OneNote Quick Start!

0:00Let's start off this skill by making sure we all understand what the point of the OneNote application actually is. I mean, why OneNote? And you might be looking at me and thinking, well, I think the clues in the name there, Simona. Surely it's just about taking notes, isn't it? And yes, of course that is true. But sometimes people say to me, oh yeah, yeah, OneNote is all about taking notes, and I don't go to meetings, so therefore I don't actually take notes in that sort of traditional sitting in a meeting taking notes type of context. So, one note isn't of any use to me.

0:31But look, here's the thing. There's more to OneNote than just taking notes. So yes, of course you can use it to take notes, either typed notes or even handwritten notes if your device supports that. But also look here, points number two and three on my list, which I think are much more valuable. So, number two on the list, planning and researching. If you're looking stuff up online and you're gathering together information, you're learning stuff, you know, where do you put all of the results of that research and planning? Look where do you put it? So therefore, OneNote really comes into its own.

1:02When you are gathering together different types of content, I mean, maybe you have found links, you found pictures, you found PDFs, you write a bit of text that springs to mind, you scribble a bit of annotation using if you've got one as touch type of device. Where do you put all of those different things that you have gathered during your planning and researching activity? Well, the answer is of course, OneNote. So if you think about how it gets its name, yes, OneNote is about taking notes, but more importantly, in my opinion, it gives you just one place to store all of that stuff.

1:32And I think it is a fantastic tool. I use it as we will see to plan the videos that I record in this job. But sometimes people say to me, "Oh, really? I'm not sure that I've got the energy to learn yet another Microsoft application. I mean, can't I just use Word or something to do my planning and research and note-taking?" And I think really, we've got to remember that products like Microsoft Word were not designed to take notes. I mean, for sure, if you're really desperate, I suppose you could use it for that. But if I just remind you what Word actually looks like, so there's a sneak preview of OneNote, come back to that in a second.

2:07But this, of course, is Microsoft Word. And Word, if you think about it, was originally designed to create the final, finished, polished documents. So you can see I'm scrolling through here, it's beautifully formatted, I've got little headings and lines across the page. I've got a rigorous numbering structure here with all of the text neatly aligned according to whatever standards I'm supposed to be following. I've got a page number in the footer area. So Word is very good at that. And I think you already know, if you've ever tried to use Word, how annoying it is, if you do want to just add a random picture, just here, or add a random web link here in this gap.

2:41I mean, it's not always that easy to just type in these gaps here because Word is designed to be a kind of a continuous flow of text, isn't it? It's a text-based tool. So if you want to start bringing in other stuff, it gets really quite annoying. OneNote, of course, is the answer. So let me just get rid of this Word document. I don't need to save any changes I might have inadvertently made. And what you're looking at here is OneNote. And what you're actually looking at are these specific notes that I've been using to plan this particular skill. So here you can see my notes for this video that you're watching right now, and you know, those are the things that we're talking about here.

3:15You can also see I've got a picture, I've got a couple of links. And what's interesting about this, can you see that all of these bits are kind of free form? You know, nothing else moves around when I move any of these things around. Imagine trying to do that in Word. I'm sure you've had the experience where you try and move something in Word and everything else goes out of kilter, and I can at any time just click anywhere and start typing, or if I have got a device that supports it, I can grab the pen and start scribbling on the screen as well. So as we progress through this skill and the ones that follow this skill, of course I will be teaching you how we can work with it and how we can add all sorts of different bits and pieces to our OneNote notebooks.

3:52But before we get any further, I do need us to make sure that you are using the correct OneNote to follow this course, because OneNote does come in a few different flavors. So this course is specifically designed for the Windows desktop application. That's what you're looking at here. So what I'd like you to do is to have a look at your OneNote that you're trying to learn how to use and check that it kind of looks like this. It might look a little bit different, but the distinguishing feature I want you to have a look for in your OneNote is whether you've got a file menu up at the top left hand corner.

4:25And if you do, does it look like this or something like this? You probably won 't have all of these notebooks because these are obviously all of my demo notebooks, but does it look a bit like this? Does it say notebook information here? Do you have these other options down the left-hand side, new open, print, share , export, send, account options? Do you have that file menu? If you do, if it looks like that, then fantastic. You've got the correct One Note. So that's the OneNote Windows desktop application. That's the focus for this course. But if what you're looking at on your system doesn't look like that, and you think, well, what OneNote am I using then?

4:59Let me show you what it might be. So what you're now looking at is exactly the same notebook with the same notes you saw a second ago and that same scribble that you saw me add. But this time, at the top of the screen, this is the Windows 10 app. So it does look a little bit different. In my environment, I've got a solid purple bar across the top, but note, I do not have a file menu at the top left- hand corner. So if you haven't got a file menu, then you're going to be using, I think, the Windows app rather than the desktop app.

