Top 7 OneNote Notebook Tips and Tricks

Microsoft OneNote is an experienced note-taking application available through the Office productivity suite. With the changing times, it is good to see Microsoft adopt and improve OneNote with more features and cross-platform availability. The point of sale for OneNote users has been its unique approach to organizing notes. Unlike competitors like Evernote and Bear Notes, OneNote does not rely on tags to find / organize notes in the app. OneNote mimics the traditional laptop style in software.

You can create a notebook in OneNote, add different sections to it, and use pages to add notes. It’s an efficient way to organize pages in OneNote. The system allows a user to easily find a note they are looking for.

You can create as many notebooks as you want in OneNote. The software also allows you to add color to a notepad for differentiation, to password protect certain sections, to share a notepad, etc.

In this article, we’ll be talking about the top seven tips and tricks for OneNote notebooks to use like a pro. Let’s start.

1. Create a new notebook

As mentioned earlier, OneNote allows you to create multiple notebooks for different use. I mainly create separate notebooks according to the subjects. You can open the OneNote app on the desktop and open the Notebook section.

Tap “Add notebook” at the bottom. You can either add a notebook from OneDrive or create a whole new notebook from scratch. Select the “New” option, and it will ask you to add a title for the notebook. You can also select from dozens of notebook colors to add a personal touch.

All laptops appear in the Microsoft OneDrive> OneNote folder. You cannot change the online location of notebooks because OneNote relies on the OneDrive cloud service to synchronize data between platforms and devices.

2. Sync Notebook

Transparent synchronization is not a major advantage of Microsoft OneNote. Users often complain about the slow synchronization of notes between devices. You should periodically sync the OneNote notebook to make sure that the recently added data is transmitted to the OneDrive.

You can open the OneNote notebook menu and right-click the notebook name (double-click if you are using OneNote on the Macbook) and select the “Synchronize this notebook” option. It may seem tedious. You can choose the OneNote keyboard shortcut Ctrl + S for Windows and the Command + S shortcut for Mac to synchronize the notebook.

Speaking of OneNote keyboard shortcuts, you should check out our list of OneNote keyboard shortcuts to use the software like a pro.

3. Change the laptop’s color

You can change the color of the OneNote notebook at any time. To change the color of the notebook, you can open the list of OneNote notebooks, right-click the name of the notebook, and select the color of the notebook.

OneNote offers a long list of color options. Select a color that matches the contents of the notebook.

4. Share the notebook

Call it a feature or limitation, but users cannot share a section of a notebook with others. Instead, you can share an entire notebook with others or invite them to make changes.

There are two ways to share a notebook on OneNote. You can open the notebook list and right-click on it. There are three options.

• Invite people to a notebook
• Copy read-only link to notebook
• Copy the view and modify the link to the notebook

The second way to share a notebook is from the notes screen. Open a note in OneNote and tap the Share button in the upper right corner. It will allow you to choose from the options mentioned above and allow you to share a PDF version of the laptop.

5. Password protect a section of the notebook

Unfortunately, there is no direct way to password-protect an entire notebook in OneNote. Instead, you can add password protection to a section of the notebook. Open a notebook and go to any section.

Right-click on a section and select Password Protection. Add a password and you’re ready to use your secret notes.

6. Change the location of the laptop

As I mentioned earlier, you can’t change the default location of the OneNote notebook to OneDrive with other cloud storage. However, you can change the location of the notebook on the web or the OneDrive app.

First, you need to open the OneDrive website and access the OneNote folder. Here you will see all of the notebooks created in the OneNote app. You can select the notebook you want to move, then select Move from the toolbar above.

Go to the corresponding folder and paste the notepad.

7. Close and delete the notebook

After you finish working on the notebook, you may want to close it for a while. You can open the list of notebooks in OneNote and select the “Close this notebook” option, and it will delete the notebook from OneNote. Do not worry. The notebook is still available on OneDrive. You can open it at any time from the application.

To completely delete a notebook and its data, you must first close the notebook in OneNote. Then head to OneDrive and navigate to the location of the notebook. Select the notebook and hit the delete option in the toolbar above.

Start your OneNote journey

OneNote is free and available on all platforms. Of course, cross-platform support is convenient, making it a viable choice over other popular note-taking options. That said, you can use these tips to get the most out of OneNote notebooks and master it with our dedicated article on OneNote Tips and Tricks.