Microsoft OneNote is a powerful digital notebook that helps you capture, organize, and quickly find information. Whether you’re taking meeting notes, planning projects, collecting research, or managing personal tasks, OneNote provides a flexible workspace that works across your computer, tablet, and phone. When notebooks are stored in OneDrive or SharePoint, you can access them anywhere and collaborate with others in real time.

What Can You Store in OneNote?

With OneNote, you can organize notes by sections and pages in notebooks. These notes can include:

• Meeting notes
• Documents and file attachments
• Emails and Outlook content
• To-do lists and tasks
• Web research and hyperlinks
• Images and screenshots
• Audio and video recordings
• Drawings and handwritten notes
• Printouts and PDFs
• Meeting recordings and transcripts
• Content from other Microsoft 365 apps

OneNote Tips: Content You Can Easily Insert

OneNote is a very flexible application that can contain a wide range of content. You are not limited by page size or a linear structure. The Insert Ribbon tab gives you ideas for the types of items you can easily insert into OneNote.

Here are 12 practical ways to use Microsoft OneNote more effectively and get more value from your digital notebooks.

1. Use OneNote with Outlook Meetings

Create meeting notes directly from Outlook meetings, including the meeting title, attendees, date, and agenda. This makes it easy to keep notes organized and tied to specific meetings.
Learn more about these time-saving options for working with meeting notes in OneNote.

2. Record Audio or Video

Perfect for meetings, interviews, training sessions, or brainstorming sessions when you want to focus on listening instead of typing notes.

3. Insert File Printouts

Do you want to capture a printout without scanning a file or creating a PDF? From any Microsoft 365 program, simply choose to Send to OneNote as a printer choice. From this option, you can specify the name of the notebook, section, and page where you want to capture the printout. You can also insert a printout directly from OneNote. Quickly creating a file printout is especially useful for contracts, reports, PDFs, invoices, or forms that you want to reference alongside your notes.

4. Attach Files to Your Notes

When a printout isn’t needed, add a file attachment instead. Attach supporting documents directly to your notes so related files stay together in one place. The file can be opened directly from OneNote whenever you need it, although the attachment doesn’t link back to the source file that may have been updated.

5. Organize Resources with Hyperlinks

Create a centralized resource page by collecting links to websites, shared files, Microsoft Teams channels, training materials, and frequently used resources in one place.

6. Use Tables and Spreadsheets

When your notes require structure, insert a table to organize information. You can also embed an Excel spreadsheet when more advanced calculations or data analysis are needed.

7. Add Date and Time Stamps

As you create notes, adding a date and/or timestamp helps document your comments and additions, especially when sharing notebooks with others.

8. Use Tags, Tasks, and To-Do Items

OneNote includes built-in tags such as To Do, Important, Question, and Contact Information. You can search for tagged notes across an entire notebook, making it easy to locate action items and follow-up tasks.
You’ll find these options in the Home Ribbon tab or use keyboard shortcuts, such as [Ctrl]+1 for To Do to mark a note. Tags can be searched throughout notebooks, so they can be easily located. To track, check a To Do Tag when completed, or send to Outlook to create an Outlook task.
Explore additional OneNote keyboard shortcuts and productivity tips on our OneNote resource page.

9. Search Your Notes Instantly

OneNote’s powerful search feature can find text across pages, sections, and notebooks. It can even locate text contained within images and printouts, making it easy to find information even when you can’t remember where you saved it.

10. Collaborate with Others

Share notebooks through OneDrive or SharePoint so multiple people can contribute notes, project information, meeting minutes, and research in a single location. Changes are automatically synchronized, allowing everyone to work from the latest version of the notebook.

11. Sketch Ideas and Annotate Notes

With a touchscreen device or laptop and a stylus, you can draw diagrams during brainstorming sessions, mark up screenshots, annotate PDFs and printouts, and highlight important information during meetings. You’ll discover these choices under the Draw Ribbon tab.

12. Convert Handwriting to Text

Similar to the drawing tools, you can create freehand text in your notes. If your handwriting is readable, pick the Ink to Text feature to convert your writing to text.

Microsoft OneNote is much more than a note-taking application. It can serve as a project notebook, research repository, meeting workspace, task manager, and knowledge base all in one place. By taking advantage of these features, you’ll be able to capture information more effectively, stay organized, and find what you need when you need it.

Looking for more OneNote tips? Visit our OneNote Resource Center for additional articles, videos, keyboard shortcuts, and productivity techniques.

© Dawn Bjork, MCT, MOSE, CSP®, The Software Pro®
Microsoft Certified Trainer, Productivity Speaker, Certified Speaking Professional