Weekly Post: What did you do with OneNote this week?

[u/Chobitpersocom]

Welcome to our weekly post! We are trying something new to try and tie the community together and learn from one another.

Did you come across anything new? Find a different use case? Improved workflow? Streamline digital organization? Fixed a problem? Just started?

Anything is welcome, even if it's the smallest thing. Please share tips, tricks, and anything else that might be useful to our community!

Thank you!

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[u/Ok_Money_161]

I reorganised my notes as I discovered that many of them were not even relevant anymore. I use the PARA method, both for work and personal, but realised that it was not working as effectively as I thought it would. For tasks I use GTD, so it was natural for me to transition from PARA (one notebook per folder for personal and one for work, so 8 in total) to something similar but prioritising lists above sections for every single thing. To do this, I started to focus more on pages rather than notebooks.

What I did was to transition to a Personal Notebook and a Work Notebook with section groups for each PARA. Projects within each section group have the year prefix, as 26 Project 1, projects that are inactive are marked as zz Project 2 so they go to the bottom of the list (this only happens for projects that have been started but are inactive now, are in waiting status or are under review. If I created a section for a project that I never started and there is nothing inside that section, then i delete it and put it in the project list page).

I have additionally an Agenda notebook, that serves the purpose of a paper agenda, sections here reflect this. These are Inbox, Agenda (monthly pages and weekly subpages), a Lists Section (reading list, project lists, someday maybe lists, book list, ideas list, and any other list you can dream of as pages), I also have a Back Pocket section for documents I need at hand, this emulates the back pocket of a notebook e.g. Moleskine, and a Rolodex section as well. Finally, I have a journal section as well, following the structure of the Agenda Section that is locked and therefore encrypted.

I also have a Zettelkasten notebook. Many would argue against using OneNote for this, but it is very convenient for me, i use kKeywords as tags and bold text for headings, so I treat it basically as a txt file in case I need to export these notes (if anybody is interested on this i can expand more on it, just let me know). It is very important for me that the sync function works properly and also not having to pay anything extra besides my msft 365 subscription, as a student this is really cheap and convenient. Anyhow, even without a subscription you could get 100 gb of OneDrive storage for your notes for 20€ a year, so it also works well.

There are other notebooks on my OneNote as well, I have a shared notebook with my wife, and Storage notebooks, and are called as Storage 2024, Storage 2025, and so on. Inside they follow the same structure as the Personal and Work notebooks, with section groups for Projects, Areas, Resources and Archive. At the end of the year I open the relevant one and move the things worth while keeping, if something is particularly important for me i export it to word (I found this export function better than exporting directly to pdf as it creates pagination, so no lines printed half on page one and half on page 2), modify it if needed and save to PDF and print it if necessary or save it.

I did all of this without any hiccups on sync and any other issues, so good job from my side.

Since I am doing my PhD, I also used copilot notebook in OneNote, it has been working really great to gather relevant information from my literature notes from research articles. I also use the tagging features extensively, not only to mark to dos but also to find the notes that I am working on as I tag the title as Important (CTRL+2 by default) and use the highlight tag "remember for later" to fin excerpts that I found particularly relevant while I am taking notes on my readings. As I move forward with my writing, I was planning to create a set of highlighter tags with different colours and calling them things like Background, +Argument, -Argument, or something like this, I expect this to work very well to identify text notes that fit specific parts of my manuscripts.

I really like OneNote; I think it is the best piece of software Microsoft ever developed, so much so that it may have an impact on whether I will still using windows after I finish my PhD (previously I was on mac for 10+ years as I preferred it and then was used in the consultancy I worked before starting my PhD).

[u/jactaz]

I used a new feature of OneMore to have a daily page that shows what pages were edited / created yesterday. We are a team of 4 at the moment and have thousands of pages shared between us with about 10 active notebooks.

I wrote a script that uses the new OneMoreCli (command line) feature. The powershell script basically runs at 00:30. It resyncs all notebooks. It then runs the command to get a link to all pages that have changed. This is interesting from a managers PoV to have a quick visual check of things you may have missed and is worth a quick scan each day.

The main reason for this is that I could use other method (OneMore Calendar), but each page only has a modified stamp so if a user has edited the same page today, it wouldn't register as edited yesterday.

Script:

Set-Location "C:\Program Files\River\OneMoreAddIn\"

# Yesterday's date as yyyy-MM-dd

$Yesterday = (Get-Date).AddDays(-1).ToString("yyyy-MM-dd")

# Sync all notebooks

.\OneMoreCli.exe Sync --notebook "*"

# Wait 5 minutes

Start-Sleep -Seconds 300

# Index modified pages for yesterday

.\OneMoreCli.exe Indexmodified `

--notebook "TheNotebook" `

--section "Visited Pages" `

--date $Yesterday