Top 20 Microsoft OneNote Tips and Tricks 2022 | How to use OneNote effectively & be more organized

i'll be showing my top 20 tips and tricks for onenote i work at microsoft and i worked on the onenote team a long time and i'm really into purple i've got my purple cardigan my onenote shirt i've even got a onenote cape now onenote desktop has been rejuvenated as part of office 365. so i'll be talking about onenote desktop and also pointing out which things are in onenote for windows 10 as well so let's get started the first tip is recording audio with built-in timestamps and also i want to point out i'm in the onenote desktop that's been upgraded and revitalized because onenote desktop is coming back this is the new office ui the beautiful purple on the top the new ui here is a little more rounded so the first tip is inserting audio to do that i'm going to record audio and take notes go to the insert menu and click record audio now it's recording as i'm taking notes so here's me taking notes i'll hit enter this is a really important point so i want to make sure to capture it hit enter one more time here's the end of my notes now when i'm done i go up here and click stop now what's cool is i can record the audio so here's where it was recorded i can double click to play now it's recording and then taking so i can go forwards here backwards and whatnot that's pretty nice but watch how it highlights the audio as i go through so this little hover here i'll click play so here's me taking notes i'll hit enter and see it highlight a really important point automatically to capture it here's the end of my notes so it follows along with the audio in time synchronization really slick we do support recording audio in windows 10 it doesn't have the time sync like you have in onenote desktop right here the second tip is copying text directly out of photos or images so here's an example i've taken a photo of a harry potter page and i'm going to click on the photo and then right click and choose copy text from picture and using ocr which will happen automatically i can extract that text so choose copy text from picture now i'm just going to click directly next to the picture and do control v to paste and it extracts all of that text right out of the image super handy in a big time saver and related you can even search the text of a picture automatically so here we have a image and it says harry in the image here in the upper right i'm going to click and i'm just going to type harry and immediately check that out it highlighted harry in the image and it highlighted harry in the image here this feature is also available in the windows 10 app it takes about a day for the service to process so it's a bit slower in the desktop right here it happens within seconds of pasting the image the third tip is one of my very favorites it is the print to onenote feature this allows me to print any type of document or file directly into onenote and then annotate or type right on top of it it's like you have digital paper what i'll do is go to the insert menu here and choose file print out this opens up the file menu and i'm going to scroll down and choose my solar system powerpoint deck so i'm going to print the slides of the powerpoint directly onto the page click insert what you can see is that it has printed every single slide onto this page so my beautiful solar system deck is now on a big digital piece of paper in onenote and i can go in here and i can double click and i can take notes on top of it i can do draw menu so i can go here and i can go and circle certain things and i can do whatever i want this is basically like digital paper and this is especially interesting in the education scenario where you might want to have lots of taking notes right on top of slides i can print anything into onenote as an example i'll show the browser printing here's a blog article and maybe i want to print this whole thing out into onenote just like digital paper if i go to the three dot menu in my browser and just choose print now it has print preview and go over to printer and instead of doing your normal tree killing paper printer instead in this case i'll choose the onenote desktop printer if you're using windows 10 it'll pop the one up windows 10 printer and then choose print what it will do is pull one up to the forefront and say hey where do you want to put this into onenote i'm just going to leave it on this current page and i'll click ok and immediately it put that entire printout right here into onenote and again this is now like digital paper and i can go in and do whatever i want right on top of it that same onenote printer works in word or excel you can literally print anything you want into onenote the fourth tip is setting any picture to the background in onenote which will let you type or ink right on top of it so back to our harry potter example i've got a snapshot of a harry potter page i'm just going to paste right here onto my onenote page now normally once it's here if i want to type on it it's kind of tricky sometimes i just want it to be like a digital background that i can scribble on top of so click once to select the picture then right click and then choose set picture as background now it is totally set to the background of the page so i can go here for example on draw and maybe i want to do stuff right on top of it do some underlines and red pen i can also go and click and type on top of it so right here if i go click i can type and now i can type on it and i can highlight this and maybe i can make it red and make it really big so again this just lets you put that picture to the background and then you can do whatever you want on top of it this feature is also supported in onenote for windows 10 as well as ipad the fifth tip is outlook meeting integration with onenote now i'm here in the desktop and this also works in the windows 10 app as well but on the home tab i'm going to go over to meeting details and click to drop this down this pulls all the meetings in outlook from my calendar which i have going today and i'm going to choose the one that i want to take meeting notes on we have a tps report planning meeting so i'll click this this pulls in all the information from that outlook meeting in my calendar so the meeting subject the date the location even the link back to the outlook item if i want to open that meeting it also pulls in the attachment so i've got a word doc and a powerpoint about our tps report planning and then who are the participants so we