5:31Or there's a third option. Let me go to my browser. You might be using OneNote on the web. And for that, you do have a file menu, but it looks different. But hopefully it should be obvious if you're using OneNote for the web because you'll be using it within a browser. So at the top here, you can see that this is a browser tab. And if I click it, I get the opportunity to do a Google search or whatever. It 's a browser-based tab. So I have put links in this skill to separate training content on how to use OneNote for the web and how to use the OneNote for Windows 10 app.

6:05So by all means, follow those links if you realize you're not using the correct product for this course. But for the rest of this skill and the ones that follow, we will be using what you see here, the OneNote Windows desktop application. But anyway, haven't got that out of the way. Let's crack on and see how we can actually use OneNote. And so in this skill, we'll cover the basics of structuring your notebook and adding content to it. And then in other skills, we'll be learning more about different content types you can work with and we'll learn how OneNote integrates with your other office applications.

6:35And we'll also learn how to share and collaborate with OneNote. But let's not get ahead of ourselves too soon. So in the next video, we'll take a quick guided tour of the OneNote environment . and then we can start building an example notebook.

0:00Although I am assuming that you're already using other Microsoft Office applications, such as Excel or Word or Outlook, and of course the interface of OneNote is very similar to that. So I'm sure you're familiar with these different ribbon tabs across the top here, this row of words, which of course changes the buttons that you've got available to use to actually do the things you want to do in OneNote. There are one or two things about the OneNote interface that I want to share with you so it doesn't catch you out. And the first thing is it will default to what we call the simplified ribbon.

0:30And the simplified ribbon as you flick through these ribbon tabs only gives you , well, a simplified version of the buttons available to lead you to the features that we're going to be using in OneNote. So I'm probably going to recommend to you that you click this drop down over on the right-hand side and change it to the classic ribbon. Now you don't have to, but that's what I'm going to be using throughout this course. So if you want yours to look the same, showing all of the features available in a slightly more expanded view, then I recommend to make it match. You should probably do the same on yours. So rather than showing the simplified ribbon, show the classic ribbon instead.

1:02And that's probably going to match the sort of view that you will see in, for example, Excel. You can see I've got that deeper ribbon rather than the thinner simplified ribbon. So that's the first thing. The second thing, a quick word about the quick access toolbar, which is common across all Microsoft Office applications. So you might have used it in Excel or Word. So let me just switch back to Excel. The quick access toolbar in Excel here, you can see is this row of buttons. I've got right at the top of the screen, which stay fixed no matter which ribbon tab I mean. So that's why it's called the quick access toolbar.

1:34I've always got access to them, no matter, you know, which ribbon I happen to be working in. And I do recommend you use that in OneNote as well. So let me go back to OneNote. So first of all, make sure it's showing. Now mine is showing. It's this little toolbar up here showing the back button and the undo button. It might be showing underneath the ribbon for you. But if you right click somewhere up here, you will see I've got the option to hide the quick access toolbar. So I'm just going to do that so I can show you what happens if you have already got yours hidden. So I'm going to hide it. It's now not there. So if you haven't got it, just right click somewhere on your ribbon and choose the option to show the quick access toolbar.

2:09There it is. It's back again. And again, if you right click on that, you get the option to show it either above or below the ribbon. I've got mine above the ribbon, but you could choose. Let's just try it. You could choose to show it below the ribbon if you want to. But no, I'm going to put it back above the ribbon because that's my preference. And then once we've mastered that, as you might be aware, if you already use this in Excel or Word, when you come across useful buttons throughout the different ribbon tabs, you can just right click on any button you fancy and choose to add it to the quick access toolbar. So I'm just going to add a few random ones here.

2:40So add the quick access toolbar, add the quick access toolbar. And you can see that little row of buttons up there is growing with all of my favorite commands. So no matter which ribbon tab I'm in, I've always got, for example, the highl ighter option available, no matter which ribbon tab I happen to be working in. So I am going to suggest you use that. And throughout the course, there will be the odd button here and there. I'm going to be recommending that you do add to your quick access toolbar. The next thing I wanted to mention to you is the search in OneNote. Now, Microsoft, historically, over the last few releases of Office have meddled a little bit with how search works.

3:15And at the moment in OneNote, in my opinion, it's ever so slightly confusing because we've got two search boxes. So you've got this search right at the top of the screen, which is currently, as you can see, aligned with my quick access toolbar and the title of the file that I'm working in. And that search box, well, let's try it. Let's imagine I want to find a particular command and I'm looking through the ribbons and I can't find it. Well, you can search for commands to get help. So I think to myself, there must be a command somewhere to clear formatting. So I'm just going to type clear and sure enough, it's come up with, yeah, there is a command and action for clearing formatting.

