Kelly LaForest (Alumni)
Co-authored by Kelly Marshall and Sean Wallbridge, SharePoint MVP
First rule of working in OneNote is: you do not talk about… Yeah right! We can’t shut up about OneNote. If you’re looking to join the OneNote club, the first thing you need to do is decide where to store your Notebook.
And for collaboration’s sake – do not store it in your C: drive on your physical machine!
Here’s your list of “work smart” options:
1. Store your personal notebook in your OneDrive.
Tip: You could store the Notebook in your OneDrive Documents folder, but why not use the OneNote Online area? A notebook has already been set up for you there – based on the first name you used to create your OneDrive account.
2. Keep your business notebook that you want to share with your team in a dedicated Document Library in a SharePoint Team or Project site for maximum collaboration.
3. OneDrive for Business is an option that gives you the best of both worlds – private space for personal notebooks as well as collaborative space for business notebooks via the Shared with Everyone Folder.
Tip: Use the new button to create a new OneNote notebook file.
“Tip: You could store the Notebook in your OneDrive Documents folder, but why not use the OneNote Online area? A notebook has already been set up for you there – based on the first name you used to create your OneDrive account.”
Please tell me specifically where the “OneNote Online area” can be found. I was using OneNote 2010 and recently purchased an Office 365 Home subscription. I have a OneDriveDocumentsOneNote Notebooks folder, but I don’t see any other OneNote folders on OneDrive. I’d also like to have “Mike’s Notebook” with QuickNotes instead of the old Personal (OneNote)Unfiled folders, but Microsoft doesn’t make it easy to say the least.
The OneNote area isn’t a folder in OneDrive. When you are in OneDrive, in the top left of your screen, click the chevron (downward facing arrow) icon beside the word OneDrive to see a dropdown menu – which should include a purple OneNote Online button on the far right.
As for the QuickNotes issue… not 100% sure what you mean by the “old Personal (OneNote)Unfiled folders” but when you create your Outlook.com or OneDrive account, a Notebook is automatically created in your OneNote Online area that takes on your first name i.e. “Kelly’s Notebook” or “Mike’s Notebook”. This is where you can find your Quick Notes for OneNote Online. This is totally separate from the Quick Notes tied to your OneNote Desktop program. Hope that helps!
Hi Kelly,
Your posts are great.
I’m also an OneNote enthusiastic.
What do you think about store OneNote notebook in the SiteAssets folder?
I ignore the default OneNote notebook of the Site and create a folder named OneNote in the Documents library, were I create all the notebooks.
I use this rule in all Team Sites.
I will follow your posts.
Best Regards
Vitor Mendes
Thanks Vitor!
In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with the storage option you described, although we have not done that anywhere in our Corporate Portal.
Sometimes we use the default OneNote Notebook library that’s automatically created as part of the SharePoint Team or Project site template and stored in the Site Assets library – mainly when when we need to spin up a Project Site quickly and keep the Notebook “locked down” so it’s not accidentally deleted/moved/etc. by untrained end users.
Most often we create a brand new Document Library called “Notebooks”. The reason is we want to be able to use different Advanced Library settings than we want for our Site Assets library or our standard Document Library.
For example, we like to be able to decide if the files opens in the client application versus in the browser.
Another example is we set the Document Template to be a OneNote file so users can easily create click on “New Document” to create new Notebooks. New Documents in a Site Assets library creates Word Documents.
This method is not ideal in many cases, but we are a team of technical users with constant monitoring on our SharePoint sites so there is little fear that the number or size of the Notebook files will explode, surpass the limits of the Library, and break the site.
(Apologies about late response – big backlog of comments to make my way through.)
Hi Kelly,
Thanks for the great info! I love it.
One question: we store OneNote notebooks in our SharePoint team site. Usually within libraries specific to projects. When I create a new section in my own notebooks, I cannot rename the section and have it stick. It will revert back to “New Section 2” or whatever. I read somewhere (can’t find where now) that this has something to do with a firewall. Have you encountered this or know a solution?
John
Keeping notebooks in a document library is nice, but if you have an Alert configured for the library itself, you will receive an incredible number of alerts as notebook is autosaved by the various authors.
I am trying to figure out how to move my notebooks back to the site assets folder so I will not receive all the Alerts.