have kara bill lumberg alex and ella and then i have a place i can take notes if i just click right down here this is really handy if you're just late to a meeting you want to get up and running and make sure you have the link back to it pull in all this information and you're ready to go the sixth tip is a nice one that goes in conjunction with meeting details and that is emailing a page so let's say i've had my meeting here and i've finished all the notes and i've taken notes and i want to send this out in an email from the home tab i can go over here to say email a page and i'm going to click this this opens up an outlook email automatically it puts it to all the right people it inserts the attachments that were on the page all the meeting notes are right here below and it's ready to send off so again this is just a big time saver the seventh tip is the immersive reader the immersive reader is an inclusively designed tool that helps make reading more accessible i'm personally a big fan because i work on the inverse reader myself so i'm in the windows 10 app right now and i'm going to go to the view menu and you're going to choose immersive reader what you see is we've reduced distractions on the page the bottom i can hit the play button the study of earth's landforms is called physical geography we have text to speech word and line highlighting i can go and change the way the page looks so with text preferences i can make the text much bigger i can increase line spacing because that can help reduce visual crowding i can change the background colors some people prefer reading with different background colors i can even change the fonts i click on grammar options i can break words into syllables with a single click like this i can highlight the nouns the verbs the adjectives all sorts of parts of speech i can even customize those colors if i'd like and you can see it's very personalized and we'll make the text a little bit smaller and choose a different color lastly if i go to reading preferences here i can turn on line focus this can help focus my eyes so i can read one line at a time and i can still relax glaciers or rivers and i can choose one line or three lines or five lines i can turn that off and lastly i can translate in over 110 languages so in this case i'm going to choose spanish i'll choose document and let's listen to this read out loud in spanish it's a really powerful tool that's built in and inclusive it's part of the onenote for windows 10 app it's not built into onenote desktop but in the near future we will be rolling out an update to onenote desktop where this full immersive reader is built in so watch for that the eighth tip is dictation also known as speech to text this is built into the onenote for windows 10 app and on the home tab right here there is a dictate button i have many languages to choose from you can see all of them here but we're going to keep it in english right now and i'll click dictate and then start talking now i am dictating in the onenote for windows 10 app period speech to text makes it really easy to write down your thoughts without having to use the keyboard period when you're done just click the dictate button again to turn it off dictate is not built in by default to the onenote desktop app but this is going to be coming in the future so stay tuned and watch out for updates in the desktop app for onenote the ninth tip is moving your page tabs on the right over to the left hand side this can make your onenote desktop look a bit more like the windows 10 app a lot of people like to have notebooks and pages on the left so if i go to the file menu here go down at the bottom and choose options now go to display and then choose page tabs appear on the left right here and hit ok now the page tabs are over on the left now if i open up here and click this notebook and then pin the notebook picker is pinned so now i can have the sections here and the pages on the left and again for the people who like to have everything left just like in one up for windows 10 and i'll quickly show you that you know here's windows 10 i have the pages and the sections there's my notebook picker i can have that similar in the desktop just like this the 10th tip is tags it's nice to be able to tag your things in one note to be able to find them later one that is great for organizing and getting things all figured out so i have some notes here maybe i want to go click here and add a tag there's a tags drop down here let's drop this down maybe that is a question and maybe i can click here and maybe i want to have a to do tag so i can choose to do and this is a little check box here a little to do check box what's also nice is i can add custom tags if i drop this down go down to the bottom here and choose custom tags this lets me go to new tag and now i'm going to give this one mike's special tag i can choose my own symbol there's lots of symbols i'll choose a little pin and maybe i want all of these to be in red font and highlighted with a dark black that's going to look funny hit okay now mike's special tag is at the top and even has a control 1 if i have a shortcut hit ok now i have this take notes right here i'm gonna go and click mic special tag and you see now it is black with the red font and a pin the other handy thing is i can find tags anywhere so click find tags it's going to search all of my notebooks in this case and find all the different tags and if i click on one of these it'll jump me so if i click on list item number three hey it jumps me to this little list item where i had this music note tag or if i go click here it takes me back to the page where i have make sure to follow up this is a really nice way to jump around your notebook and these features are also in the onenote for windows 10 app the 11th tip is page versions and recycle bin sometimes you find in one oh i deleted a page or gosh i swear i had some text on that page i can't find it anymore maybe i deleted it on accident if i go to the history tab in the desktop right here you're going to see notebook recycle bin and if i click this this is like a trash bin for things that you've had oh so here's a couple pages that i deleted i deleted a page about tags so if i want to put this back it just says right click a page or section to move it out of the recycle bin so i can just go here choose move or copy and maybe i want to move that page back into my research section click move and there i just got that out of my recycle bin i can also empty my recycle bin