3:50And what I like about this, actually, I can use the command directly from here, but I can also right click and add it to that quick access toolbar. That saves me ever having to care where that command actually lives on the ribbon. I've just found it through search and added it straight to my quick access toolbar. But if you are curious, it would have lived. So there we go. That's where it lives on the home ribbon tab. But did you also notice, as I typed in clear for that example, it was also searching for the word clear in my notebook itself, you know, actually in my notes.

4:21And if I click that, what you'll see, the search then pops down to this other search box over on the right hand side here. So if you knew you were going to search specifically for content that you've made notes on in your one note environment, you could have gone directly there to find your particular, you know, to type in your search term. But what you can see here, I've obviously typed the word clear many, many, many times across all of my different notebooks. And I've got a very complex notebook structure, as you will see in the next video. But this is where I can see all of the times I've mentioned the word clear 222 times across my whole one note environment.

4:56But if I want to just find the word clear on this page, then look, find on the page, I click that. And that's where, can you see the gray highlighting there that indicates that's where the word clear appears on this particular page? There's only one search result that's come up on this particular page. You can see in the next to the search box there. And interestingly, well, as you know, these are my notes for these videos that I'm recording. So in this particular video, yes, I do want to talk about clear formatting as an example in the search. So that's where it's come up with the word clear.

5:26So searching within the page itself or within your notebook, then you can use this search box up here. But there's one more clever thing I want to show you about searchings. Let me clear that search I just did. And I'm going to search notebooks for the word heart. So let me just type in heart. I'm only interested in finding search results on this particular page. Let's just choose that. And you can see it's come up with three matches, one of which is in my notes, because I made a note that that was an example I wanted to do with you. So yeah, it's in my notes.

5:57But the reason why it's in my notes as an example I wanted to show you is because look, this little screenshot, this image I've got here, it has also read the text in that picture. So the word heart appears twice, one tiny tiny there and one slightly bigger there. So one note is rather fantastic at searching not only your notes, but also any text in your pictures, which is rather fabulous when it comes to searching for the content that you need. But anyway, I just wanted to point out to you the slight oddity of having two different search boxes there.

6:28And then finally, in terms of the interface and how it looks, you do have a few options. So you will have spotted, of course, that yes, the commands are all at the top here and the main body of the screen is where you're going to be typing your notes. But also, as we'll learn in the next video, you can structure your notebook into different pages and different sections and whatnot. And the different pages in your notebook will appear down the side. So look at my screen, I've got these different pages down the left-hand side here. And as I said, we're going to play with this a bit more in the next video. But you might prefer to have the pages shown down the other side.

7:00You know, it depends on what makes best sense to you. So there are a few options with regards to how you lay out the screen and how one note behaves for you. So in the file menu, if you choose options right at the bottom, you've got a few things to play with. As we progress, we might be diving into some of these things, but while we always have a browse through to see what's going to help the way you use one note. But if I go into display, you will see, for example, that I've got the page list on the left-hand side. If I uncheck that and click OK, it puts the page list over on the other side, which may be how yours has defaulted to.

7:32But that's going to be very much personal preference. Or let's imagine you've got really carried away with your quick access toolbar that you are taking up loads of space across the top here and you prefer to have the search box kind of collapsed. So it didn't take up as much space. So you've got more room for all of these lovely buttons to have quick access to . Well, again, that's an option. So if I go back into file options and on the general tab here, there we go, collapse the search box by default. Let's check that. Click OK. You can see that now the search box is just that little magnifying glass over on the right-hand side, which will only expand when I click it.

8:05That means I've got loads of space here to put lots of lovely buttons on my quick access toolbar. Much like I had already done if I show you in my Excel environment, you can see I've got loads of buttons here and that search box is collapsed. So a few options there. But in the next video, we're going to learn how we can work with our notebooks, how we can structure them into different sections and pages and whatnot to really make our researching and planning and notetaking experience more powerful and more organised.

0:00Let's have a think about the different ways that we can structure our OneNote content. So you have your OneNote notebook and as you might guess within that you have several different pages. You can have as many pages as you like and you saw a glitz of that in the last video and of course it's on the pages where you, you know, do your random typing and stick pictures or links or whatever you need to do. So yeah, your notebook contains multiple pages for you to put your notes and your research onto. But actually to help us organize this better our notebook can be divided up into sections.

