Organizational Apps Series: Episode 1 - OneNote

Welcome to my short series on organizational apps!

There are so many apps out there that can be used to organize yourself in the digital world but many people don't know the differences between them or which one should be used to organize what.

In this short series I will discuss 8 different apps, I'll demonstrate their functionality and explain what they are best suited to and of course, the information will not be exhaustive and you may know more than I do!

Organizational Apps Episode 1: OneNote

Software Provider

OneNote is a Microsoft product and it's totally free when you get a free Personal 5GB OneDrive from Microsoft, no strings attached you don't even need to get a new email address, you can use a gmail, hotmail, ymail etc email address. If you subscribe to a Microsoft365 package it's also included in that but your email address will be your work one.

Operating Systems

OneNote can be used through any Internet browser when you are logged into your OneDrive account or OneNote.com itself and it also has desktop apps for Windows and iOs. It also has an app that can be downloaded onto mobile devices on both platforms which means when you use OneNote you can always connect to it where ever you are.

Because OneNote syncs back to the cloud if you are working off-line, as soon as you reconnect your changes will be synchronized.

You can work on the same OneNote from both PC and Mac as well as mobile devices, just always make sure that your OneNote has synchronized before you switch devices and make changes otherwise this can cause conflicts.

Primary Use

OneNote is a three dimensional storage box for note taking, it is divided into sections, pages, sub-pages and sub-sub-pages, so has width, height and depth.

Basic Functionality

You can write notes, insert graphs, images and videos, you can use the drawing tool and make drawings or highlight writing, make a voice recording, etc, etc, etc.

You can format the text you put into OneNote, you can use headings and paragraph styles and you can change the font colors just like you can in Word.

You can insert links to local files, other sections in the OneNote or other OneNotes as well as URLs that will take you to websites on the Internet.

OneNote is fully searchable and you can search across the current OneNote or all the OneNotes you have open and the search functionality works well.

You can also add as many pages as you like, the size of your OneNote will be limited by the amount of space you have in your OneDrive but if your OneNote gets too big or you have too many large attachments inserted for instance, you may have performance issues.

Hope this was useful and as always if you have any questions about OneNote, please send me an email!