OneNote – part of the Microsoft 365 suite – is an excellent tool for taking notes and managing tasks. If you’ve previously relied on MS Word for note taking, it’s worth spending time getting familiar with OneNote as you may well find your digital notebooks are neater, more organised and easier to share.
Whilst the program may not be as well known as the likes of Excel or PowerPoint, OneNote has been around for a rather long time – in fact Bill Gates first launched it back in November 2002. In the intervening years OneNote has seen extensive development and evolution, to create the smooth note-taking tool in use today.
The benefits of OneNote (when compared with MS Word, for example) include a useful organisation hierarchy, where pages are organised into sections within notebooks. This allows users to collate projects and find information they need quickly, without trudging through reams of irrelevant content.
It’s also very easy to use, with text able to be added anywhere on the page without hitting formatting snags, and other multimedia to be dropped in wherever and however required. This multimedia isn’t just imagery or video saved on your desktop, though, but could also take the form of stickers or drawings.
Plus, when saving notebooks, you can colour code them to easily group projects together or make it quick to find what you’re looking for in future.
If all this has sold you on OneNote then you’ll want to create your first notebook. To do this, open OneNote then File > New, whereupon you’ll be asked to save your notebook straight away. You can also create a new notebook directly within SharePoint (by clicking ‘New’ within the Documents section). Simply give your notebook a name and click ‘Create’.
You’d find an existing notebook in the same way as you would a saved Word Document or Excel Spreadsheet. It may also be under ‘Recent documents’ if you’ve not worked on it too long ago, or within Delve.
All this is just a snapshot of the great many features and functions available within OneNote. So if you’ve never used it before, it really is worth giving it a try.
