646 – Finding stuff in OneNote
Ewan Dalton
I help Microsoft Partners with strategy, GTM, roadmap & sales alignment | ex-MSFT | IAMCP UK board
Many?people??OneNote. It has evolved much over the ~20 years since it sprang from the “Scribbler” project at the turn of the century and was released in the Office 2003 wave, under the name which the developers disdainfully referred to as “Onay-no-tay”. A recent update to the OneNote strategy for Windows was covered in?Tip #632.
There were other OneNote tips a few weeks previously, in?Tip #617, including?OneTastic, a great addin to the?traditional desktop app?– the?Metro?Modern app?never had an addin capability.
As well as powerful macro capabilities, which can do things like generate tables of contents or sort pages and other works in ways that the base app doesn’t offer, the OneTastic addin includes the?OneCalendar application?– also available to install separately – which lets you see which OneNote pages were edited on each day.
If you keep a note of every meeting, stored in different places – by topic, by customer etc – then this is?invaluable?when it comes to finding notes, as you can see what you last wrote on a given day.
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Of course, OneNote has searching capability where you could look across notebooks for key words. There is the ability to?Tag?notes too, and you can?search across notebooks for tagged content.
A powerful yet somewhat hidden search capability in desktop OneNote is also available – you can press CTRL+F to search on a given page, or CTRL+E to run a simple query across multiple places, for where a particular word is mentioned.
Look, however, at the “Pin Search Results (Alt+O)” option at the bottom – it opens search results in a pane to the side, and lets you sort by different criteria, e.g. date modified.
This ALT+O option can only be invoked from within existing search results, so if you want to find all your recent notes with a searched-for word, press CTRL+E to start, then ALT+O and search by date modified to see the results clustered by month.
Principal Azure Architect @ Nimbus | Microsoft Azure, Enterprise Solution Design
2 年I have more recently started to use OneNote for all my note taking and have found it better than scribbling in notepads or other media, been able to drop in screenshots and write commentary around them is great for interviewing or making notes on a course or presentation your watching. Also basic maths built in is quite handy when trying to come up with rough figures for an RFP or bid, saves having to switch out to calculator. I haven't tried these add-in's yet, always a bit dubious if it's not built in to be honest, oh and the link to OneTastic above doesn't work, the OneCalendar one does! ??
I've always seen OneNote as a bit of a benign cult and while I've met lots of people who say that it's the answer to all of their problems, I've only gingerly dipped a toe in the water myself. I'm sure it's very useful once you've got everything in there but I'm wary of going 'all-in' and I'm eager to hear from more people with examples of how it helps to sort their lives out. On a slightly tangential theme, I'd like to see a lot more useful integration between Office products and O365 data - mapping all your contacts to a Collection in Bing Maps? Searching OneDrive photos by location using a map? Memory assistance using O365 data and AI? Maybe OneNote could be the hub for trying out experimental integrations between other O365 services...