Make Your Tags Work for You

OneNote tags are little symbols you place next to content on your pages in order to characterize your information. Tags are not just cute; they are useful.  OneNote uses tags in clever ways to help you organize and find the information you need.

With your initial installation of OneNote, you are provided a pull-down list of tags which you can find in the Tags section of the Home menu.

Tip:  If your menu bar is not expanded, you can expand it by clicking the little down arrow that appears in the upper-right corner of your OneNote window. Clicking the arrow works like a toggle to expand and collapse the menu bar.  See Figure 1, below, for an illustration of a collapsed menu, the arrow that expands the menu, an expanded menu, and the arrow that collapses the menu.

Figure 1

I prefer to keep my menu bar expanded because I have a monitor with plenty of real estate; however, if you use OneNote on a small screen, you may want to keep your menu collapsed.

The initial pull-down list of tags that come with a fresh install of OneNote does not allow me to be as productive as I can be with a more customized list of tags. Fortunately, OneNote provides the option to customize your tag list.

If you don’t already have a list of tags that are proven to work great for you, I suggest you create one right away. See Figure 2, below, for an illustration of my custom tags.

Figure 2

This set of tags should prepare you for the journey of Mastering OneNote, especially if you facilitate meetings.

In order to setup your tags like mine, I recommend you start by deleting all the tags in your current Tags list. You can delete them by selecting the “Customize Tags…” item from the pull-down list of tags in the Tags section of the Home menu; then, select the “X” to delete one item at a time until all except the last item is deleted. When you get down to the last item, simply select either the <Modify Tag…> button and modify the Display Name and Symbol to bottom tag on My Custom Tags list.

NOTE:  When you add new tags to your list (i.e., from My Custom Tags list), the new tag is inserted at the top of your list. This means if you start adding tags to you list by working from the top to bottom of my list, our lists will be in opposite order when you're done.  Create the same by starting at the bottom of my list, and adding all the other tags, one at a time, using the <New Tag…> button.  Continue until your tag list looks just like mine.

As a side note, for improved readability, I avoid using the Font Color or the Highlight Color feature.

Keep in mind that tags are like stamps. When you tag information, an instance of the tag, including its display name, are attached to that information.

NOTE:  When you tag content, the symbol is visible, but ironically, the display name is not.

The tag and the tag's display name will not change unless you delete the tag. Tagging content and then later changing the display name can cause issues when you start grouping content by tag name.  (i.e., This will result in multiple occurrences of the same symbol with different tags.)  For this reason, it is good practice to settle on a list of custom tags when you first start using OneNote.

Later, you may find that you want to tweak the tags more to fit your business/personal needs. To do that, simply select the tags you want to use, and give whatever Display Name you wish.

Overall, there are 138 tags available in OneNote 2010.  See Figure 3, below, for a screen clipping of all tags available in OneNote 2010.

Figure 3

There are two easy ways to tag your content.

• Select any tag from the pull-down of the Tags menu; or,
• Hold <Ctrl> key, and press a number from 1 through 9.

NOTE:  The first nine (9) tags in the Tags list, can be used with the <Ctrl> key to apply the corresponding tag. Put your most frequently used tags in the top 9 of your tags list, and don't change the order.

Use your tags to identify your content. Then, you can put your tags to work for you. You can summarize content based on your tags, to produce new useful information.

Organizing Your Notebooks

OneNote® allows for content to be easily moved and organized.  While this is a useful feature, some users find themselves spending a lot of time reorganizing.  The need to reorganize increases due to work/life changes over time.  As we change jobs, get married, have children, buy a home, etc., the amount and type of content we need to organize changes.  As the amount and type of content changes, the way we wish to organize that content also changes.  If you have a daughter in Girl Scouts, for example, you might have a notebook specific to Girl Scouts; and, when your daughter is finished with Girl Scouts, you won't want to be burdened with looking at the notebook every time you open OneNote®.  In that case, simply close the notebook.  This will make it disappear from your OneNote® window.  Keep in mind that you can always re-open it if she decides to re-start Girl Scouts.

Finding a design that works for you can take time.  In order to save you some time, I used the Screen Clip feature of OneNote® to copy and paste a screen clipping of a sample layout from my personal computer.  (See "Sample Layout for Your Home Computer".)  I'll share some tips about using the Screen Clip in a future post.  I even opened a few of my notebooks to give you a deeper view into my life.  From the illustration, you can see that I at least have an interest in entrepreneurship, that I document my knowledge of various industries and disciplines, and that I have worked as an employee and a contractor.  I hope that by opening up a bit, I have provided you with some ideas that may help you get organized quickly.  Everybody is different, so you'll need to decide how you want to organize your own notebooks.  Get started right away so that you can start reaping the rewards of OneNote®.