0:30So much like if you've got a ring binder or something you might have those colored cardboard dividers if you like to divide up your pages into, you know, into sections. So in terms of the hierarchy of how your OneNote content is structured at the very top level you have your notebook. The notebook is then divided into sections and then the sections are divided into as many pages as you need. And if we think about this as a hierarchy, you know, very much like an organization chart almost you can see here the notebook at the very top level that's then divided into a number of sections and each section is divided into a number of pages.

1:03But I'm also going to just rearrange that hierarchy a little bit to display it in a kind of a sideways fashion. And you'll see why when I actually show you how we can get this to look in One Note because actually this more kind of sideways style of hierarchy shown here in the bluey color is more how it's represented in OneNote. And if you're thinking to yourself, well why does she make you such a big deal of this? I mean, this is not that surprising is it? Well, for two reasons. Firstly, you can see here is that you can and possibly should have multiple notebooks.

1:36So as soon as you have more than one, two, three, four notebooks in your One Note environment it becomes quite important to understand the structure so that you can navigate both within and between notebooks effectively. And I've also put here that you possibly should have multiple notebooks and we 'll talk a bit more about that as we progress. But the main reason is that because your OneNote environment can get very complex very quickly. Sometimes I see people working with just one notebook and it is enormous. They have hundreds of sections and section groups and pages and sub pages and it becomes an absolute monster to deal with.

2:08So we can ease that problem by having multiple notebooks and understanding how best to organize the structure before we get too deeply, too deeply into the world of OneNote and starter, creating a monster before we even realize what's happened. So yes, your OneNote environment can get very complex very quickly indeed. So my goodness, thank heavens for search. We saw that in the last video, didn't we? That the search is very powerful. It will search across multiple notebooks and multiple sections and believe you me, we're going to need that once we start getting into creating lots of content within OneNote.

2:39You already know, don't you, that what you're looking at here is my real live OneNote notebook and I'm using it to plan what I'm going to cover in this particular skill. But if you look over on the right hand side of that page list, now in the last video, we saw how we can move that page list from the left to the right depending on our preference. But you can see there are three pages already. So this first page is all of the detail, all of the planning for what I want to include in this skill. And then you can see I've got a couple of other pages ready and waiting for me to plan content for subsequent skills. But look, you will notice that these three pages here are actually in a section called OneNote 2024.

3:13So you can see these colored tabs across the top representing the different sections in my notebook. And if we look a little bit further to the left again, you'll see that my notebook is called CBT nuggets. Okay, so that's our hierarchy CBT nuggets divided up into multiple sections. And then you can see in this one note section, I've currently got three pages. So what I'm going to do is just go to the View ribbon tab because we do have some different display options that we can use to help us see the hierarchy in different ways. And it does very much depend on what's going to make best sense to you.

3:43So look at this, we have a tabs layout button. That's going to control the appearance of these section tabs. Now for me, they're currently shown across the top here as these colored tabs. But if I click the drop down here and choose instead of horizontal tabs, if I choose vertical tabs instead, then look at the left hand side of the screen. You can now see a hierarchy that does look a bit more like what I sketched up in the intro video in the blue color, you know, the sort of the sideways style of hierarchy. So at the very top level, there's the notebook, which is called CBT nuggets.

4:15Here are some sections and actually I've got loads of sections. Mine is a horribly complicated notebook, but let's just change it to a section that's close to the top so you can see it more easily. So here's the social media section in my CBT nuggets notebook. There are currently three pages in that social media section and you can see as I flick through them there, obviously the main body of the screen will change. And also while we've got that view ribbon tab showing, try out the full page view at the left hand side here. So if you choose that, what it's going to do is collapse all of that sort of hierarchy on that left hand side here so you can see what you're doing.

4:46If you switch it back to normal view, you'll see that it shows it again, or you could use this button here to hide the notebook and section level of detail if you like. So you can click that as required to see the notebooks and the sections, but you're always left looking at the pages. So it does depend on your personal preference, what makes sense to you. It also is going to depend on how much room you've got on the screen to play with because if you're working on a very small monitor, you're more likely to want to get rid of some of that clutter at the side of the screen. If you work on a big monitor, it's not going to be too much of a problem seeing that.

5:17But what I'm going to do is I'm going to change the tab's layout back to being horizontal tabs because I do quite like that. It does give me, I think, a bit more room on the screen, but it is personal preference, but that is where I'm going to settle, I think, for my preferred settings for how it's displayed. I think what we should do for the rest of this course is create a brand new practice notebook for us to work on for the rest of the course and it'll save you from having to look through my rather messy real life work notebook. So what I'd like you to do with me is click just here. Now what yours is going to say, it's probably going to say something like my notebook or something.

