First 5 - List of Favourite Features in OneNote

Co-authored by Kelly Marshall and Sean Wallbridge, SharePoint MVP

How can you not love OneNote?

We do! It’s a free download and works across every device and operating system that matters to us (i.e. everything except Blackberry). Sean loves that he can relax on the couch and use his iPad to jot down ideas into his Notebook. And Kelly loves that she can access her Notebook from her Android phone while she’s at the grocery store to check out what items she’s running out of in her kitchen pantry.

We decided to take five minutes to compile a list of our top five favourite OneNote capabilities:

(And yes, we wrote this list in OneNote. We creating a page in a shared notebook, share it’ location using a page link (via email), collaborated by each adding our notes on the page, and exported the finished product to a PDF format.)

# 1 – Use square brackets to create a new page and a hyperlink to that page.

Kelly discovered this trick by accident, and the entire itgroove team has been using it ever since.

Sean loves that it works exactly like square brackets [[ ]] do in SharePoint to create new wiki pages. Simple, easy to remember.

# 2 – Creating reusable checklists for projects.

We have a saying around the itgroove office – “our clients are special, but not unique.” Every SharePoint and Office 365 project we work on has some overlap so why reinvest the wheel every time? We use OneNote Notebooks to store reusable checklists of itgroove-approved best practices and step-by-step processes to share knowledge between teams and team members.

# 3 – Insert Space in a OneNote Page

Since these lists are not static (aka they are evolving over time with revision and additions) there’s many times we want to quickly chop lengthy checklists into smaller chunks.

Here’s a handy trick Sean recorded to quickly insert Space in a OneNote Page. (Tip: It lives in the “Draw” Tab, not the “Insert” tab.)

# 4 – Assigning Outlook Tasks from within OneNote.

Sure, creating Outlook tasks for yourself from within is great, but delegation is an important part of leadership and running a tight ship. Use OneNote to write down all actionable items during a meeting then use the Custom Tasks feature to assign them to members of your team.

# 5 – Have you checked out the Onetastic add-on yet? Get on it!

Pinning favourites, cropping images, viewing OneNote pages as calendar entries, adding custom styles and downloading macros are some of the features we use every day – and that’s only the beginning of what’s included.

This list only scratches the surface of the list of features in OneNote that get us excited.

Stay tuned for our next list of “Another Five Favourite OneNote Capabilities”…

In the meantime, check out the OneNote Search results on our itgroove staff Knowledge Blogs for more OneNote tips and tricks. New articles posted weekly!

First 5 – List of Favourite Features in OneNote

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