Those of you who are W-2 employees, may have one computer for work (one owned by your employer) and another personal device owned by yourself.  In that case, you will have two instances of OneNote®, one on each computer.  In both cases, you may wish to have a notebook that contains personal or private content.  You have a few options for keeping your personal content synchronized.  One great option, if your IT organization will allow (and they probably will not), is to create your personal notebook on a shared location outside of your companies network (i.e,. on a service like SkyDrive, DropBox, etc.).  Another option is to manually synch those OneNote folders.  In any case, for your personal instance of OneNote®, I suggest you consider creating a book titled "Personal", with sections/section groups something like:

• Passwords (i.e., a password protected section of pages, with one page per account/password.)
• Emergency (i.e., a section with one page for each type of emergency:  power outage, fire, flood, death of spouse, national security emergency, etc.)
• Travel List (i.e., a section with one page for each type of travel, including the following pages:  individual travel for work, family travel for vacation, etc.)
• Financial Accounts (i.e., a password protected section of pages, with one page per banking institution, including key information on each page:  account numbers, and routing numbers, customer care contact information)
• Registrations (i.e., a section of pages, with one page per personal registration of software including key information on each page:  source of software, URL for downloads, software keys, price, etc.)
• Professional Memberships (i.e., a section of pages, with one page per organization in which each page contains key information:  organization name, member ID, etc.)
• Personal Assets (i.e., a section of pages, with one page per asset in which each page contains key information:  Name/Description of rolling stock, make, model, serial number, photo, etc.)

Below is an image of an instance of OneNote® on my personal computer at home.

Sample Layout for Your Home Computer

Professionally, OneNote® can improve the speed at which people prepare for a meetings; it can improve the quality of your meetings minutes; and, it can improve the speed and quality in which you summarize and distribute meeting results.  There are many other professional uses of OneNote®, and below is a sample design that you can use to get started.  From there, just do what works for you.

Below is screen clipping of a simple layout for your work computer.  This is just something to get you started, but you will need to modify this to suit your needs.

Sample Layout for Your Work Computer

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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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Work Smarter | Play Harder

Technology is driving us through a paradigm of mass information, towards a theoretical paradigm of mass imagination.  In this information age, our need to sift, organize, process, and retain knowledge continues to accelerate.  Thankfully, technological advances help us deal with the rapidly growing mass of content.  More connected and faster devices, a host of applications (excuse the pun), and cloud computing are some of the major game changers.  OneNote® is a great productivity application that has been around for several years, but doesn't get the attention it deserves.  Read on to see how Mastering OneNote® can help you be more productive, sleep better at night, and impress your co-workers.

OneNote® is an application found in MS-Office suites, but many licensees are simply unaware of its power, even after a brief exploration on their own (once they discover it in their MS-Office folder).  OneNote® can be used by anyone to organize personal information, by parents to organize family information, by entrepreneurs to record ideas, by researchers to capture web pages and to footnote information, and by employees to create agendas, scribe meeting minutes, summarize meeting minutes, and much more.

Mastering OneNote® helps you organize work/life artifacts.  Delegating the work to OneNote®, not only produces more reliable and higher quality results than our brains can produce, but also allows you to sleep deeper so that you can play harder.

Personally, OneNote® can help you stay organized by managing your passwords, emergency contact information, favorite recipes, entrepreneurial ideas, and more.  Professionally, OneNote® improves the speed at which you can, for example, prepare agendas for meetings, summarize and Email meeting results, and retrieve information after long periods of time.

Information in OneNote® is automatically saved!  That's right; there is no need for a save icon.  If you put content on the page (i.e., by typing text or inserting a file), you can simply "x out of the window" without having to save what you typed.  When you reopen OneNote®, everything you put on the page is still there!

Sharing OneNote® files on the internet or your shared network allows synchronization with your local drive.  This can be a great feature if you use a laptop on the go.  Synchronization occurs automatically when you connect to the same network as the shared OneNote® file.

OneNote® is a jewel of an application, and if you subscribe to my blog, in the weeks ahead, I'll teach you all you need to know to relax at home, and perform like a star at work.

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