#39: OneNote Shortcuts, Favourites and Pins

Regular ToW readers may share in a collective ??for OneNote – and there have been plenty Tips over the years to celebrate. There are other note-taking apps out there , of course, but if you have invested time and years of notes in one, it’s hard to shift.

OneNote comes in a variety of versions spanning web, mobile, Mac & PC, and you have the ability to organise pages of notes in sections, groups and whole separate Notebooks, should you wish. Notebooks can be shared with other people and could be used to contain stuff that’s specifically for one particular project or role.

Personal vs Work

If using OneNote on the web (which needs you to be online to access it), you could have different browser profiles for work and home, and therefore all your work notebooks would be in one and your home-related ones in another. The PC version of OneNote lets you mix notebooks from different accounts, so you could have them all open in one app – handy for some, though it can lead to lots of notebooks being open and searching right across them can be bothersome (see Classic ToW #646 for help with that).

If you keep going back to a few pages for shopping lists or the likes, it’s quite easy to grab a link directly so you can find it again quickly. Go to a section or page in the web version and you can right-click to copy a link to it, forming a simple https:// URL to wherever the source is stored (on OneDrive if you’re using a personal Microsoft Account or in SharePoint if using a M365 login).

Save that URL to wherever makes sense for you and it will launch directly to that page in a new browser upon activation.

Desktop vs Web

If you’re using the PC OneNote app, however, you’d want to have the page open in that app rather than in the browser. In the old days, you could drag a OneNote page to your desktop or some other Explorer folder, and it would create a shortcut to it – but not any more .

If you repeat the above process of right clicking / copying a link when in the app, then paste the resulting link into Notepad or similar, you’ll see there are actually two links – firstly, a https:// formatted URL and a second beginning onenote:https:// and finishing &end.

Select and copy the line(s) beginning onenote: to the end, then you can create a shortcut elsewhere – it’s a bit of a palaver, but…

• right-click on desktop or in your chosen folder,
• choose New > Shortcut and paste the onenote: link in there… hit Next,
• give it a meaningful name and save it.

Now you could launch OneNote directly to your chosen page, with a simple tap or double click on that icon.

OneTastic to the rescue

A simpler way is to use the Pin to Favorites (sic ) feature in the most excellent addon, OneTastic ; this lets you create and pin links to a variety of locations, perhaps most usefully within the “Favorites” section of that menu itself – and to recall a Fav in future, just go to that menu to quickly navigate to several pinned OneNote pages and sections.

The “Favorites” location can be accessed in the file system if you like, too – just press WindowsKey+R to get the Run command up, then enter %appdata%\OneTastic and you’ll find the folder in there.

Pin it on the move

Mobile users have a simpler way, at least Android users do. Within OneNote, select the 3-dot menu on the top right of a page, and you can Add to Home screen; this will try to pin a shortcut to whatever kind of homescreen / launcher you have.

iOS users might need to rely on a Widgety solution instead .