Note Taking

This is the second in a series of posts on taking notes and managing your work with OneNote. For an introduction to OneNote, click here.

If you have used social bookmarking tools like Diigo or Delicious, note taking software like Evernote, or even created a blog, you are probably familiar with tagging. Typically, you tag a note, webpage or blog post to categorize it. You might for example assign the tag “recipe” to web pages and notes containing recipes.

Where are tags used in OneNote?

OneNote tags are usually not applied to categorize whole documents or pages (for this you use notebooks, section groups and sections), but to mark individual items (e.g. headings, paragraphs, sentences, or even images) on pages.

OneNote includes a large number of predefined tags, allowing you to label items according to their type, or what you need to do with them. In addition to predefined tags, you can also create your own.

Read moreOneNote Tags are Special: Use them to Manage Work and Study

WHAT IS ONENOTE?

OneNote is part of Microsoft’s office suite, and an extremely versatile note taking and outlining application. It allows you to create rich notes which may include text, tables, formulas (OneNote 2010), tags, images, audio, and video recordings. You take your notes on pages in a OneNote notebook – and your notes can be anywhere on a page as on a sheet of paper. The pages in your notebook can be organized in section groups and sections. You can tag items (sentences, images, paragraphs etc.) in your notes to label them as questions, comments, to-do items, ideas etc.

Two popular ways to take notes in OneNote:

1. Annotating documents: You can cut and paste, print, scan, or photograph almost any document to OneNote and then highlight it and take margin notes (or notes anywhere else in the document).
2. Outline note taking: You can use OneNote as a folding outlining application (Outliner) and create collapsible hierarchical summaries.

Read moreEffective Note Taking and Outlining with OneNote