OneNote part 2: organizing your information

jonathanh — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 09:23:00 GMT

When it comes to organizing your notes, OneNote is all about freedom - you can put information wherever you want, move it around at will, and generally get totally lost. The search box is a lifesaver in this situation, but it's easiest not to get lost in the first place. Luckily, we've got four levels of hierarchy to play with in order to stay organized - what, you thought there were only three?

Folders - I use these at the top level, with separate folders for Work (everything I'm working on), Resources (useful information I might need someday), Secure (password-protected), and Blog (past posts and ideas for the future). Since the taskbar version of OneNote automatically saves everything into a top-level section called "SideNote", I've kept that section and use it as a short-term note-holder for random scribblings.

Sections - One level deeper. With default font sizes, you can fit about seven section tabs horizontally across a 1024-pixel screen, and that's also the useful maximum. Partly because you really don't want scrolling tabs - how will you ever remember what's there if you can't see it in the first place - but mostly because seven-plus-or-minus-two is the rule of thumb for "number of separate concepts you can keep in your head at the same time". So if you've got more than seven sections, start a new folder, and your memory will thank you for it!

Pages - Ok, I just counted, and you can fit 27 page tabs vertically down a 768-pixel screen. That's wayyyyy too many to easily grok at a single glance. Three ways to organize 'em:

By date. This works great for e.g. archiving daily information (blog posts, anyone?)
Alphabetically. Your eyes have had lots of practice at quickly scanning down alphabetical lists of information to find what you need, so put that skill to use.
By topic, with liberal use of subpages to add a fourth level of hierarchy. SP1 made this technique much more useful, since subpage tabs now show their title text.

You can find many more suggestions in Chris Pratley's excellent post, "How do you use OneNote?" Make sure you read all the ideas in the comments as well!

Part 1 of this series was about making your own toolbars.

OneNote part 1: making your own toolbars

jonathanh — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 08:08:00 GMT

This is the first in a series of loveletters, I mean blog posts, about how I use OneNote. No, seriously, I love this thing. I'll also be talking about:

folder layout and information sharing,
note taking, outlining and mind mapping,
and personal databases,

but I want to start with the toolbars.

Why the toolbars? Partly because having the right ones is important - if you're on a Tablet PC, you've got a limited amount of screen space, and you only want to display toolbar buttons for the actions that you use the most. But mostly because setting up Office toolbars is one of the most annoying and counter-intuitive UI tasks known to man, and deep down I just want to vent.*

So which are the right toolbars to use? I argue that it's best to create your own - I did that after I found myself frequently using buttons from four or five of the standard toolbars. And I created two: a horizontal toolbar that I use everywhere, and a vertical toolbar for the pen actions that I only use on my Tablet PC. To do it yourself:

View->Toolbars->Customize, and switch to the Toolbars tab.
Click New to create a new toolbar, give it a name, and drag it into the toolbar area.
Display all the other toolbars by checking off their names.
Now comes the counter-intuitive bit: while the Customize window is active, clicking on a toolbar button does not perform an action. Instead, it lets you drag-and-drop that button onto a different toolbar.
So, drag all the buttons that you want to use onto your new toolbar - my horizontal toolbar contains buttons from the Standard, Formatting, and Outlining toolbars, for example.
If you're not sure what a button does, right-click it and take a look at its name. Right-clicking also lets you change the appearance of a button (text, icon, or both), or insert the little divider bars between buttons ("Begin a group").
Some OneNote commands don't appear on any standard toolbar, but you can still see them listed in the Commands tab of the Customize window, ready to be dragged onto your own toolbar.
When you're done, the standard toolbars will probably be mere shadows of their former selves, denuded of useful buttons. That's ok - just select each of them in turn and hit "Reset…" to make their buttons reappear.

Phew. That wasn't so bad, was it? Now you can hide the standard toolbars and revel in all the screenspace that you just created!

More OneNote 2003 resources:

Download the OneNote Trial to try it for free for 60 days.
You really, really, REALLY want to add Service Pack 1 for a lot of extra functionality.
Brian Johnson wrote the Insider's Guide to OneNote 2003.
Chris Pratley has the best OneNote blog around, including a great series of posts on how it came into being.
The ever-popular Crabby Office Lady has a nice introduction to OneNote and to SP1.

*To be fair to the Office UI team, giving a user good visual cues as to how to manipulate toolbars is hard!

Jonathan Hardwick : OneNote

OneNote part 2: organizing your information

OneNote part 1: making your own toolbars