your pages and each section can contain many pages. For example, I have a section dedicated to blog posts and each individual post is a page within in. Each page can contain your text, handwriting, audio/video, links, tables, images - anything you might have in a traditional notebook.
For more complex or larger notebooks, you can also use section groups which effectively create sub-notebooks each with their own sections and pages. You can also group sub-pages under individual pages. No matter what your ideal organization looks like, OneNote can probably help you achieve it.
A notebook is the smallest unit that can be shared with another user (you cannot share a single page) but you can password protect sections within notebooks. You can also export notebooks, sections, or individual pages to use elsewhere, perhaps to share with others, but these exports are then outside of your notebook.
More resources:
Tags and Tasks
Tags menu on the OneNote desktop ribbon
One of my favorite features in OneNote to aid in organization is to be able to tag items anywhere on pages. Tags can be a to-do item, but can also be marking something as important, or as linked to a specific project or type of information. You can then search on those tags and create aggregated views of them in new pages.
If you want to sync your to do items across OneNote, To-Do, and Outlook then you can use the Outlook Tasks tags instead. This enables you to tag a note, then that note will show up as a task item in Outlook and To-Do, which you can complete from there. It's important to recognize that even though OneNote has a built in To Do tag, these currently do not sync with to-do lists elsewhere in Microsoft 365.
More resources:
Meetings Integration
Choose a meeting to create linked notes
OneNote integrates with the meetings on your Outlook calendar, so you can create a linked notes page for each of your meetings or appointments. You can either use this to easily create your own notes for a meeting in a private notebook, or to create a set of linked, shared notes that everyone in the meeting can use in a shared notebook. Microsoft's own instructions of this feature demo sharing your existing notebook for the purposes of collaborating for a meeting, but it's really important to remember that any sharing is applying to the whole notebook, so, at least for my use case, I never share my primary notebook as many of the notes contain private or confidential information.
It's important to note that this functionality is entirely distinct from the Meeting Notes capability in Teams. Using OneNote, your notes "live" in your notebook, or a shared notebook, while in Teams, your notes "live" with the meeting or series of meetings and are accessed by returning to that event on the calendar. In reality the files associated with these notes are either stored in the OneDrive of the first user to start notes on a non-channel meeting, or in the SharePoint site associated with the team site for a Teams channel.
The Teams capabilities have their upsides and downsides, but I often find that in addition to the "public" notes that are distributed for meetings, I also want to have my own personal notes. I use OneNote exclusively for my own personal notes and only use the Teams Meeting Notes capabilities for collaborative note taking.
More resources:
Understanding the Good and Bad of Teams Meeting Notes - Office 365 for IT Pros (office365itpros.com)
Linked Notes
I have previously highlighted the capabilities of Linked Notes. This feature helps you keep track of notes associated with other things you have open on screen and offers an experience akin to having your notepad beside you when reading a book. Take a look at the previous blog post.
More resources:
Search
The biggest advance that OneNote offers over paper is its rich search capabilities. If you get to a point where all of your notes are inside OneNote, then finding them becomes a breeze. You can search text, handwriting, tags, whatever is in your notebooks. You can even turn on textual search of audio recordings.
More resources:
Conclusion
OneNote offers a comprehensive set of notetaking tools; although some of these are not as thoroughly linked into the wider Microsoft 365 landscape as you might intuitively imagine when first learning about the feature (e.g., to-do tag limitations, linked notes increasingly lackluster integration with other apps).
To use OneNote effectively requires some commitment as it really takes time to be able to work out what sort of set-up works best for you. More so than most other Office apps, every step of how you choose to use OneNote is down to your personal workflow preference, and this customizability is both a big upside and a downside.
Title image credit: Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
