What You Need to Know First

The key to mastering OneNote® is to first learn the parts and pieces, and how they relate to each other.  Once you understand them, and how they relate, you will be able to create your first notebook with confidence.

Of course, there is more to learn than parts and pieces, but learning these basics will allow you to get started with your first organized notebook.  Some people may wish to have a set of notebooks for personal use at home, and another set for professional use at the workplace.  In my next blog, I will offer a snapshot of organized notebooks for your personal use, and another snapshot of notebooks for work.  If your mingle your work with home, you may wish to combine the two.

While writing this blog, and sharing the draft with family, I was reminded that everyone thinks differently.  Some people conceptualize better by building the parts up to make the whole; others conceptualize better by imagining the whole and breaking it down into parts.  Because of this, I will describe it in two ways.  I will describe it from starting from the whole, working my way down to the smallest piece (a top-down approach); and I will describe it from the smallest piece, and work my way up to the whole (a bottom-up approach).  By the way, I consider this different kind of thinking just one vector of diversity, and I am a full believer that there is strength in diversity.  I plan to post about the strength in diversity in one of my blogs later this year, and I hope to catch your eye with that post too.

Below, I step through the parts using a top-down approach.

• OneNote® contains "Notebooks".
• Each notebook contains one or more "Sections" or "Section Groups".
• Each section group may contain one or more sections.
• Each section may contain "Pages" and/or "Page Groups".
• Each page group contains one or more "Subpages".  (Subpages are actually just indented pages).
• Each page may contain content.

For those who think equal and opposite of me, I step through the parts using a bottom-up approach.

• Your content is stored on a "Page".
• Pages may be indented.  (Indenting pages will form one "Page Group" with one or more "Subpages)
• Pages (whether or not they are indented) are always stored in a "Section".
• One or more sections are stored in either a "Section Group" or a "Notebook".
• One or more section groups are stored in a "Notebook".
• One or more notebooks can be created in open in your set of OneNote® notebooks.

You may be interested to know that I used OneNote®'s convenient screen clipping feature to copy and paste a screen shot so that you can follow along.  Within the illustration below, I named the parts and pieces so that they match my word descriptions above.  In other words, to one notebook, I gave the title "Notebook"; to two different sections, I gave the title "Section"; to one section group, I gave the title "Section Group"; and, so on.  As a reminder "Page", "Page Group", and "Subpage" are actually all just pages that are indented.  The reason I've called them out with these names, is that OneNote® uses these terms when it's time to print; otherwise, it's pretty irrelevant.

Illustration of the relationship between Notebook, Section Group, Section, Page Group, and Page

You probably noticed that some of the parts appear in more than one place.  For example, the left pane includes a list of all your notebooks, with a collapsible outline of section groups and sections.  In the middle section, you will see the same Section Groups and Sections along the top, which appear much like tabs in a file drawer.  On the right, you will see a list of pages within a section.  I've indented one page and titled it "Subpage" so that you can see the difference between a "Page", a "Page Group", and a "Subpage".

The names of the parts and pieces may be changed to suit your needs.  I encourage you to explore and name the parts and pieces to fit your needs, to to look for future blogs from me that will help you Master  OneNote®.  There is much more valuable stuff to come!

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