Work with OneNote Notebooks

Quick reference

• 00:04 Another application that you might find useful is OneNote.
• 00:07 And OneNote is available online through Microsoft 365 or
• 00:11 you can download the desktop version.
• 00:13 I'm going to show you the difference between the two versions in a moment.
• 00:16 Now, if you've never used OneNote before, it's basically a notetaking application.
• 00:21 So it allows you to collate and collect notes in pages and sections within
• 00:26 a notebook and then collaborate on those notes with colleagues.
• 00:30 And you'll find that OneNote notebooks are incorporated into many
• 00:35 parts of Microsoft 365.
• 00:36 And as you might have guessed,
• 00:38 you can incorporate a shared team notebook within Microsoft Teams.
• 00:42 So let's dive in and open up the online version and
• 00:45 just take a bit of a look as to how it all works.
• 00:48 So once again, we're going to the App launcher and
• 00:50 we're going to find OneNote in the list.
• 00:53 Now you can see here that I've already created a notebook for
• 00:56 the Project Alpha Team.
• 00:58 This is where you're going to see all of the recent notebooks that you've accessed,
• 01:01 and then we have various different headings across the top to filter
• 01:04 our list of notebooks.
• 01:05 So if we've pinned any notebooks by clicking on the pin icon,
• 01:08 we are going to be able to see them underneath here.
• 01:11 We have a My notebooks section, a section for notebooks that have been shared with
• 01:15 you and then we can also discover other notebooks.
• 01:18 Also, notice in the top corner, we have New notebooks.
• 01:21 So if you want to create a notebook from scratch, this is where you would go.
• 01:25 So let's start out by taking a look at an existing notebook.
• 01:29 Let's open up Project Alpha Team Notebook.
• 01:31 Now currently, I don't have a great deal in this notebook.
• 01:35 What I've done is created a section.
• 01:36 I've called it Meeting Minutes.
• 01:38 And then I have two separate pages for meeting minutes on different days.
• 01:42 Now if we have more than one notebook and we want to switch between those notebooks,
• 01:46 we can click the dropdown.
• 01:47 We'll see our notebooks listed here, or we can go to More notebooks, and again,
• 01:51 we have another Add notebook link just here.
• 01:53 Now, the structure of a OneNote notebook is that we have sections and
• 01:57 then we have pages within those sections.
• 02:00 So the way that I like to think of this is if you think of just a regular physical
• 02:04 folder, it's like that with tabs inside.
• 02:07 So if I wanted to create a new section, I can right-click and
• 02:10 I have Section just here.
• 02:12 I can give my section a name.
• 02:14 I'm just going to call mine Brainstorming.
• 02:16 It's going to add that new section there.
• 02:18 And again, if we right-click, we can rename the section.
• 02:21 We can delete it, we can change the section color.
• 02:23 So let's change this to magenta, and then we can add pages within that section.
• 02:29 So if I click on Page, you can see now I have two pages because you're always
• 02:34 going to get one page by default.
• 02:35 So if I click on the first page, you can see it's called Untitled and
• 02:39 I just need to give it a title up here.
• 02:41 And the same for the second page, we just click and we give it a title.
• 02:44 So we can add as many sections and as many pages as we like within our notebook.
• 02:50 If we click back on Newsletter ideas,
• 02:51 let's take a look at some of the things that we can do within our notebooks.
• 02:55 Now as you might expect, we can simply type text, and
• 02:58 this difference from Word in that we can basically click anywhere on this page and
• 03:02 you can see I can start typing.
• 03:04 And as soon as I start typing, I get this little text box which I can then drag and
• 03:08 drop wherever I like.
• 03:09 Now, notice when I hover over my text, I get this little arrow on the side.
• 03:13 If I click this it's just going to select all of that text for me.
• 03:16 So I can then utilize my formatting options, I can change the font,
• 03:20 I can change the size.
• 03:21 I can make it bold, I can change the font color.
• 03:24 So all the things that you might be used to when you're working in an application
• 03:29 such as Word.
• 03:29 And remember, we can always pick it up and we can move it wherever we want.
• 03:34 So we have things like bullet points, alignment.
• 03:36 We can spell check, we can do things like add tags.
• 03:40 So for example, if I click in front of this piece of text,
• 03:44 I could tag this as something.
• 03:46 So I could say that this is important.
• 03:48 It's going to flag that as important.
