Take Super-Powered Notes for Free
YOU’LL NEED THIS
ONENOTE Grab the app for free from
www.onenote.com. WHEN IT COMES TO TAKING NOTES on your PC, smartphone, and tablet, nothing beats Microsoft OneNote. It’s powerful, flexible, and free, with updates synched across all your devices. It’s a great way to keep on top of what’s going on in your world—and then share it with anyone.
OneNote lets you create and capture almost anything: a list of things to buy on your next shopping trip; vacation ideas, with pictures, notes, annotations, maps, and weblinks; lecture and meeting notes, with information and documents right there where you need them. You can even use it to work on projects with family, friends, and co-workers—it’s the perfect collaborative tool. The more you use OneNote, the more things you’ll discover it can do. Let’s get started! 1 START A NOTEBOOK When you first fire up OneNote, you’ll discover that it has already created a default notebook for you, but you can add as many as you like by selecting the menu icon in the top-left corner of the app. Right-clicking any one brings up a contextual menu, enabling you to sync your notebooks, share them with others via a weblink, or even pin one or more to the Start menu. 2 ADD SOME CATEGORIES You can organize your notes under each notebook by adding category tabs under the Ribbon. Add titles to each one, and change the default colors if you want. To change the order of your tabs, drag and drop one to its new location, and all the others shift along. Add individual pages to each category by clicking “+ Page” in the menu bar on the left. 3 MAKE A NOTE Click on the “+ Page” option, as in the previous step. In the main window, you can now add a title to your note, and then start adding whatever info you want. To create a checkable shopping list, for example [ Image A], type the items you want to add, arranged in a list, then select the “Tag As To Do” icon under “Home.” Checkboxes appear next to each item, which you can check off one by one.
4 ARRANGE AND RESIZE If your list is too small or plain-looking, you can select the text within it, and use the text tools under “Ribbon > Home” to style it up. You can also move the list anywhere on the page by dragging and dropping using its grab bar, or change its shape by dragging each of its sides. You can also cut, copy, and paste items in the list by right-clicking to bring up a contextual menu. 5 ADD MORE ELEMENTS Because you can move items around the page in your notes, OneNote makes it easy to add lots of other elements—pictures, doodles, weblinks, and so on. What you can’t do is make audio or video recordings within the desktop version of OneNote—that is now a mobile-only feature [ Image B]. Luckily, you can listen to these or watch them on your PC later, because they sync in the cloud. 6 GRAB THE WEB One of the best things about OneNote is that it gives you the ability to grab webpages, or bits of them. So, let’s try it: Open Microsoft Edge, select a webpage you want to grab, then select the “Make a Web Note” icon. You can now use OneNote’s tools to annotate it, or use the Clip tool to grab just a section. When you’re done, select the “Save Web Note” icon to add it to OneNote [ Image C].
7 ADD YOUR DOCUMENTS There will inevitably be times when the stuff you need is available elsewhere—maybe as a separate Office document or PDF on your PC. You can make sure you don’t lose track of these by heading to “Ribbon > Insert > File,” and adding the files as an attachment, which you can double-click to open in the relevant app [ Image D]. You can also insert the content of PDFs directly. 8 BUILD A TABLE Head to “Ribbon > Insert > Table,” and you can create one right there and then. You can add columns by simply pressing the Tab button on your keyboard. Rows are created by pressing Enter at the end of the final column. You can resize the table any way you wish, but OneNote is also clever enough to automatically resize columns and rows for you as you type. 9 GET DOODLING, DUDE You don’t have to type notes using your keyboard— write them freehand using “Ribbon > Draw” instead. Choose the color and line thickness using the contextual tools, then use the mouse, trackpad, or your finger (if you have a touchscreen) to doodle away. If you’re useless at drawing shapes, select “Convert To Shapes” to sort them.
10 GOOD TO SHARE If you would like someone else to work on your note with you, use the “Share” option in the top-right. Clicking “Share” brings up the Sharing pane [ Image E], which asks you to invite someone to work on the note with you using OneNote online, or their own version of the app. Or you can send them a non-editable copy.