- Organizing Onenote For Project Management
- Organizing In Onenote
- Organizing Onenote Pages
- Organizing Onenote
OneNote offers many ways to organize your notes. For instance, you can categorize notes in notebooks, sections, and pages. Tags are one of the ways to organize your notes in OneNote effectively. OneNote is a powerful tool. Pairing it with the Bullet Journal system is a smart way to organize your notes and schedule. One of the best parts of this system is combining OneNote with Outlook to get reminders for tasks and events. Get organized with OneNote for Windows 10 Keep your life in order by staying up-to-date with your OneNote for Windows 10 skills. Whether you're organizing notes for a meeting or jotting down a reminder for the grocery store, use OneNote to stay organized in your professional or personal life.
OneNote is a Microsoft program that’s like a virtual planner, legal pad, and three-ring binder all rolled into one. It helps keep your thoughts and ideas orderly, categorized, and easily accessible.
To get the most out of OneNote, you’ll want a good grasp on how to create and edit its pages, sections, and notes features.
Here’s how you can get started organizing your notes with OneNote to take full advantage of the program’s organization-oriented interface.
How to organize notes with Microsoft OneNote
You can create multiple hyper-organized notebooks to track different aspects of one project, or create a single broadly themed notebook to track all of your school, work, and personal projects in one place.
How to create a notebook in OneNote
However you decide to organize your notes is up to you, and whatever you decide, you’ll get started by creating a notebook.
To create a notebook, open OneNote and navigate to “File,” then select “New Notebook…”
- Choose a notebook color, name your notebook, and then click “Create.” You will always save your notebook in OneDrive, in order to support OneNote’s synching mechanism.
How to create and edit sections in OneNote
The next organizational tier within OneNote is sections, which you add and edit for your notebooks.
How to create and edit pages in OneNote
Similar to how a notebook automatically creates a first section, a section will automatically spawn its first page.
The page name will default to “Untitled Page” until you start adding notes or a header to the page. You can also right-click and add a name of your choosing to the page, rather than stick with the automatic title based on the contents of the page.
How to create and edit subpages in OneNote
Then, there’s an even smaller organizational unit in OneNote: the subpage.
A subpage will be beneath a page, but slightly indented. Right-click on an existing page and select “Make Subpage” to make this change to the visual format.
How to create and edit notes in OneNote
Organizing Onenote For Project Management
Finally, there’s the namesake “note” aspect of OneNote.
Clicking anywhere on the page will create your first note.
- To edit an existing note, simply click near the text to highlight its text box and make edits.
To create a new, independent note, click far away on the page from the existing note.
If you reach a point where you want to remove a notebook you no longer need, and reduce clutter in OneNote, you can right-click on the notebook and select “Close This Notebook.”
For a more permanent removal, you’ll need to find and delete the notebook in OneDrive or on your computer.
Having spent 15+ years in IT project management, I have an appreciation for the tools out there that make Project Management simpler and efficient. OneNote (yes, OneNote!) is such a tool. Today, I want to highlight the ways a project manager and project team members might use and adopt OneNote when managing projects within an organization.
It is important to note that OneNote by itself does not constitute a project management software. OneNote, in combination with SharePoint Site or Office 365 Group or Planner – will though. So when I talk about OneNote features below, the software is more of “assisting/facilitating” tool that complements the other tools in Office 365 eco-system.
1. Storing and sharing Agendas
OneNote can be great for storing Agendas for meetings. You can create a page for each meeting and name it accordingly.
Moreover, since OneNote, by default is part of all SharePoint sites and Office 365 Groups, you can use it to collaborate and co-author and easily ask your team members with adding items to an agenda for example.
2. Keeping Meeting Minutes
Meeting Minutes are another great piece of content belonging in OneNote. You can use the same OneNote page where you stored Agenda items above and record Meeting Notes, action items and other outcomes from the meetings keeping everything organized in one place. Alternatively, you can create another page for Meeting Minutes and organize it together with Agenda page above into a section.
If you are managing your projects using the Agile methodology, OneNote can become a great tool to keep track of these daily Scrum Meetings. I documented it in this post.
3. Storing Lessons Learned
Another great way to use OneNote is to capture Lessons Learned on a project. When I managed projects in the corporate world, I used to hold Lessons Learned sessions for every project that I managed. It helped me avoid mistakes in future projects.
And then you can allow users to co-author and contribute to the document – essentially building a Lessons Learned database.
4. Organizing Risks in a Risk Register
Organizing In Onenote
Another cool way to use OneNote is to capture project risks. Typically, Risk Register is built in Excel, I also advocate for using a SharePoint custom list for this, but you can also use OneNote and either embed a table or Excel document right on the page.
5. Project Wiki
What really makes OneNote great – is that it can become an easy dumping ground (repository) for any content (images, audio, video, tables, hand-written notes, etc.) that otherwise would not be stored in any SharePoint document library. You can use OneNote’s sections and pages to create a nice project Wiki! OneNote is fully searchable, so you can always search and find what you are looking for.
6. Links
Related to the Wiki above, you can use OneNote to organize and store various links (bookmarks, URLs). Alternatively, SharePoint is also a great place by itself to organize links too – so if that is of interest to you – click here.
7. Business Requirements
Organizing Onenote Pages
I have seen organizations use OneNote for business requirements gathering. Co-authoring capabilities would allow your team member to collaborate and gather requirements all in one place. Speaking of which, if you are thinking of gathering business requirements on SharePoint, you might want to read this.
8. Status Reports
Oh yes, Status Reports! Who does not like them? Well, the truth of the matter is – nobody does, other than senior management. I remember when I managed projects in the corporate world, I absolutely hated putting them together. You spend hours on something that would take senior execs 1 min to read, only for them to make some stupid and unreasonable decision. Sorry, I digressed here. In any case, OneNote can become a great tool to expedite the development of those weekly Status Reports.
9. Action Items List
Action Items is another piece of content that might be perfect for OneNote. Could be great for quick To-Do Lists that do not belong in the formal task list/schedule. The checklist (To Do functionality in OneNote) is amazing!
Organizing Onenote
10. Emails
Did you receive an important email you want to become part of a project record? You can copy the whole email to any OneNote notebook with a click of a button.