• 03:50 And then we can do things such as search across our notebooks for
• 03:54 all items that are flagged with that particular tag.
• 03:57 We have an Insert tab up here where we can insert tables, files, pictures, links,
• 04:02 audio, lots of different things we can insert.
• 04:05 We also have a Draw section just here so if you have a stylus, and I'm using your
• 04:10 mouse, this is going to be a bit messy, we can do handwritten notes here as well.
• 04:14 So there is my attempt at writing hello.
• 04:17 We have a View tab.
• 04:18 And again, these are things you might expect to see.
• 04:21 So we can do things like add rule lines, we can change the page color.
• 04:25 So it really is like working with a manual notebook.
• 04:29 Now, everything we've been doing so far is within the online version of OneNote.
• 04:33 But it's worth noting that there is a desktop version as well.
• 04:36 In fact, there are two.
• 04:38 If you have a Windows 10 or higher system,
• 04:41 OneNote now comes pre-installed with the operating system.
• 04:45 So if I search my system for OneNote, notice that I have the OneNote app, but
• 04:50 then I also have OneNote for Windows 10.
• 04:52 Now these two are different to the online version as well.
• 04:56 So there's kind of three different versions of OneNote.
• 04:59 They all work along the same lines, it's just the interface is slightly different.
• 05:03 So let's open up the desktop app.
• 05:05 And you can see that everything synchronizes.
• 05:08 So I've got Project Alpha Team Notebook open.
• 05:10 Here I have my Meeting Minutes tab.
• 05:13 The pages in this version are all the way over on the right-hand side.
• 05:16 You can see the two separate dates just here.
• 05:18 And then we have that Brainstorming section that we added with our notes.
• 05:23 So everything synchronizes between the online version and the desktop version.
• 05:28 Now once again OneNote notebooks are stored in SharePoint.
• 05:33 And if you're in any doubt of that,
• 05:35 you can see it at the top here in the URL bar sharepoint.com.
• 05:38 So that means we can access our team notebook through SharePoint, and
• 05:42 we can also add it to other applications like Teams.
• 05:45 So let's quickly jump across to SharePoint and take a look at that.
• 05:48 And if we go across to Project Alpha Discussion,
• 05:52 notice we have a notebook link in here.
• 05:54 So if I click on this and click the dropdown, and
• 05:57 you can see that I currently have three in here that are all named fairly similar.
• 06:01 I'm probably going to want to change the names on some of these.
• 06:04 But the one that we've just been working on is this one just here,
• 06:07 Project Alpha Team Notebook.
• 06:08 If we click on this, there are our notes.
• 06:11 So the point to take away here is that everything feeds through as you might
• 06:16 expect.
• 06:16 Now, of course, we can share this notebook with our colleagues as well.
• 06:20 So there are a couple of different ways we can do this.
• 06:22 Let's click on the team notebook, and notice in the top right-hand corner,
• 06:27 we have a Share button.
• 06:28 So we can share the entire notebook,
• 06:30 we can copy the link to the notebook and we can manage access.
• 06:34 Now if we go into manage access, you can see that currently,
• 06:37 I'm the only one with access to this notebook.
• 06:40 Now if we click on Share Entire Notebook,
• 06:42 this is where we get that same window that we've seen throughout this course.
• 06:46 We can then type in the name of who we want to share this notebook with.
• 06:50 So I could type in individuals or I could type in entire group, so
• 06:54 I could share it with Project Alpha Discussion.
• 06:57 Click on Send and
• 06:57 that's going to send an invite to all of the people who are a member of that group.
• 07:02 Another thing we can do is that we can add the notebook to a channel in
• 07:05 Microsoft Teams.
• 07:06 So let's scroll down to Project Alpha.
• 07:08 Let's click on the General channel.
• 07:10 Because what we can do here is much like we did with Planner,
• 07:14 we can add the OneNote app.
• 07:15 So I'm going to click the plus at the top.
• 07:17 There is the OneNote app.
• 07:18 Let's add this.
• 07:20 And then it's going to ask me to select what notebook I want to add.
• 07:24 So I'm going to add the Project Alpha Team Notebook.
• 07:26 Let's expand it just to make sure it's the correct one.
• 07:29 It is, we have our two sections, let's click on Save,
• 07:32 and that's going to add that at the top.
• 07:34 And now anybody who is a member of this channel can access the notebook and
• 07:40 collaborate on notes with everybody else.

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