11.4 OneNote for capture and organisation
Notes you take are notes you find again.
Before:00. Getting Your Footing
OneNote is the capture surface of the suite: notebooks, sections and pages that hold typed notes, ink, audio, clippings and screenshots, all searchable — including the text inside images. This topic closes the module with organising and sharing notebooks across devices. The common confusion is designing an elaborate notebook structure before writing anything; capture first and let structure emerge, because search, not filing, is how notes get found again. Its place at the end rounds out the personal-organisation trio of mail, calendar and notes.
Work through these
Notebooks, sections, pages and subpages
Notebooks divide into sections and sections into pages, with subpages for detail. Deciding this structure early is what makes notes findable later.
Typing, ink, audio, clipping and screenshots
Notes can be typed, handwritten, recorded, clipped from a page or captured as a screenshot, all in the same place. The variety is what makes it a capture tool rather than a document editor.
Tags, search and the OCR of images
Tags mark things for later, search covers everything including text inside pictures, and that last capability surprises most people. It is what makes photographed whiteboards useful.
Sharing a notebook and syncing across devices
A shared notebook syncs across devices and between people, which makes it work for group projects. Understanding when syncing happens avoids the two-copies problem.
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