11.4 OneNote for capture and organisation

What you'll be able to do

Capture anything: typed, drawn, photographed, or clipped from the web. Find it again months later, which is the whole test of a notes system. Share a living notebook with a team.

Before you start

OneNote, signed in with your Microsoft account, so that notebooks live on OneDrive and sync everywhere. It is the Getting Your Footing files story, applied to notes.

The work

1. Same either way: set up the three levels once. A notebook for each big area of life, such as College, Projects and Personal, and a handful of them rather than twenty. Sections are the tabs inside a notebook, one per subject or project. Pages sit inside sections, and subpages indent under a parent page for detail. The structure follows the app-choice idea from Getting Your Footing: OneNote is where things live before they have a shape. Once a note becomes a document, a set of data or a talk, it moves to Word, Excel or PowerPoint.
2. Same either way: capture in whatever form the thing arrives. Click anywhere on a page and type, because a OneNote page is a free surface and text lands where you click. Draw with a stylus or a finger on a touch device, for diagrams, margin notes, or marking up an image you pasted. Record audio from the Insert menu while typing a few keywords, and the recording is tied to those notes. Ask permission before recording anyone, in the spirit of the sharing lesson. Photograph the whiteboard, or a page, with the phone app, and it lands in the same notebook and syncs.
3. Same either way: clip the web rather than pasting pieces of it. The OneNote Web Clipper, an extension for your browser, sends a page or a selection to a section you choose, with its web address attached. That is the difference between a note and a quotation nobody can trace. Content you paste into OneNote also keeps its source link to begin with, so leave that setting on. You will always want to know where it came from later.
4. Same either way: make things findable on purpose. Tags, from the Home menu, mark lines as To Do, with a box you can tick, or as Important or Question. A search by tag then gathers every open question across a notebook into one list, before an exam or a meeting. And here is the ability nothing else in this subject has: OneNote's search reads the text inside images, using character recognition. The photographed whiteboard and the clipped screenshot both become searchable. Photograph the timetable, and a search for "Tuesday" will find it.
5. Same either way: share at notebook level when a team needs one memory. The Share control sends an edit link, and the permission decisions from the sharing lesson apply unchanged. Everyone then works in the same notebook at the same time. Meeting notes are taken once and readable by all, with a section for each series of meetings. Syncing does the merging, and the phone app makes that same notebook the thing you capture into in the corridor.

Try it

Build your real structure: two notebooks, with sensible sections. Capture in all four ways. A typed page. A drawn diagram, or an annotated image. A clipped web page with its source. A photographed page of handwriting. Tag three lines as To Do and one as a Question, then find them by tag search. Search for a word that exists only inside your photograph. Then share one notebook with one person.

Check yourself