or even disable history if i don't want any recycle bin this feature also exists in the onenote for windows 10 app related to history is page versions let's say i want to find an old version maybe i updated a page a couple months ago and i'm like oh no there was important information i forgot can i go back in time and find that page versions on the history tab lets you do that so here's a page of meeting notes if i click on page versions you're going to see oh on april 3rd there was an old version the older version here if i click here oh it's a different meaning that has some different people like arden asher oh the meeting notes were different too so this was the older version of this page that i updated so if i want to restore that it says click here to restore this as the main version so i can click this and say restore version and now it put this back as that main page but it also kept the older version the one that i worked on just before in this video where i had my nice little pin down there so it kept the newer version and the older version both so page versions can get you out of a jam if you inadvertently got rid of old things and if you drop this down you can say delete all the versions in the section clear out my entire notebook so you know if i found the page that i need i'm just going to say delete all versions choose yes and there they're all cleaned up so this is the only version left right now for this one the 12th tip is teams and office integration and finding your notebooks i'm here in teams and first i want to find all my onenote notebooks from within the onenote app in teams go over here to the three dot menu and then search for onenote here it is click and i'm going to right click on onenote and pin it in teams on the app bar now by default it pulls up my personal notebooks right here if i click the little notebook expander you can see i'm in my projects notebook if i click this i can see all of my other personal notebooks and this could also include class notebooks if you're an education or a student using this if i go up to teams it'll show the shared team notebooks i'm part of so right here you can see that i have my planning notebook as well as my plc notebook and if i just click here it'll drill me right into that notebook i also have recent notebooks and things that i've visited recently so here are all the different notebooks that i have that i've visited so this is just a nice way to navigate between all the different notebooks you have there's a similar type of structure on office.com so let's look over there i'm signed into office.com and on the left i'm going to click onenote this brings up the landing page and you can see all of my recent notebooks if i've pinned some of these see how you can pin by clicking the pin i can pin a couple notebooks so here are two that i've pinned my notebooks are the same as personal notebooks and teams if people have shared notebooks with you they'll show up here if you're an educator or a student and you're part of class notebooks we have specific labels there so i click and here all my class notebooks and if i want to create a new notebook i just click this button right here the 13th tip is copying links to pages sections or notebooks so let's say i've got this meeting notes page here i'm going to right click and i can choose copy link to page we'll click here now i'll go to my research section and i'm going to paste this link so now i have the meeting notes link if i click this link see how it jumps me right back to that meeting notes page i can also link to different sections so i've got a onenote tips here i'm going to right-click and i'm going to choose copy link to section go back to my research here i'm going to go down here and this is going to be paste now i've got a link to the section takes me right to onenote tips i can even link to notebooks so right click on any notebook like this choose copy link to notebook go back to where you were and just do paste here is my link to the real world samples notebook if i click this it jumps me right to that notebook so what this allows you to do is create hyperlinks through your notes again you can be incredibly efficient when you're putting links you can also paste these links into email or on teams message if you have a shared notebook right now this notebook isn't shared with anyone so in this case i would just link across my own notebook this also works in the onenote for windows 10 app the 14th tip is full screen mode so let's say i've got my set of slides here and i want to really focus and take notes on these i want to get rid of all the other interface ui i can go into the upper right and click full screen so if i click this all the ui disappears now i'm full screen now if i need to access things in the upper right i can still drop this down and hey here are all my notebooks sections and pages so it's really nice to be able to focus here still access things and change pages and if i click the little three dot menu here the menu pops down so if i want to have my drawing or inking things like that if i click there it goes away so it's really nice to be able to just have focus for taking notes if i click this again everything comes back this also works in the onenote for windows 10 app the 15th tip is setting password protection on your sections in onenote so i've got my future tps report this is super top secret no one can ever see this so i'm going to right click on the section here and i'm going to go down and choose password protect this section on the right hand side the dialog opens and i'm going to choose set password and we'll give the password tps is my password don't tell anyone hit ok now this is all locked up so i can lock it here and this is what it looks like and the next time i reboot onenote anytime i switch over to this section it's going to show this as a password-protected section so in this case i'll go here and click and then i'll type in my tps password again don't tell anyone that hit ok and it will unlock the section this also works in the onenote for windows 10 app the 16th tip is collapsing and outline this is a nice little trick in onenote that not a lot of people know about so i've got a big outline list of things here and i want to collapse that if i hover you're going to see this little arrow here if i double click it it collapses the entire outline just like this same thing here if i hover the top i double click and it's collapsed and if i want to open it back up just go over the plus double