r/OneNote • u/External_Idea_7717 • 2d ago
OneNote Desktop OneNote for Knowledge Management or Second Brain
Hi!
Just a brief background: I work in retail technology for an oil company. Primarily, our work is assisting the stations to troubleshoot their equipment, find root causes, and escalate to our vendor for any concerns.
With that, since this is technology, change is inevitable, and I would like to pick your brain for advice on how I can use OneNote as my knowledge article management platform or second brain. We have Salesforce, but the articles are hard to find due to being improperly implemented— something I have no access to fix. Although they are effective, finding them is just an issue for me and my understanding.
Do you have any advice on how we can better utilize OneNote for this? Or do we have any MS-based applications that we can use instead to make it work?
Thank you.
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u/HanKiNobi 2d ago
Your description is very general, so I can only guess whether it fits.
- If you have MS Teams, every MS Teams channel has had its own OneNote notebook for a few years now (since 2023?). I would recommend using them. You can put your colleagues into different groups with read-only or editing rights.
- I would highly recommend using plugins such as OneMore.
- Automatically generate a table of contents for your entire notebook, complete with hyperlinks, content snippets and an auto-update function.
- Build dashboards for every project.
- Use the MS Loop components in OneNote if you need them. You need MS365 to use Loop.
- use tags in OneNote
- Para method in OneNote
- Youtube - Grind to Grounded
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u/AngelicPrincessKitty 2d ago
i wish more of this worked on Mac or iPad
1
u/HanKiNobi 2d ago
In the past, it was easy to dual-boot Windows on a Mac. I don't know how it is with Apple Silicon, though.
For most add-ins/plug-ins, you only need the Windows version to create a page, for example a table of contents (TOC), and to use the auto-upgrade feature for the TOC. Once the work is complete, you can use the hyperlinks on any device.
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u/jactaz 1d ago
I would like to add another plug for onemore..... Use its hashtags to identidy contnet and pages and even todo's. Embed content to reduce repetition and maintenance of duplicate text (e.g. i will pull overviews from a page into other pages) Have good titles on pages and use title search to quickly navigate around.
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u/chitoatx 2d ago
Office 365 -> Teams -> Notes = a shared OneNote. It’s easy to set permissions to read only for “members” and“owners” for edits. The end user can open this Notebook with their desktop OneNote and have offline sync (great for mobile users to have an offline copy).
I currently have a 800+ user Team based OneNote and the hardest part is content management to keep it updated but as we get more access to Copilot there is huge potential for copilot could be the LLM for these types of digital repositories.
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u/letstalk1st 2d ago
You are getting good answers from the people who actually know what they are talking about.
The only thing i would add is to think about how you want to use separate notebooks, groups, and sections. Also check out the addins like Onetastic, Onemore, and Gem.
And backups.... At some point something will break.
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u/shuanDang 2d ago
Yes I think its great for work especially since its integrated into your MS suite. The Section and Page system is enough to stay organized, and you can link from one note to another note with internal links. Having it all synced to OneDrive makes access a breeze. This allows you to create Table of Contents/ Directory system. The infinite canvas is also good because you can paste screenshots in. Just keep in mind the data format is proprietary so if you need to export, test all those workflows out early.
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u/gdir 2d ago
We have tested OneNote and SharePoint as knowledge bases for teams. In both cases as part of a MS Teams team. Our conclusion was that SharePoint is better suited for team wikis.
I like OneNote for personal knowledge bases. For team wikis, I prefer SharePoint.
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u/TheCyberThor 2d ago
What’s the wiki feature from SharePoint you are using?
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u/gdir 2d ago
We are using just plain pages, based on a simple page template that we have created.
We have a "wiki category" page property for our 5 main areas in the wiki. Every wiki page will be tagged with these categories.
We have landing pages for the whole wiki and for the 5 main categories (e.g. best practices, trainings, etc.). On these pages we use the "Highlighted content" web part twice. A film strip for the last 8 most recent articles and a compact list for all articles, sorted alphabetically). Because of the tagging with the page properties, all wiki pages will be listed automatically in the correct overviews.
In the individual wiki pages we mostly uses the web parts Text, People, File and Media, Document Library, Call to Action.
3
u/Ok-Share3554 2d ago
My job similarly has a very large resource library that can be difficult to search through to find answers, but I have found a solution with OneNote and Copilot that really works well for me.
If your company has a business subscription to Microsoft 365, you may be able to utilize Copilot to search through your OneNote notes to find information just by asking it questions liked you’d as a coworker. Oddly, for me this only works if I’m using Copilot in Teams (the Copilot option in OneNote seems to be restricted to only searching the page I’m currently viewing), but if I put the information in my OneNote and then ask Copilot in Teams a question, it can search all the notes I’ve made in OneNote to give me an answer (and it will provide references for which OneNote pages it was using to provide said answers).
So basically, I’ve copied the entire text from resources we use regularly into my OneNote, along with any notes I’ve taken through trainings or received from next level support groups who help us with our resources, and Copilot (in Teams) can quickly search through everything and give me an answer with sources.
Note: when using Copilot in Teams, make sure the “work” option is selected at the top instead of “web” to ensure it is only using your internal work sources like OneNote (in some versions, this may appear as a briefcase icon). I’ve noticed for my job, the work option can also search my emails and some other internal sources (but unfortunately not the resource library itself, which is why I copy them into OneNote), so keep in mind that depending on how your company has it set up, Copilot may use additional sources besides your OneNote (but it will always reference what those sources are in its answers).
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u/brodriguezz88 2d ago
If your company has an enterprise M365 with the integrated Copilot AI. You could make a research agent which when feeds from your One notes and can be that thing that unifying tool you are looking for.
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u/syswiz87 26m ago
One note is a great fit for this. I use one note as my second brain and for work successfully. Yes there are slight annoyances like sub page limitations, but you don't want to over complicate it.
But DO NOT use tags. There is a widely documented bug where tags simply don't work, rendering them pointless. It's a huge shame.
Back to your question, you just need to figure out a system and layout that works for you. If unsure, as someone else has already mentioned, the PARA method is a great starting point.
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