Speaker 1: Watching this video you will unlock so many useful features you would have never thought OneNote to have. Trust me. I've been using OneNote for more than 10 years by now and can tell it might not be as fancy and hyped as other note-taking tools but it certainly has tremendous power if you know OneNote's hidden features and how to properly use them in the Microsoft Office environment. So let's start with one of OneNote's stunning capabilities that solves the problem of extracting information from pictures. And yes you've heard right from pictures. Sometimes you might just have a screenshot with some text on it or would like to copy information from a website or PDF that is blocked and does not allow you to just copy and paste the respective information. So instead of retyping the information word by word you can let OneNote do the job. Paste the picture in OneNote, do a right-click and select copy text from picture. Now you can paste the text wherever you would like to inform it, reword or reuse it in any other way. OneNote also comes in handy if you would like to collaborate with others. Either by sharing an entire notebook that you're working on and making everyone you share with an editor who can add or delete things. Or you would just like to share a page with notes for example with your colleagues. To do so you can simply use the share button at the top right of the OneNote ribbon. Choose to share an entire notebook with someone and type in their names or email addresses and message if you would like to. Now click share and the other person will receive an email invitation to join and collaborate. If you just want to send a copy of your page you can again go via the share button on top left or click on email page under the home tab. A new email will open up with the content of your OneNote page as the body. You could still change the notes wording or add a message on top and send it to whomever you want. To navigate in OneNote there are two main areas. By default your notebooks are hidden but can be shown by clicking on top left namely on the current one you are working in. You can also add notebooks there and pin all of them to the left hand side if you want to have an overview at any time. On the right hand side of OneNote you can see the list of individual pages within a notebook. So for example I have in my individual notebook that is selected on the left several pages that I can see on the right. But most people prefer to have both the notebook and page overview on one side to see everything in just a glance. So you can do that by going to the view tab and choosing the vertical tabs layout under tabs layout. Now that you have all your notebooks and pages in one place I believe it's worth organizing your sections and pages within the notebooks. So instead of just having a long list of pages within a notebook without any structure or overview I recommend organizing a little bit. In fact there are three main ways to do this. First you can choose OneNote's functionality to sort your pages either in alphabetical order by date created or modified. Second you can create sections and sub sections by pulling one or several pages to the right by having your left mouse clicked. There are two layers in which you can organize your sections and fold them in or out. And finally you could better organize your pages by giving them proper names. For example by starting with a date or project such that you will know to which topic this page belongs by just looking at the page title. Another thing that might bother you about OneNote's layout is its blank pages. That might be great if you want to draw or scribble something which I will show you in a bit. But in case you want to just type or structure something the blank background might be problematic. So to change the pages layout go to the view tab and click on rule lines. There you can choose to show different rule and grid lines. You can even change the color of the lines and define if you want to always create pages with rule lines. If that's still not enough structure, color or variety you could also change the page color by clicking the button right next to the one for changing rule lines. Besides a few predefined pastel colors you could define your own color and set it as a background. One thing that has been bothering me for a while is OneNote's inability to create a table of content. This is super helpful if you have very long notes with different headings and subheadings. But there's an easy workaround that lets you create your own table of content. Regardless if you have used the standard styles and inserted headings or just used simple lists or bullets you can mark your highest hierarchy level or anything else. Do a right-click and select copy link to paragraph. Then on top of your page or any other page you can then manually insert a table of content by typing the different paragraphs or sections you have and linking the one you have just copied the location. You can also link to different pages by right-clicking on them, selecting to copy the link to this page and then inserting the link wherever you want to link to that page. By the way if you liked the video so far I'd appreciate if you give it a like and subscribe to my newsletter by the link in the description below. This is the place where I share even more productivity insights and office best practices. Even though you might have organized your OneNote very well you might still want to search for a keyboard phrase or paragraph. Maybe just because it's faster than clicking through all your pages or because you want to see if there are any connections between the pages or similar keywords. You can use OneNote search functionality by typing your keyboard or phrase in the search bar on top right. Clicking on the small drop-down you can select if you just want to search the current page, the current section, the current section group or the current notebook or within all notebooks. But the best thing about searching in OneNote is that it also searches the text in pictures. So in case you have pasted a screenshot from a presentation or from a website OneNote's search will also detect your keyword in those pictures. As any other note-taking tool OneNote tries to facilitate your life and help you to be more productive. Another way OneNote does this is by giving you the opportunity to use ready-made note templates or create your own. You can access the built-in templates by clicking on the insert tab and page templates. On the right side you will have an overview of all templates you can use by clicking on them and at the very bottom the ability to create a new template from the current page. So whenever you have come up with a great structure you can save this and it will appear under my templates at the very top. I assume most of the notes you're making in OneNote are directly related to a meeting in your calendar. Even though OneNote automatically inserts the date and the time when creating a new note you might want to add the participants or other details of the meeting. The easiest way to do this is to add meeting details from Outlook by clicking on the respective button on the home tab. It shows all of your meetings of the day from which you can choose or alternatively you can also choose a meeting from a different day. To better organize your notes and make them a bit more interactive or easy to read you can use tags. Tags indicate specific prompts or actions to be taken. You can either start by choosing a specific tag and then add the text or you can also click into a line or paragraph and then apply a tag afterward. In case you miss an important tag or have a very common action that you would like to create a tag for you can expand the tag list, click on customize tags and at the very bottom on new tag. Another handy OneNote feature is its ability to quickly translate selected text without using a third-party translator. Just highlight the text you want to translate, click on the review tab and translate selected text. The translator will open on the right side and you can choose different languages or the option to insert the translated text right away. I must admit sometimes the translation is not the best but at least it gives you a rough idea that might be sufficient oftentimes already. OneNote is so versatile that it also provides the opportunity for doing handwritten notes or drawings. This is quite useful if you're using OneNote on your mobile phone or tablet or if you would like to show something very simple with a few illustrations or graphics. Just go to the draw tab and choose a pen of your choice or add different shapes. You can also add coordinate systems or use the ink to math function if you need to write down some mathematical functions which can often be very tedious. But with OneNote this is super easy and it can even detect the worst handwriting or whatever you write with your mouse. So whatever you scribble is directly converted into the correct function that you can insert into your document. Besides the ability to work with pictures, drawings, handwritten notes or equations OneNote can also work with tables. You either have the option to insert a table directly to a page by clicking on the insert tab and choose the table size of your choice that you can now fill with life. Or the more advanced option is to link to an existing or new Excel spreadsheet by insert and spreadsheet. Once you hover above the table you can click on the edit button to open the spreadsheet and be able to do some more advanced functions and formulas directly in Excel that will be shown on your OneNote page. Another great OneNote feature is its ability to convert voice to text or transcribe audio files or recordings that you might have. To dictate something to OneNote just click on the respective button on top right on the home tab and start talking. If you would like to record something or upload an existing audio file you need to go via the transcribe button. As we've already said in most cases your notes will be linked to a meeting that might have been scheduled with Outlook in the first place. Now to close the loop we can now also go back and link action items from OneNote to Outlook again. Just click on Outlook tasks on the home tab to create a task that will be shown and flagged in Outlook. I recommend always using to customize the flag so that you can directly change the subject of the task, start and end date and if you want to set a reminder or not. Using flags in Outlook is just one great feature to improve your workflow but there are so many more that will make you a real Outlook pro. Similar to you now being one for OneNote. So watch this video now for even more Outlook productivity hacks that you wish you knew earlier.