5:49It's not going to say CBT nuggets because obviously that's the name of my notebook, but whatever the name of your notebook is, click on the drop down there and choose the option to add notebook. So this is where you get to give that notebook a name and I don't know, I don't mind what you want to call it, but I'm just going to call it one note training, but it can be anything, just something for us to play with throughout this course. We then get the opportunity to decide where it's going to live. Now yours might be defaulting to the cloud to OneDrive. I'm going to suggest that you just, it doesn't really matter, but maybe just put it locally on your PC.

6:21That's what I'm going to do and I'm going to be deleting this once we finish the training course. But you might be thinking to yourself, well, hang on a minute, it's putting it on the PC, but where on my PC is it putting it? But if I choose this option, create in a different folder, that's where you will get to see the path of where it's actually going to create it. And we are going to look at that later. So I'm just making a mental note that it's in my documents folder in the One Note notebooks folder locally on my hard drive. So let me just cancel that for now because I'm going to let it put it there in the default location on my PC. So let's create the notebook.

6:52So now what you can see over on the left hand side there, there's our new notebook called OneNote Training. If I pick a drop down, that's where I can switch back to the other notebook. So it is a really good idea for a number of reasons to have multiple notebooks. I would strongly suggest you don't try and just have one great big notebook for everything in your life, not only, as I mentioned in the introduction, does it get very complicated, but also if you need to share content and collaborate on content with other people, currently you can only share at the notebook level and you're probably not going to want to share your whole world, your whole OneNote notebook with somebody else.

7:28So I tend to recommend people create a new notebook for every major project if you like that you're working on. So anyway, we're going to be working on this OneNote Training notebook. And what you'll see is it's given us a default section that's just called section one and then over on the right hand side, we've just got an untitled page there. So let's start putting in some text. So let's imagine this is just some meeting notes. Maybe it's for a review meeting. Let me just edit that slightly so it says review meeting. And as I type something in there, you'll see the date and time is automatically populated, but whatever I type in there becomes the name of the page over on the right hand side.

8:03And then as you know, you can just click anywhere to start typing. And as we progress through this course, we'll talk a bit more about how you manage the content that's going to be going on the pages. But let's imagine I have taken a screenshot during an online meeting or something. So I'm just going to paste that in there, but you know, you get the idea with just putting all of our stuff onto this page. But now let's add another page. So over on the right hand side where we've got our page list, I mean, you might have it over the left, but either way, you will have this add page button. So let's just add another page for something else.

8:34So maybe it's a budget update, I don't know. And let's just add another page or look, we can right click to add a new page. You can click and drag to move pages around. If you end up with too many pages, you can right click on the pages that you don't want and delete them. And you will also see you can click this little plus here to add a new page in a particular position. So up to you, very easy to add new pages, also very easy to move them around, very easy if you need to to delete pages if you do get a bit a little bit carried away like me with adding some new pages. Let me just tidy up for a second there and get rid of some of these untitled ones.

9:05So yeah, we've got two pages, but this section, the section, the default color being blue there for the first section is just called new section one. Well, let's rename that. So I'm just going to double click on that to rename it. So let's call it meetings, imaginative, I know. Press enter just to enter that in and you'll see if you want to create another section. So let's just add another one by clicking this plus here. It's giving us a different color tab and let's call this, I don't know, admin or something and press enter. So in that admin section, I've now got one blank, unnamed, untitled page ready for me to add more pages, add content.

9:40And of course, at any time I can switch back to that meeting section and the two pages I've got in there. So already you are creating content in one note. And if you want to change the order of your tabs where you can click and drag them. So let's say I want meetings to be after admin, I can do that or I can right click to change the color of the tab. So this bright pink for admin don't like that. I'd rather it was yellow than yet we can do that. And once you do get slightly more complicated structures in your notebooks, then you're going to be finding it very useful to use this back button up here.

10:13So you know that the undo button and does the very last thing you did, but the back button will navigate you back to the previous page that you were clicked on when you were hopping through the different parts of your one note notebook. So that does become very useful when you've got lots of pages and lots of sections and whatnot. Now remember, when we created this one note training notebook, I was very particular in saying that I was saving this locally on this PC and then I clicked denied to have a look at where actually it was stored. So what I'm just going to go and do is have a look in my file explorer. I'm going to have a look in my documents folder and you'll see here there's the one note notebooks folder that it told me that this new notebook was going to be created in.

10:50And if I open that up, you'll see sure enough, there's a new folder called one note training which aligns with the name of that notebook that we created. So whatever you called your example practice notebook, that's going to be the name of the folder in your one note notebooks folder here. And if I open that up, that's where we will see individual one note files. So you can see if I just expand there, there we go. The file type there are one note sections. It's given me a separate file there for each section that we created within that one note notebook.

