How to Easily Organize Notes in OneNote

OneNote is a very efficient and organized app. As its name suggests, it is meant for taking notes. But, thanks to its excellent organization and comprehensive UI, OneNote can be used for tracking anything.

Just like how any physical notebook can be highlighted, drawn on and written in, a notebook in OneNote allows highlighting, drawing and erasing, and of course, writing/typing. However, OneNote can do much more. It allows for the insertion of spreadsheets, tables, screenshots, personal images, scanned images, web images, and file attachments. You can record audio and video, insert equations, access thesauruses and dictionaries, add multiple different types of rule lines, change the background, and secure your notes.

Besides all of its features, OneNote is amazing for its organization. Here is an overview of OneNote’s organization in a hierarchal form:

• Notebook
  • Main Sections
    • Pages
      • Subpages
    • Section Groups
      • Sections
        • Pages
          • Subpages

The Notebook

To understand OneNote’s organization, you should start from the top. The highest level of organization in OneNote is a notebook. Like with a physical notebook, a notebook in OneNote consists of sections. They can also have section groups, which will be discussed later.

Note: All OneNote notebooks, including their sections and section groups, are accessible under the “OneNote Notebooks” folder in your files.

Sections and Section Groups

Within a notebook, there are sections and section groups. Sections can be used for representing modules in a seminar session, textbook or class. The section tabs can be accessed at the top under the toolbar.

Section groups are yet another way to organize a notebook. Section groups are organized groups of sections. If you were to have a multi-subject notebook, section groups would contain all the sections for that subject. To access section groups, look to the right of the main sections.

Pages and Subpages

Pages are the next organized part of a notebook. Found under sections, pages can be used for representing lessons, or pages within a lesson. A page is where you type all your notes and perform all the other actions that OneNote so generously allows.

Within a page, you can create subpages. For example, if you have a meeting or lesson with a lot of information, you can create a page, right click on its tab, and make it a subpage.

Note: Once you have a subpage of a page, you can only go one level deeper.

Different Notebook Views

There are a few different notebook views in OneNote. Upon entering OneNote, you will notice a layout like the one in the picture below.

If you want to see all of your notebooks, you can pin down the pushpin icon on the far left next to “Notebooks”. That way you can easily switch between notebook and another.

If you want to have a larger view of your screen, hitting the resize diagonal arrows next to the pages tabs would show a layout like below.

In the full screen layout, you can see a nice organized view of your notebooks by clicking the notebooks tab.

Note: In the examples above, OneNote 2013 is used. The relative positions of buttons and tabs may be different depending on which version of OneNote you own.

Now that you understand OneNote’s organization and layouts, you can efficiently take advantage of all it has to offer.