A request I get face to face is "What is a way to get more out of OneNote?"  I don't think I've ever gotten this in email - must be something about the way people interact.  So after a year of using it far more than I ever did before, though, I want to share my favorite tips.  If you are in a hurry, you can use the patented "bold skim reading" technique to focus on the highlights.

 

  1. Holding down the SHIFT key while dragging outlines around the page will cause them to merge together.  Try it: type on the top of a page, and then again near the bottom.  SHIFT+drag the bottom outline onto the top.  They become one larger area.

 

  1. File | Backup is where you can get to your most recently changed pages. This crops up fairly frequently, and is usually phrased as "Ack!  I just deleted something important!  Now what?"

 

  1. I almost exclusively use WINDOWS + S to get a screen clipping.  A surprising number of users I meet rely only on the menu commands.  This would save a little time if you don't want to force OneNote to the top to access the command, and works whenever there is a little OneNote icon by the clock (technically, if OneNoteM.exe is running).  You don't need OneNote running to use this.

 

  1. My screen is small, especially on a tablet.  I rename notebooks to save vertical real estate.  For instance, our "Test Team Notebook" has a relatively long name.  I right click it and select Rename to "ttn" and it uses much less space.  This does not actually rename the notebook - just the notebook name in the UI.

 

  1. I have meetings with all the people on my team regularly, and have a separate section for each.  But that is boring.  I asked everyone to give me a photo, and used MS Paint.net to "fade" the photo.  Then I enlarged them each to about screen size, pasted them onto a page, and made a template for each section with a background photo of the person.  I would post a picture of this, but I had to promise none of these photos would wind up on the internet.

 

Also, did anyone see Ed Bott's column over at Ziff Davis?  It's at http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=402, and guess which application got rated "Favorite Windows Application" by his readers?  What a nice compliment, especially considering the size of the field.

 

On a side note for number 3 - I'm convinced that taking a week or so to do nothing but learn keyboard shortcuts for the applications you use would be worthwhile.  I've never really like the mouse.  Even when I first saw the Mac in 1984, I did not like switching my hands between the keyboard and the mouse.  It just felt clumsy.  I'm thinking that knowing and using the keyboard commands would only result in more quickly completing the task at hand. 

 

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John