11:24And again, if you think I'm being a bit pedantic by pointing this out, it's just that I know that people do create a lot of one note content and it can get very complicated very quickly and it can get very confusing where it actually lives, where's it stored. And as we progress through this course, we will be talking a bit more about how we share this content, putting it up in the cloud using one note notebooks that are stored in SharePoint or Teams. We're going to be covering all of that later on. But for now, this is just a personal notebook stored locally on your hard drive . Let me just minimize that for a second though. So we know how to add sections and we know how to add pages.

11:55We can also add sub pages. So let's imagine that I'm making notes in this review meeting and it's getting really rather busy, really rather crowded. You can scroll down almost indefinitely to add more content. That's not a problem. But if it does get too full, you might want to create a sub page to just be better organized and to separate out some content. So I'm going to create a new page under review meeting called action items. But because those action items relate to that review meeting, look over on the right hand side here, I'm going to make it a sub page and you can either just carefully click and drag to the right slightly.

12:29Can you see now it's slightly indented or let me just put that back, you could right click and choose to make it a sub page, whichever feels easiest to you. But as soon as you've got a sub page, let me create a few more just for dramatic effect. What you will get with the kind of the master page is this button here which will allow you to hide or show the sub pages within it. So wow, can you start to see how organized we can become with notebooks, sections, pages and sub pages? So that's just one last thing for this video.

13:01If you do have lots of notebooks, you may or may not want them all available at the same time, particularly if you are working in an organization where you have lots of shared notebooks stored in Microsoft Teams or Microsoft SharePoint, you might have a huge long list here of different notebooks that you've ever opened. So if you want to close a notebook that you're not using at the moment, you can right click on it in this list here and choose close this notebook. That does not mean you've deleted it. So if I go back to the File Explorer, you can still see that that OneNote training notebook we created is still in that file on my hard drive with those same OneNote files representing each section.

13:39It's just it's not open at the moment in OneNote. And if you do want to open it again, while we don't create a new one, we don't add a new notebook, no, we click this More notebooks option down here. This is also where we can pick up any shared notebooks, but we'll talk about that another time. But you can see just down here, oh, there we go. There's a recently accessed notebook called OneNote training and it'll open it up again alongside any other notebooks that you've got open. So wow, quite a lot there, but I really do urge you in the early days of using OneNote to give the structure of your content some consideration.

14:14And it is absolutely a good idea to have multiple notebooks. Don't feel like you have to put everything into the same notebook. It really does streamline things nicely. If you can have multiple notebooks, perhaps divided up by project or whatever. And then within each notebook, you create your sections. And then within each sections, you can have multiple pages or even sub pages.

0:00One of the problems of fully embracing OneNote to take all of your notes is that that means you don't always have a pen and paper handy because you're used to taking all of your notes in... in OneNote! But there will still be times, I'm sure, when you do need to take a note of something that either doesn't really belong in any particular section or page in your One Note notebook or that you just need to make a quick note and you're going to file it properly into your notebook structure later on. So sometimes we do still need a little pad of sticky notes to drop down those odd things and OneNote can address that scenario using two different ways. Now the two things we're going to look at are quick notes and sticky notes and I want to cover both of them in this video.

0:40They do have a big overlap in terms they both provide a way of jotting down those odd little things on a quick note very much like you would use the natural pad of sticky notes in a pen. But you would probably not need to use both of these two tools. Now it doesn't mean you can't, they don't conflict with each other or anything but they do very much overlap in how you would use them. So we'll start with quick notes and I'd like you to imagine that you're working away at your desk and somebody walks by your desk and says, "Oh, I've got that phone number that you're asked for" and they start telling you the phone number.

1:11So you need to write it down, you're scrambling for a pen and a little sticky note, but you haven't got one so you're going to use OneNote instead to drop down that phone number. So to find quick notes within OneNote, you go to your View, Ribbon tab and choose this option here, New QuickNote. So that pops up this little floating window thing where you can drop down that telephone number that somebody's just just mentioning as they walk past your desk. Fantastic. You'll see you've got a couple of options with regards to how you want this note to look. So I'll leave you to play with that. But if I close that you might be thinking, "Well, okay, well where has it actually gone?" Because, you know, I'm in OneNote, but, you know, I can't see that quick note that I just created.

1:48Well, let me show you. So if you click the drop down where you see your list of open notebooks, you've got this special entry here, this default entry, which is your quick notes. And that's a whole special section whereby it'll build up a separate page for each quick note you create. So that page there is the note that we just made literally quickly on the fly there. So that's where they live. Let me just go back to our OneNote training notebook though, because another way we can use quick notes is when we don't even have OneNote open at all. And that I think is a much stronger use case scenario because sometimes you might want to make a note or something, but, oh, no, Scramble Scramble. I haven't actually got OneNote open yet. Where do I write it down?

