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In this interactive student's guide, you’ll see how to get the most out of OneNote so you can stay on top of your schoolwork.

Anarchy can quickly supplant order when Monday rolls around.

How do you stay ahead of the chaos? There are a host of tools—Evernote, Wunderlist, Outlook Notes, Windows Sticky Notes, Sharpie on my arm , etc.—and I've tried them all. The power of OneNote stands far above the rest acting like a personal dragon, guarding my mountain treasure—disclaimer, nerdy Hobbit reference. By the way, it’s completely (100%) FREE everywhere!

Getting The Most Out Of Onenote Windows 10

Here are some insights that help me get the most out of OneNote, the best kept secret at Microsoft.

To get the most out of OneNote as a tool for your GTD practice, let’s review the fundamentals of the Getting Things Done® approach, so you understand how the methodology and tools will intersect. GTD is the shorthand brand for “Getting Things Done”, the groundbreaking work-life management system. OneNote 2016 Find Tags listing Ideas 6. Integrate OneNote with Outlook Flags. Now, we’re getting to OneNote’s true potential! As you take notes and plan projects in OneNote, you might wonder how to manage deadlines and remember the things on your to-do list.

#1 – Structure or No Structure…That is the Question

Back when I wrote everything on legal pads, it was difficult to find anything. Paper solutions and even many software options lack an elegant way to organize, so information goes into a blackhole. OneNote provides the best structure for organizing, reorganizing, and searching notes. Here are some ideas to help even the most disorganized user become a neat freak.

Send to OneNote

OneNote integrates with everything! You will see options to “Send to OneNote” in Outlook, Internet Explorer, and Skype for Business to name a few. In the Desktop application, you’ll notice that OneNote comes with a secondary window called “Send to OneNote.” Let this magic wand run in the background. It will allow you to send anything you are working on directly into OneNote. If you are a Windows 10 user, just use Win+Shift+S and it will launch the snipping tool to capture any part of your screen!

When you “Send to OneNote,” the tool will ask you where you want to store the item. You can even teach OneNote how to handle specific actions, so it doesn’t ask you every time where you want to save specific items.

Notebook Organization

I have 6-10 notebooks that I use for a combination of personal and business purposes. OneNote offers layers of organizational options for your notes and tasks:

How To Use Onenote 2016

If you are OCD like me, you can put every item in its place. Right-clicking on page(s) or section(s) will let you move or copy those items to the right place making reorganizing a snap.

Searching Notes

OneNote's search functionality finds flecks of gold lost in the fray. If you don’t have everything in the right place, you will still find it quickly. OneNote supports OCR (Optical Character Recognition), which means it searches the text inside of images and handwritten notes made with a stylus; OneNote is also heavily integrated with the Surface Pen. Print an image of a PowerPoint file or PDF to OneNote for easy access.That text is also searchable.

The search is instant and goes across all of my notebooks, but I can change the scope of the search with one click! When searching for a specific term...no retyping needed!

#2 – Enhance the Experience

If OneNote is the power to tame chaos, free tools exist that can make it a superpower. Below are a couple favorite productivity-enhancing add-ons.

OneDrive

Getting The Most Out Of Onenote 2016

Be sure to store your notebooks on OneDrive. OneDrive ensures access anywhere on any device making it a must have for every OneNote user. It comes with 15 GBs of free storage but you can get additional free storage through Bing Rewards or with a paid Office 365 subscription.

If you are a business user—and your company subscribes to Office 365, you can get up to 1TB of storage with OneDrive for Business.

Because OneNote is available on almost any device, OneDrive will connect your notes together to ensure you always have the information you need.

Onetastic

Many users take notes in Word and have come to love features like “Find and Replace” or “Image Cropping.” OneNote's lean format prevents the availability of these features. Onetastic takes care of this by adding advanced features into your desktop client of OneNote. Additionally, it gives you a calendar view for searching you past notes.

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Onetastic makes it easier to extract image text as well using OCR.

Getting The Most Out Of Onenote Screen

Office Lens

This app is bottled magic! It allows you to take a picture of a whiteboard, document, or photo and insert it instantly into your OneNote. This can even convert documents into Word files with editable text! Available on iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. I used it to convert a 200 page spiral bound book from my aunt (made on a typewriter) into a Word file and saved weeks (maybe years) of tedious copying.

OneNote Clipper Chrome Extension

A colleague of mine showed me this little gem. You can easily use it to capture exactly what you want from the web:

1. Strip out ads and navbars from websites to only get the text
2. Clip specific regions of a page (like snipping tool) or get the full page
3. Add a note with the clipping explaining why you wanted to keep it

How Do You Use Onenote

#3 – Get Creative

Last but not least, take some time to think about what you want to remember and how you want to remember it. OneNote is loaded with cool ideas to help you:

Use Tags

OneNote allows you to quickly and easily tag important items to make them easy to find in the future. Just looking at the suggested tags can give you ideas you can include in your OneNote. 'To Do' and “Movies to See” are two of my favorites. The default tags also come with short cuts and clicking “Find Tags,” will help you find them later.

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Beautify your Notes

Ever miss writing on notebook paper? Using the Surface Pen, you can write with line-ruled guidance in the color of your choice.

In addition, you can prepare and insert templates on pages to have them prepared with whatever you want. I like to save my own custom templates for future projects.

Never Lose Your Notes Again

There really is so much these tools can do. Make sure that you never lose a note again.

About the Author: Todd Kirk is an end-user advocate and trainer from BrainStorm, Inc.

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