How to use OneNote to its full potential

Posted on July 7, 2020 by Louise Howland

One of the lesser known apps in the Microsoft Office 365 suite, OneNote allows you to advance your paperless journey by creating electronic notebooks that can be shared across multiple devices and even across teams of different co-workers, all in neatly organised sections, with content that is easily searchable. OneNote is like a virtual meeting file, giving the ability to split your work into different ‘Notebooks’ that can be further divided into ‘Sections’ and ‘Pages’ and combines the ability to type, ink drawer, annotate and insert files and images. You can have Notebooks that are just for your own eyes, or you can set up shared notebooks to allow groups to collaborate, for example for meeting minutes or accessing notes on particular clients or work processes. And because it’s all stored in Office365, everything is cloud based and accessible from multiple devices, making it a great tool for taking notes with you everywhere. OneNote and Outlook Emails are a part of everybody’s daily working life, it’s a great tool for communication but not the best way to keep track of files and important information. Using OneNote you are able to drag emails into a shared notebook to make collaboration (and searching for emails) much easier. OneNote is recognised as being a great tool to create meeting notes. Meeting notes often tend to live in separate files which can make organising and searching for notes difficult. In OneNote, you can create a “notebook” where you are able to have subpages for all your meeting notes within a project. OneNote also allows you to search on certain keywords within notebooks to find the exact note that you are looking for. Allow the important emails you need to keep hold of in OneNote with “Send to OneNote” button in Outlook. This will place the selected email straight to the notebook of your choosing. Or, you can send to OneNote by sending it to an authorised email account [email protected] How to ‘send to OneNote’ Open the item that you want to send to OneNote by doing the following:

On the ribbon near the top of Outlook open message or meeting window, click “Send to OneNote”.
Select your notebook and click where you want the information to
Click “save”

Another way that you will be able to send emails from a non-Microsoft email to enable the save emails to OneNote feature:

Choose the email you’d like to send.
Then choose your destination – make this the default location.
The email content – just send an email to “[email protected]” to save information straight into OneNote allowing you to have access to the emails that you had saved in your device.
This can include things like “notes to self” receipts and important emails. This way you can always stay connected with your projects.

OneNote and to do lists OneNote allows you to create and manage to-do lists. By removing the hassle of having piles of paper, post-it notes and various emails, OneNote stores your to-do lists right in the application, ensuring tasks stay on your radar. You can add your meeting notes from your notebooks and copy the items into your to-do list. To create a checkbox, simply right click and you are able to categorise your -to-do list. These reminders will also pop up on outlook if your OneNote and Outlook are connected. OneNote for project management Planning, organisation and collaboration are important factors in project management and are mandatory for projects to run smoothly. Every project manager will organise their projects and their way of working differently to ensure that their projects are completed on time. By using OneNote project managers can organise their projects, including capturing as information of any kind and sharing any type of content– including text, images, videos, tables and files anywhere on OneNote with the ability to move from multiple notebooks. Using the email integration elements of OneNote is a great tool for project managers especially with large projects with a large volume of emails, it allows them to find information quickly and tag information to improve searches. Using OneNote for to-do lists makes managing projects much easier especially when juggling numerous mini complex projects. Here are some tips for navigating OneNote with a few actions that can be made via your keyboard:

CTRL + up arrow + E sends the selected pages in an email CTRL + , creates a bullet point list CTRL + / creates a numbered list To capture your entire screen use the clipping tool which can be a convenient feature of OneNote to do this use the Windows Key+Shift+S