2:26So I've got a keyboard combination for you. It's Windows key, Alt and N. So even when OneNote isn't open, that will also open up another quick note for you. So let's imagine somebody has just recommended a hotel to you. You think, "Oh, where am I gonna write that down?" So you just drop that down and we know that saved into that quick notes section . Or a third way we can create these quick notes. If you look at the bottom right -hand corner of my screen here, you can see on the taskbar in the system tray, I do have a little OneNote icon. And as I hover over it, you can see that that's going to give me a way of creating a new quick note.

3:02So even though I haven't got OneNote running, I can create a new quick note by clicking that. Now if you don't have that, then what you need to do is right click on your taskbar down here, choose Taskbar Settings. And then it's this bit here, other system tray icons. So if you click that and that will give you various icons you can switch on and off for this area down here, one of which is the Send to OneNote tool. So if you've got OneNote installed on your Windows desktop, then you should have this ability to switch this on. So you need to make sure that that is switched on. That will give you that little button down there.

3:36One more thing we do need to check though, if you right click on that little button, you'll see that the default when I click that little button is that it is going to give me a new quick note. And there's a reminder of the keyboard shortcut. But we need to check that that is the default for you as well, because yours might be defaulting to opening OneNote. So if you click on this option here, OneNote icon defaults and make sure that this is checked, that it's going to create a new quick note for you. If that's what you want it to do, of course, if you actually want it to open up OneNote then change it to open OneNote.

4:06But anyway, once you've got that, then yeah, you're on your computer, you haven 't got OneNote open. Somebody says, "Oh, I've got that name of that piano teacher that you wanted," or whatever. Then you click that, that opens up again, another little note for you, so you can just drop down the name of the piano teacher. So if I close that and go back into OneNote, so let's just open that up again, oh, it's opened up on the other screen that I'm not showing you, so let me just drag that across here. And then hopefully, if I go into the quick notes section, we should see, there we go, those other two quick notes that I added in different ways.

4:40So I've got three quick notes now. And what I do like about this is it'll just gather them all up here for you, you can leave them there. Or if you did want to file them properly into a notebook structure later, you can do that. So let's imagine Hotel Amelie, that recommendation, I can just right click on that and choose to move or copy it to elsewhere in my notebook structure. So let's just quickly do that. So let's say I'm going to put it into my, into my meeting section in our One Note training notebook. So let's move it there. So it's now gone from quick notes.

5:10Let's just check that it's gone where we expected. There we go. So here I am in the meeting section and you can see that page there with that quick note. So that's pretty useful. But now let's look at sticky notes, which in my humble opinion is the more modern version of quick notes. And I have a feeling that maybe quick notes will disappear at some point in the future in favor of a sticky notes. And I say that sticky notes is the more modern version because they are stored in the cloud. And that means they're going to be accessible from multiple devices. But do be warned that if you do want to access these sticky notes from other devices, you need to be very aware as to what login you're using, you know, what account you're using through your different devices.

5:48So this is going to be primarily associated with your Microsoft account. But anyway, here I am in OneNote and I can create a new sticky note directly from within OneNote. So top right hand corner, there we go, sticky notes. And what that will do, it'll actually open up the sticky notes app within One Note. So you might have a few default sticky notes already listed here, which are sneaky ways of teaching you how to use sticky notes. So if I'm in, have a look at those. But as you can see, you can click this big plus button there to add a new note. So let's imagine I'm using a sticky note to make a note of the sandwich order because it's my turn to go down to the sandwich shop to order sandwiches for the team for lunch.

6:26So clearly I need to, somewhere of remembering that. So I've just dotted those on a little sticky note. I've got a few formatting options as well that I can play with to delete a note . If you want to delete any of the default ones, which you might still have, then you click this more options button here to either change the color or look , you can delete it as well. But anyway, I'm going to leave that there. So if I close that to get back to those sticky notes within OneNote in the future, then you just click that sticky notes button again and that will show your complete list of sticky notes and of course give you the ability to create a new one. But now let's imagine I've closed down OneNote.

6:58I'm just about to go and get the sandwiches and somebody says, "Oh, by the way, did you know that the sandwich shop has moved?" It's sort of different address now. You think, "Oh, no." So they tell you the new address. You need to make a quick note of that new address, but I've closed out of One Note now. So the sticky notes app is actually part of Windows. So you can either go to the sticky notes app from within Windows. You'll see that I've actually got it pinned to my taskbar down here. Or you could use the keyboard shortcut, which is WinAltS. And that'll also load sticky notes in the similar format that we saw in OneNote .

