One of those wonderful forehead-slapping moments, that I stumbled across only once I’d looked through the automation API for OneNote. And I thought I’d share.

I’m increasingly relying on OneNote to organise my life – dropping all kinds of research and meeting notes into it. I’ve also taken to tagging notes, either as actions, memorable names, or for research. Some kind of follow-up required in other words.

But as my notes have grown, actually sifting through the notes to find my tags and actions has become painful, and not at all obvious. Even more difficult has been filtering my actions by some kind of meaningful denominator – say customer, or meeting.

And it turns out that OneNote has this functionality pretty much built in. Here’s how it works -

Take a standard couple of tagged notes – here I’ve just got a couple of pages, but this works at multiple levels (including semantic searching such as today’s notes – nice).

Page 1

Page 2

The key here is the Find Tags button -

Click it – and you can search for Tags and then (Magic Unicorn bit), create a summary page of your Tags.  Yay!

It looks like this – and there’s even pop-up navigation to link you back to the original content. Wonderful stuff.