The Windows 10 OneNote app is great for taking notes for work or personal projects. Get more from it with Roland Waddilove’s top tips
1 Access Your Notes Online
The OneNote app in Windows 10 stores your notes in a file on OneDrive and places it in the Documents folder. If you need to access your notes on a different computer, such as a Windows 7 PC or a work computer, go to the OneDrive.com website in a browser, click the menu button in the top-left corner and click OneNote. It lists the notebooks, and after selecting the one you want, it opens in the browser.
Notebook sections are listed down the left-hand side online but across the top in the Windows 10 app. Otherwise, most of the menus and features are the same. There are differences, though. For example, the Windows 10 app has drawing functions, while the online version of OneNote can record and insert voice notes.
2 Save Notes On Your Phone
OneNote is available everywhere, so take advantage of this by adding it to your phone and tablet. Sign in with your Microsoft account to access your notebooks and notes. Wherever you are, if an idea comes to you or you need to remember something, tap OneNote on your phone and type it in.
OneNote can be run as an app, but it’s also among the share options on Android and iOS. The web browser, photos and other apps on phones and tablets have share menus or buttons, and you can save the page, photo or whatever to OneNote. It then appears on your PC in Windows 10’s OneNote app.
Notes shared on mobile devices are stored in a special section called Quick Notes. Select Quick Notes in the Windows 10 app, right-click a page and select Move to move it into another section.
3 Write On The Screen
Touchscreens are becoming popular on PCs and some laptops. Hybrid devices that have tear-off screens that can be used like tablets have them too. With a touchscreen, you can draw on notes and write on them with your finger. Select the Draw tab in OneNote, select the pen or highlighter, select a colour, and then just write or draw on the screen.
You can do this with a mouse, but drawing in a note with your finger or a pen is more natural. It’s great for sketching diagrams and plans. There’s a control to set the line width, an eraser and a lasso selection tool.
4 Show Symbols In The Margin
It’s not obvious, but there’s a margin on the left side of notes, which can be used to display symbols. Select the home tab, and in the toolbar, the last item in the text formatting section is a down arrow. Click it to see a list of symbols. Click Important, Question, Critical, Contact, Address or Phone Number. The symbol is inserted in the margin to the left of the note.
The symbols are just visual aids, and you can instantly see a note that is critical or important.
5 Save Webcam/Phone Photos
If you have a webcam on your computer, you can insert photos into notes. Click the Camera icon on the Home or Insert tabs, and a window opens with camera controls.
This is a bit limited with a computer, because you can only shoot something in front of it. Where this is really useful is with a mobile phone. Run the OneNote app, select a note, or tap the new note button, the§n tap the camera icon. There’s an option to select an image already taken or to capture a photo with the camera. This is a useful feature if you need to collect and store photos for a project or document.
6 Picture Tools
There are a few basic picture tools and one killer feature, and all are accessed by right-clicking a picture you’ve taken with a camera or inserted from the PC’s disk or the phone’s gallery. Right-click an image and select Picture in the toolbar that appears. Choose ‘Rotate right 90’ or ‘Rotate left 90’ to switch from portrait to landscape, for example. There are also options to flip the image horizontally or vertically.
The killer feature is Copy Text. Right-click an image, select Picture > Copy Text. OneNote uses optical character recognition (OCR) to pick out the text in an image and copy it to the clipboard. You can then paste it into a new note or another application, like Word. This feature is very useful if you ever need to scan a document and don’t have any OCR software installed.
7 Add Lines And Grids
OneNote allow you to write anywhere on the page and to insert images and place them anywhere. This can make the notes look untidy and confusing if you aren’t careful in placing everything. Adding lines and grids to the page can help to make the notes clearer.
Go to the View tab and click Rule Lines to see a choice of four rule lines, four grids and none. Rule lines make the background to notes look like a notepad. There are pale blue horizontal lines and a red vertical line to mark the margin. The grids make the background look like graph paper.
8 Pin Notes To Start - Right-click Note
Some of your notes might be important, and you may need to frequently refer to them. They can be difficult to find if they’re buried deep in a notebook with many pages, so why not pin them to the Start menu? Right-click a page in the left-hand pages list and select ‘Pin to Start’.
A tile is created for the note, and it can be dragged and placed anywhere on the Start menu. Clicking the tile opens OneNote, the notebook and the page with the note. It’s a quick and easy way to get to your favourite notes.
9 Pin Notebooks To Start
A notebook can have many sections, which are added by clicking the plus button just above the notes. A section can have many pages, which are added by clicking the plus above the pages list on the left. It’s also possible to have multiple notebooks. You could have one for home and one for work, or one for each project you’re working on. There are many uses for separate notebooks.
Click the menu hamburger button in the top-left corner, and click the plus sign next to Notebooks. Enter a name for it, and it’s added to the list of notebooks. You can select the notebook to use in this menu, but to make it easier and quicker to access a notebook, right-click a notebook file in the menu and select ‘Pin to Start’. Create a separate tile for each notebook and then it’s just one click to open them.
10 Colour Code Notes
Notebooks have sections, which are the tabs across the top. To make them stand out and to make selecting them easier, they can be coloured. Right-click a section title, click Section Colour, and then click a colour.
The order of sections can easily be changed by clicking and dragging them. Drag a title left or right, and the others scoot around to make space for it. The order of pages can also be changed by clicking and dragging them in the left panel.