Why OneNote should be your note-taking app of choice

What is OneNote?

Initially released in November 2003 OneNote is a note taking program for free-form information gathering and multiuser collaboration. Part of the Microsoft Office suite and also free standalone applications. It is supported across all major platforms (Windows,Android,iOS,MacOS) and also has a web-based version that can be accessed too.

Why should I use OneNote?

Firstly, it syncs across all your devices under one account so it’s a notebook that’s always with you, even if you sell or lose your device. You also use it exactly as a notebook and can put images, handwriting even calculations on the page. As a Business Analyst this is invaluable as it can become a robust store of information. Meeting notes, specifications, diagrams, everything can be collated in OneNote.

What are the features?

OneNote has many features, too many to list here that will bring different value to different users with different use cases. I have tried to pick out the top 5 below that for me, as a Business Analyst, bring the most value.

Quick Note

This is perfect for making notes in meetings or writing down those must do's and then later compiling them into more formalized notes and thoughts. It automatically adds them to a tab when you have finished making the notes.

 

Search

OneNote makes it really easy to search through all your notes, simply put in what you are looking for and you can easily navigate to it, ideal for those notebooks where the documentation is long and you're looking for a particular word or term.

 

Tags

This is a really powerful feature; you can use tags to highlight key sections of your document. Not only do they stand out when tagged but you can find the tags inserted in the document and quickly navigate to them. You can assign tags against different words, essentially creating your own.

 

Templates

Imagine having to create the same document over and over, maybe it’s a requirements template or a project template. Whatever it is, you can set up a template for this is OneNote and open it each time you need it, saving valuable time for those repeat documents that need to be created.

 

Pages and Sub Pages

With OneNote you can add in cascading subpages to each of your main pages, which makes splitting down a document really easy and keeps everything in an organised format. Ideal for documents with multiple sections you want to keep separated.

What are your favourite OneNote features if you're already using it? Or if there is anything else OneNote related you would like to see then please leave a comment below!