Small Business Microsoft OneNote Digital Notebook Tips

What do you use to manage your posts, ideas, projects, client files (Affiliate Link), business research, etc….? Do you want to go paperless? Do you want to be able to search your records and ideas easily? Here is one application that works whether you use a PC or Mac or if you use mobile devices, like Android, Android tablets, iPhones, or iPads.  It’s called “Microsoft OneNote Digital Notebook.” Below, we will share with you OneNote digital notebook tips to help your small business.

My definition of Microsoft OneNote Digital Notebook.

Microsoft OneNote Digital Notebook is an app you can use on a phone, computer, and tablet. It’s a digital notebook where you can create notebooks, tabs (Affiliate Link), and pages for information gathering and collaboration with other users. If you have the Microsoft Office package on your computer, you most likely already have OneNote.

Note: If you have a Windows PC, you probably already have the app. It is probably under Microsoft Office apps.

Three Tiers in Microsoft OneNote to Use for Your Small Business

As small business owners, we must keep track of several tasks and various information. OneNote is a great app for this purpose. Here are the three tiers in OneNote I enjoy using in my small business.

You need to create a digital notebook title that is broad enough to include whatever you want to put in it. 

When you create a notebook and label it, you can then share the notebook with your clients (Affiliate Link) or co-workers so you can see, share, and modify the notebook content. An example of a notebook title could be “Client-Joe,” “Recipes,” or “business documents.”

Here is a video directly from Microsoft on how to create a notebook in OneNote.

Then, you need to label the tabs as you would in a physical notebook.  

Use tabs (Affiliate Link) to divide the broad topic into smaller more subjects or activities like, “Social Media Posts To Share,” “Frequently Used Posts,” “Meeting Notes,” “Tips,” “Charitable Locations,” “What to Sell,” “Household Tasks,” “Misc. Info.”, “Christmas Tasks”, “Blogging Ideas”, “Quotes-feelings”, etc… Making this title be more specific than the notebook title helps keep you organized and focused on the pages you create next.

Lastly, add pages for even more specific topics.

Here are some examples of pages you can create, “Website Notes,” “1/2021 meeting notes”, “2021 recipes to share”, “Happiness quotes,” “Ebook,” “Blog Posts Topics,” etc… The pages can also be to-do lists using the Tag “To Do” on the app. Using the date or year on the page title helps you remember when you created the content. It does give you this information in small type at the top of the page when you open the page, however, if it is in the page title, you will see it in the page title list on the left-hand side making it easier to find the page you are looking for.

These are the main three areas of OneNote. It is pretty easy, right? Below are some specific tips that you can use to enhance the usability of the application. 

What Features are on the Pages in OneNote Digital Notebook Tips

On pages, you can tag your work.

Tags can help you make your pages more useful by enhancing the content on each page.  Tags include things like To-Do boxes, the priority order of tasks, Call, Remember, Question, Website to visit, etc… You can also create your own customizable tags, like having a tag for a Blog Topic and adding an Icon to go with the tasks. You can use an envelope as a tag to remind yourself to mail or email something to someone. I find it useful for creating task lists and delegation lists for projects. It looks like this below.  There is a drop-down list of various tags and icons you can use. So, the tag list is limitless.

On pages, there are preset-style fonts for headings.

Using these items will allow you to better organize your content and distinguish between titles and content. You can also use bullets and numbers to create fact lists. You can create a variety of headers, page titles, quote phrases, and add citations. This is great if you like to do a mind dump on the page and then sort it later for presentation or meeting purposes. Read more about this feature here.

You can remember and organize your information from any Web Page.

When you like content on a web page, just copy it and paste it onto a OneNote page. This will also bring over the URL source of the content, so you recall where you got it. I like this for research on social media sharing content.

Printing to OneNote.

If you like to keep PDFs of content, you can keep them on a OneNote page as well. When you want to print a page, instead of selecting the printer, you can choose “Print to OneNote.”  It will automatically ask you what notebook and page you want to print it to.

Draw or Write on the page.

You can even draw/write on a page.  It also offers shapes and arrows to help create maps. This feature works really well on mobile devices.

Edit your pages.

It also includes spelling, research, translation, and language features. Some of these features may have additional costs.

The searchability is convenient.

At the top right, you can type in the term you are looking for, and it will review all your notebooks for that term. This works great when you have many notebooks, as I do.

Insert objects on the page.

On your pages, you can do a variety of things you can insert on a page, like add pictures, make tables, links, files, scanner (Affiliate Link) printouts, Online Video, Meeting Details, Equations, Math, Stickers, and symbols. There is even a Researcher section that helps you find sources. I’ve used almost all these features, and they work great.

I like to insert snippets of images by using the Snipping Tool option and saving the image. Then, I use the “from the file” option to insert it into the page.

General Features to Stay Focused

Update 2024: This next section will share the features that help me stay focused. I hope they help you too.

Collapsing Notebooks to stay focused

When you have several notebooks in OneNote open, it can be distracting. You can collapse or even close the notebook so it does not distract you when you need to be focused on something else. I like to keep the notebooks open but collapse them in OneNote so I can see the title of the Notebook, and if I need to go to it, I do not need to open the notebook from OneDrive. It saves me a little time doing it this way.

Password Protect Pages(Notes)

Protecting your pages (notes) is possible and is another part of my Microsoft OneNote digital notebook tips. This helps keep my personal information private and not accessible even if someone can get into my app. Here is how to set this up: Protect notes with a password in OneNote for Windows 10

Quick Notes

Quick Notes is a digital version of sticky notes (Affiliate Link) (you know, the yellow square paper you probably have in your office). It is a quick way to jot down things digitally on the go. Here are the instructions on how to find them in OneNote and how to create them from Microsoft. There is even a way to do it without having OneNote open on your computer. On your keyboard, press Windows + Alt + N for each Quick Note that you’d like to create.

That’s it for now. OneNote has many other features, so feel free to use it and explore. I hope this gives you some ideas on using Microsoft OneNote Digital Notebook for your small business.

Do you use OneNote? Do you have anything to add?  Please leave a comment below.  I would love to hear from you.

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Looking for more digital organization tips and tricks, check out these posts below.

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• Small Business Microsoft Excel Tips
• 10 Creative Ways to Use Sticky Notes In Your Small Business
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• Learn about Blogging Category Tag Structure
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