click and then on the plus double click there you go this also works in the onenote for windows 10 app the 17th tip is page sections and notebook colors now i want to change the color of my page right here if i go to the view menu i drop down page color and you have a bunch of choices so maybe i want to make it pink or yellow you can choose the different colors that you want it's really easy to change now maybe i also want to change the section colors here which also change the pages here so maybe i want to make right click on research and make this yellow so i'll choose yellow now everything's yellow and then if i want to change the notebook color i can open this let's pin it let's right click on micro tips and choose the color to yellow choose properties drop down the color here choose yellow and then okay this also works in the onenote for windows 10 app the 18th tip are my favorite onenote keyboard shortcuts so the first one is select a list of items here do control forward slash and you get numbers immediately if i do control period it turns them into bullets another one is control e to search so control e will open up the search dialog up there to make a table just type one word then hit tab and it makes a table if i type header number two hit tab there's another one and then ctrl enter i can make my table just like that and perhaps my favorite shortcut of all if i want to move any item in a table or a list like this let's say i want to move list item five up to the top instead of selecting it control x control v all that stuff i just select the item do alt shift up arrow and it moves and just keep hitting the up arrow and it goes up up to the top and then move it back down alt shift down down down down you will impress your friends with that one guaranteed this also works in the onenote for windows 10 app the 19th tip is outlook mail and meeting integration now i'm in outlook and i've got an email from bill lumberg about the virtual tps report strategy off-site so i've selected the mail here and there is a onenote button right here and i want to send this mail right into onenot to track it better so i'll click here it pops up the little location dialog picker and now i'm just going to choose where to put it and i'm going to open up my micro tips and i'm going to put it into research so click ok this immediately sends a copy of the mail plus the attachment as a new page into my research section in onenote i can also do something similar with meetings if i go into my calendar here in onenote i'm going to open up my tps report planning meeting and you can see a meeting notes button right here so if i click this i have the option to share notes with the meeting or take notes on my own so this is just for myself i'll click take notes on your own similarly it opens up the location dialog for onenote i'm going to choose the meeting notes area here so here's my meeting notes section click ok and in a similar way it automatically creates a new page with all the details the attachments the participants and a new page right there the 20th tip is section groups section groups allow you to create more structure beyond your normal section tabs in onenote so i've got all my research and my meeting notes and other things maybe i want to create an archive area where i can drag old sections into just right click right here and choose new section group and i'll type archive and enter now i can do things like move my best shortcuts i'm going to drag this into the archive section group and drop it and that is a little subfolder and right here you can use the arrow to navigate up now what i like to do to visualize this better is click on the notebook picker here and pin this and now you can expand and see the little section group just like this so now a class notebook which is made up of a lot of section groups if i expand this there are a bunch of section groups and you can really get a sense of how these little hierarchies are created and it's really easy to drag stuff so i want to drag my meeting notes right here into archive i just click and drag now i've got these and if i want to collapse it to get out of the way i can do that as well this feature also exists in one up for windows 10. here's one for windows 10. i can just right click right here and say new section group we'll call it archive again and i create a new section in here and it works in a very similar way you can expand and collapse for those of you that made it past the 20th tip this is my top secret bonus tip and one of my very favorites that a lot of people in onenote don't know about and it's actually existed since about the year 2007. so let's say i've got a bunch of names right here and i want to be able to create a page for each of these people maybe we're doing a feedback collection section maybe you're an educator but instead of saying you know what creating one page and typing each name watch this tip right click then choose link to pages and this is going to create a page for each person automatically with a link to it so click here it blasts all these pages immediately and note that all of these little links exist so if i click on evelyn it takes me right to her page so it's almost created a little table of contents page and if i do this to add bullets now i'm all set if you found this video useful give it a 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Channel: Mike Tholfsen

Views: 584,797

Keywords: onenote tips and tricks, onenote tips and tricks 2019, onenote tips and tricks 2020, onenote tips and tricks 2021, onenote tips and tricks for business, onenote tips and tricks for project management, onenote tips, onenote tips for beginners, onenote 2016, onenote 2019, onenote dictation tool, onenote for beginners, onenote immersive reader, onenote note taking, onenote tutorial, how to use microsoft onenote, how to use onenote, microsoft onenote, mike tholfsen

Id: I725xySvwug

Length: 23min 58sec (1438 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/MagnificentTiger]

It hurts me so much that you can create custom tags to that degree of control but you can't even get a color wheel for picking the color you want to draw with. I get OneNote isn't an art app but the small selection of colors you are left with is absurd.

[u/NastyGerms]

Great video, good to see that onenote desktop wasn't abandoned!

Immersive mode looks stellar, it's the type of feature I didn't know I wanted. Does it work for brazilian portuguese? Also, can it handle technical jargon like medical terms?