Updated by Tina Sieber on February 28, 2017.
OneNote is one of Microsoft's most underrated apps The only OneNote guide you'll ever need The only OneNote guide you'll ever need OneNote is a powerful note-taking app. It is cross-platform and well integrated with Microsoft Office. Read this guide to become a OneNote pro! Read more . Not only can you jot down notes or keep making lists, you can also use a pen to do so, convert handwritten notes to text, or organize your recipe collection. OneNote is available on almost every platform, which makes this ridiculously useful app even more relevant.
Although OneNote is available with good functionality on mobile devices, the following tips are primarily intended for running OneNote on Windows and macOS.
Have you ever arrived at the supermarket and discovered that you forgot what you were looking for? Even on a paper list, it's easy to forget things if you don't have a pen to mark them off.
Today, you can keep your shopping list on your phone. If you use OneNote, you can update it on your desktop and sync it with your phone before you leave. Fortunately, OneNote is available for Android, iOS, and Windows 10 Mobile.
Simply create a list on a device, select the items, right-click and select Tag as done to add checkboxes. While you're shopping, check off items as you go, and look for your extra partner who adds 12 bottles of wine to the list!
If you love food, you might be interested in how easy it is to manage recipes in OneNote.
You can approach this in different ways. Start by creating a new section in your notebook and labeling it “Recipes”. You can use your mobile device's camera to make recipes in books and magazines or use Printing It works in your browser (selecting OneNote as the printer) to add recipes to this new section, organizing them into individual pages for each recipe, or perhaps each type of food.
For those using a device that recognizes handwriting, you can also use your finger or stylus to annotate the recipe while cooking, maybe a measurement was printed incorrectly or you need to make a fan oven temperature adjustment .!
Remember, you can use custom labels 7 Little-Known OneNote Features You'll Love 7 Little-Known OneNote Features You'll Love OneNote is 100% free and packed with advanced features. Let's take a look at some of the ones you may have missed. If you're not already using OneNote, these may beat you to it. Read More
An amazing way to use OneNote is to adopt it as an extension to your newsreader app. It sounds pretty unlikely, but it's possible thanks to IFTTT, which recently launched a OneNote channel. There are several different integrations available, allowing for many recipes, and we think this is one of the best.
The recipe uses Feedly and allows you to set the posts you enjoyed in the newsreader app and set as favorites in OneNote. This is particularly useful as it saves you from having to track and find them later, and of course OneNote will sync the content across devices, making it easy to find.
Use this button to get started:
Ryan previously wrote about another OneNote recipe for IFTTT 5 Ways to Be Productive with Microsoft OneNote 5 Ways to Be Productive with Microsoft OneNote Feel the need for an offline organization tool that also exists on the web? Surprisingly, Microsoft has found the perfect solution:OneNote. Read More
Don't have time to set up a playlist on iTunes, Xbox Music, or whatever your MP3 player of choice? Why not play your favorite songs through a OneNote page?
This is particularly useful if you're working in OneNote, perhaps on a large collection of notes. All you need to do for this is find the MP3 files in question by exploring Windows Explorer and dragging and dropping them onto your OneNote page. From there, arrange them so they're out of your way and click Play to start listening.
Keep in mind that MP3 files will become part of the document as you work, and if you use OneDrive, they'll also sync to the cloud, so you may want to avoid too large a file size by deleting tracks from OneNote when you're away. done with the page.
This is a variation on using OneNote for interviews. If you're a musician or singer-songwriter and you want an easy way to record tracks and keep all the music, notes, chord changes, and lyrics on the same screen, OneNote is a great way to do it, and it allows you to record on the same screen. time!
After you have everything you need to record the demo together, use Insert> Record Audio to record the song. This is obviously not intended for demos intended for record companies or radio stations, but rather ones you would produce to share with bandmates and collaborators, or as a reference point to further develop your track.
For writers (or researchers) using the app's recording feature is a must, and combined with the presence of text on the page, you can easily turn your OneNote Windows computer or Windows tablet into a device that will record questions as you ask them.!
Prepare for your interview by using OneNote to write your questions. When the interview begins, use the Insert> Record Audio (or Record video ) to start recording the discussion. Transcribing the interview will be much easier as you can easily press play and pause the dialogue as you go. You could even use the Windows speech recognition tool to transcribe the interview as it happens!
Another one of OneNote's great built-in features is OCR, Optical Character Recognition. This means the images (perhaps taken with your Windows Phone) How to go paperless with Windows Phone 8 How to go paperless with Windows Phone 8 Are your shelves collapsing under the weight of packed folders and paper seems to materialize everywhere? The answer to going paperless (scanning Read More) are scanned, and the text in the image is captured and converted to text that you can edit in OneNote. What applications could there be for this?
Following the suggestion above, you may want to quickly transcribe the contents of a historical document so that you can share it with others who are researching similar records. Alternatively, you can use OCR as a quick note-taking tool, it's particularly useful for writers who have kept press clippings on particular topics.
OCR can also be useful for managing your scanned receipts. Everything you add in OneNote is searchable, which means you should be able to easily find any receipt simply by entering a date, the name of the item or store, or the amount spent.
If you have a good reason to collect receipts (for expense claims, perhaps), this feature can help you save a lot of time searching for the expenses you want to claim from your employer. Planning to try this? It's a good idea to start a new section especially for receipts, and group them by month by page.
Whether you have the ability to use your mouse or have a touchscreen device with a precise stylus, a great use for OneNote is to plan things, particularly the branches of a family tree. You could be learning about your family tree for the first time or an experienced researcher in the field, but it's always nice to have something you can instantly annotate and share.
OneNote's ability to take notes and illustrations makes it a great choice for anyone who wants to create a quick outline of ancestry. However, you can also go further, individual pages dedicated to each individual in your tree, where you can add notes and images as the facts are discovered.
A quick search of the IFTTT OneNote channel (see above) will reveal a host of useful automations, but one of the most effective is creating a photo journal with the images uploaded to your OneNote account. Every time you create a new photo on Instagram, it syncs with your OneNote notebook, allowing you to create a record of your images in a more accessible and navigable way.
The possibilities here are solid:you can convert the notebook to Word or PDF format (using File>Export ) and then print the book with a POD solution like Lulu or CreateSpace.
To do this, use the following IFTTT Photo Journal recipe:
Send your Instagram photos to OneNote
We've given you a collection of very unusual uses for Microsoft OneNote. Top 7 OneNote Apps You Can Have for Free. Top 7 OneNote Apps You Can Have for Free. OneNote takes care of your note-taking needs. Just a few tweaks. We're looking at the best free OneNote apps that can help you stay organized and productive. Read More The added dimension of IFTTT integration brings much more to the table.
But have we missed something? Do you have a particularly unique approach to integrating OneNote with your daily tasks?
Let us know in the comments!
