From the course: Optimizing Your Work with Microsoft 365

Managing and organizing notebooks

From the course: Optimizing Your Work with Microsoft 365

Managing and organizing notebooks

“

- [Instructor] Have you ever taken detailed notes only to have to sift through them later in order to find that one thing you jotted down halfway through? What a pain. In this lesson, I'm going to share how you can use OneNote to help organize your notes. I'll start on the Microsoft 365 homepage. Select OneNote on the left side of the menu. In this example, I'll create a notebook for an event that I'm organizing by selecting New notebook. Name your notebook. I'll name mine Customer Event, then select Create. Each OneNote notebook contains sections, and each section contains pages, as you can see underneath the menu on the left side. To add content to a notebook, you need to add structure. First, with sections and then pages, and then subpages within those sections. Since there are a lot of meetings happening for this event, I'll create a section by pressing Enter on this empty notebook page and call the section Agenda. Inside this new section, a blank page is automatically created. To keep each page of notes organized, I'll title this page Breakout Sessions, and now the page Breakout Sessions, inside the section Agenda, in the notebook Customer Event, I can finally start jotting down my thoughts. To add more pages to each section, navigate to the bottom and select Add page and give it a title. I'll add two more pages, Group A and Group B. To add more sections to the notebook, select Add section at the bottom and give it a title. I'll add one more section and call it Planning. To rename a page or section, select it, then right-click it and choose Rename, then enter the new name. I'll rename this Logistics. To add even more structure to your notes, you can turn your pages into subpages. For example, you can make Group A and Group B subpages of the whole Breakout Sessions page. To change a page to a subpage, right-click it and select Make Subpage. You'll see the title indent right under your main page, showing that it is now a subpage. To change the subpage back into a regular page, right-click on it and select Promote Subpage. Outside of the structural hierarchy, OneNote makes it easy to find what you're looking for with tags and search. Tags can be used to categorize and prioritize notes in your workbook. With tags, you can quickly return to notes, remind yourself about action items or simply mark what's important. To apply a tag, navigate to the page you want to work on, then place your cursor at the beginning of the line of text that you want to tag. Next, go to Home in the top ribbon and select Tags. Choose the tag you want to apply, select it, and it appears next to the text. To remove a tag, right-click it and select Remove Tag. To search your notebook, go to the menu on the left and select the magnifying glass icon. In the search box, enter a keyword or phrase. As you're typing, OneNote begins returning results that match your search. Choose a result to retrieve that matching note. When you're done with the search, press the Escape key on your keyboard. Now that you've organized your notes, it's important to know where they're saved. Notes are automatically and continually saved in the cloud, your OneDrive. OneNote is a helpful tool for capturing and organizing notes. Try using tags and subpages in OneNote in your meetings this week and use the tools to keep your notes organized.

Contents