7:31But either way, you add a new sticky note without needing to be in OneNote. So let's just add in the new address. Let's imagine somebody says it's 140 May Street. There we go. So I'm just going to close down that note. You can see that that's sitting neatly alongside the sandwich order. So let me close that down. So now, of course, I'm away from my desk. I'm walking down the street. So I'm hoping that I can see those notes from my mobile device. So what you're seeing now is my Android phone. You can see that I've got the OneNote app already installed on my phone.

8:04I'm already logged in with the same user account that I use on my computer. And as I opened it up, you can see straight away. I put the top there, two yellow sticky notes there. One with the address and one with the sandwich order. So I've got access to those on the fly. Fantastic. I like it. And of course, because these notes are stored in the cloud, that also means you can access them through a browser. But it is ever so slightly odd where you find them in the browser. So it's certainly worth mentioning. So let me just open up this browser window here. And you'll see that I'm in Outlook for the web.

8:37And your sticky notes go into the notes folder in the folder structure in Outlook. So if you click that, that's where you'll see those very same two notes that we made through the sticky notes app. Of course, available on any machine through a browser. But as I say, the slight oddity is that you'll find them through Outlook. And of course, next time I'm in OneNote or whatever, if I do want to refer to those sticky notes, then let me just maximize that for you. Then we click that sticky notes button to see the list of sticky notes that we had created.

9:07So two options there for you, sticky notes or quick notes. They both fulfill, I think, the same function in terms of just jotting down a quick note. But they do work very differently. I wonder which one you prefer.

0:00The scenario is for this learning check is that you're setting up a new Babminton club at work and you thought it would be a good idea to use one note to store details about league matches and events and meetings and subscriptions and whatnot and it does make sense to create a whole new workbook for this rather than just creating a new section in this notebook because if we stand down from leading the Babminton club we're going to want to easily pass on all of the notes associated with it to somebody else and also for that reason we're going to save this new notebook to the cloud so let's do it. So up here we choose the option to add a new notebook we're going to call it the Babminton club so let me just type that in Babminton club and as discussed we're going to save it onto your OneDrive so hopefully you've got a OneDrive option just here I'm going to save it to my personal OneDrive but of course you might also have a work OneDrive either will do they're both cloud locations and because this scenario is about a Babminton club at work then you know maybe save it to your work OneDrive if you've got that available. So let's go ahead and create that notebook save to the OneDrive you'll see that because I have saved it to the OneDrive I've got the opportunity straight away to share it with other people but I'm going to say not now because we're going to talk about sharing and collaboration in a different skill another time but look we can see that that new notebook has been created fantastic. Let's rename this section and

1:17create some new ones so this one I'm going to double click and call it members let's add another section and call it League Matches and let's create another one and call this one subscriptions that kind of thing so there we go. Let's say that I want to just change the color of this middle one here to a different color so I'm going to change that to a brighter pink I'm going to change that one to that's sort of a lemony limey color oh that's better. In the League Matches section I'm going to create a few pages so this first page is going to be Round 1 of the League and let's add another page and I'm going to call that Round 2 for all these matches create another page and call it Round 3 and then because in Round 1 we're going to have more matches than the other two rounds I'm going to add a couple of sub pages so let me just quickly do that so Round 1 I'm going to have a sub page for Group A and then I'm going to have another group within Round 1 for Group B and you already know that you can just click anywhere and start typing and we're going to talk more in the next skill about the type of content we can actually add to these lovely blank pages we've got here but you've got enough to get you started just by clipping anywhere and starting to type. Now because this has been saved to my OneDrive it should

2:35therefore be accessible from other devices and also from a browser so I'm just going to go back to my phone and go back into the OneNote app and what we should see it might take a second or two to load but oh it did it before our very eyes you can see those different pages and sections there appearing at the top for Round 1 Round 2 etc so yes it has synchronized to my phone and then finally let's just see if we can track down that notebook on my OneDrive so that we can delete it it's always useful to tidy up after ourselves when we do these activities so if I just go to my OneDrive which I've got open here on the home part of OneDrive you can see yes there's that Bapington Club which I can just click and it'll open up in the browser so yep that's all there ready and available with the same pages and sub pages and whatnot that we had already created perfect but if I just close that because the task I really want us to do is to delete it I can see it stored in my files so let me just go to my files and make sure that this is sorted newer to older and I should therefore find it in here somewhere maybe it's in my Documents folder there we go Bapington Club you see it's new because of the twinkles let's just delete that job done - Mm-hmm.