A OneNote notebook is the main container for notes you lot capture within the app. It's like a specialized binder, but with its own interface and unique tools. You can put notes anywhere within a notebook, and sync them across your devices.

Unfortunately, this simplicity of the notebook doesn't tell y'all how to use them properly. It'south like shooting fish in a barrel to current of air up with a bookshelf full of notebooks. We'll show you how to organize and manage notebooks in OneNote.

Notation: The instructions for this article is based on the OneNote app for Windows ten.

What Are Notebooks, Sections, and Pages

difference between notebook, section, and pages in OneNote

If you're a beginner, it's easy to learn the basic concepts. OneNote consists of three principal hierarchical levels:

Notebooks are the holders of all the items you deem worthy as notes. You can store notebooks on the calculator (only in OneNote 2016) and OneDrive.

Sections provide a level of organization within a notebook that corresponds to private projects or subjects. In the OneNote app, the sections appear on the left function of the navigation pane and pages to the correct.

Section Groups contains 1 or more sections. It creates an actress layer of organization to a notebook for keeping related content together.

Pages comprise your notes, images, links, and other elements you capture and create to help you lot with the piece of work. Give your page a distinct name and track information technology through the list of page tabs.

Organize Your OneNote Notebook

The style how you organize notebooks is a matter of individual preferences. You may collect everything that you want to remember in one notebook and rely on the search function. Or, yous can create a separate notebook for every project or subject.

You tin can create many sections or merge them into section groups. It's also possible to indent pages ii levels deep for further organisation. OneNote offers everything for users obsessed with orderliness.

General Strategy

  • Do you lot desire to share a notebook with someone else or a team? Create a dedicated notebook for this purpose.
  • Is your notebook likely to balloon with images, videos, or attachments? There could be issues with sync speed and reliability issues.
  • Will you access the notebook on the OneNote mobile app? A smaller targeted notebook works better on slow connections and requires less storage.
  • Purpose of creating a notebook? Align your notebook with any overarching notetaking goal.

Effectively Points About OneNote Notebooks

notebook management in OneNote
  • Renaming a notebook can break the sync with OneDrive. Y'all can give it a nickname instead. Right-click a notebook, click Nickname Notebook and type in your proper name.
  • Notebook color lets you quickly identify a notebook amongst the Notebooks listing. Right-click a notebook and choose a colour from theNotebook Colour choice.
  • If you frequently work with many notebooks, the listing can go cluttered. Y'all tin can close them any time and open it later on on. Correct-click a notebook and choose Shut This Notebook.
  • You can delete notebooks simply from OneDrive. Caput to the Documents folder. Click the checkbox abreast a OneNote document and click Delete.
  • OneNote uses a proprietary sync protocol that works just with OneDrive. Merely you lot can backup a notebook to Google Bulldoze.

Methods to Construction Your OneNote Notebook

Information technology's ever wise to create dissever notebooks for personal and work projects.

Y'all can sync them with OneDrive or choose SharePoint for your work notebook; the choice is yours.

As well, you can create a notebook for whatsoever field of study y'all wish to acquire, as a journal, and notebooks for school or college assignments, amid other things.

Now, you lot can put any number of sections, pages and even sort them. If you're not happy with the structure, you tin can tweak the section groups, subpages, or move your stuff to a new notebook.

PARA Arrangement to Organize Information

PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. Information technology's an organizational system that uses these four meridian-level categories to organize data.

  • A Projection is a series of tasks linked to a goal with a deadline engagement.
  • The Expanse of responsibility consists of tasks with a gear up of standards you should maintain over time. At that place is no deadline for tasks, only they're important.
  • A Resource is a topic of ongoing interest.
  • And Archives include completed items from the other three categories.

For instance, publishing a volume is a project, in which writing is an surface area of responsibility. The writing process, with tips and tricks, could be your resources. The workflow is complex and takes some fourth dimension to grasp.

To know more, read about this PARA system for organizing digital data.

Using the PARA System in OneNote

PARA system in OneNote

At first, you must define your projects. Write them down on a slice of newspaper, away from the constraints of any notetaking app. It'south possible you use different apps like Asana, Zoho, Basecamp, Google Bulldoze, etc. to manage your personal and work projects

Instead of binding yourself to each app's unique organizational scheme, you lot can utilize a common PARA system to copy the same projection list across every single tool you apply. This allows you to leverage each app's unique strengths while using the same projection listing across interfaces.

With this organisation, you can too dissever actionable and non-actionable information. This enables you to filter the overflowing of information coming your way and just focus on the actionable tasks.

In my case, OneNote is splendid for annotation-taking, Todoist for chore director, and Google Drive for keeping project files in-sync across the machine.

Cantankerous Linking Notebooks

OneNote has a born simple wiki system. With it, you tin make connections with other notes in the aforementioned section or another notebook. You can also link to a web page, Office documents, and other resources.

copy link to paragraph in OneNote app

And if you make a tabular array of contents (TOC) at the meridian level, yous can link to pages with whatever notebook. You have to do this manually equally there are no add-ns available for OneNote in Windows x.

OneNote 2016 users accept better luck with the Onetastic app. Hither's a guide showing how to gear up a wiki arrangement in OneNote 2016.

Notebook Size and its Affects

If you lot employ the OneNote app with the right strategy, a notebook with ii–3 GB in size should non cause any issues. Hither are some tips you lot can follow.

  • Practise non insert multiple PDF printouts in the same notebook: The printout (100 MB or more than) and OCR processing can slow the indexing procedure and sync speed.
  • Practise non overload a notebook with unnecessary media content: Upload it to Youtube or Vimeo, then embed it.
  • Page versions can touch notebook size: Correct-click a page and choose Page Versions. Delete the older version for a page with heavy content.

To see how big your OneNote notebooks are, head to the OneDrive website and click the Documents folder. Switch the display view from tiles to list. You'll see how much space each notebook occupies in the right-almost column.

size of the OneNote notebooks in OneDrive

Search Notes in OneNote

It's easy to search through your notes no thing where you shop them in a notebook. Press Ctrl + F or click the magnifying glass icon nearly the Navigation toggle button. In the search box that appears, enter a search word or phrase and press Enter.

search notes in OneNote notebooks

Just beneath the search box, click Pages to come across results found in the text of your notes. Or, click Tags to search by note tags.

To accommodate the telescopic of search results' scope, click the dropdown arrow and choose from---All Notebooks, Current Notebook, Current Section, and Current Page.

Trivial Known Microsoft OneNote Features

Merely similar a regular spiral newspaper notebook, OneNote notebooks are built folio by page. You can organize them into sections or section groups. With and then much flexibility, you must accept a thorough strategy and programme how you want to employ the notebook.

With the tips discussed in this article, you tin organize and manage notebooks in a amend style. OneNote has many little known features that you might not know. These piddling known OneNote features can meliorate your notation-taking skills.

12 Little-Known Microsoft OneNote Features You Will Love

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