Onenote belongs to the Office team and is very easy to get started with, requiring almost no additional learning costs to use directly. But simply getting started doesn’t mean the software itself is simple. Office has always been known for its powerful features, and OneNote is no exception. Based on OneNote’s excellent and comprehensive functional architecture, many efficient application standards or techniques can be developed.
Shortcut keys: making operations faster
Placing shortcut keys first is because it is an efficient tool that anyone can easily master. Shortcut keys can save time on a specific operation, and can completely change behavior patterns.
With the help of the Alt key, onenote can define shortcut keys for all menu functions with limited freedom; By combining third-party hotkey software such as AutoHotKey, not only can shortcut keys be freely defined, but a series of operations can also be integrated into one shortcut key. (For specific usage, please refer to the Onenote shortcut key series and AHK series articles)
For example, in Onenote, the default shortcut keys for the 6 title styles are Ctrl+Alt+1-6. If proficient, you can quickly add styles. But objectively speaking, this shortcut combination requires pressing three keys, and the span of these three keys on the keyboard is quite large, which is not particularly convenient.
With the help of AHK, “Ctrl+Alt+1-6” can be remapped to “F1-6” for example, and in the future, simply press F1 to add a level one title to onenote content. This mapping has greatly changed me: I used to dislike using default shortcut keys to add title styles, but now I particularly like using F-series keys to add titles, which has also changed my reading habits.
For example, all of my articles are written in OneNote, and some article pages may contain many images. What should I do to export these images and upload them to the internet? Onenote does not support batch export of images, but you can first export Word and then save it as a web page to obtain all image files. This operation involves more than ten specific steps, which is quite cumbersome. You can record these steps in AHK and save them in shortcut keys such as “Ctrl+S”. In the future, you only need to press this shortcut key to get all the pictures, without having to choose the operation step by step.
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Natural directory hierarchy: building knowledge systems
In the era of the internet, we can access massive amounts of information at any time, but at best, this information is just knowledge fragments. These fragments have almost no meaning until they are accurately classified into your own knowledge system.
The default hierarchical structure of OneNote is “notebook section page sub page”, which is a natural knowledge management structure. Generally speaking, using a partition to manage a knowledge topic is more than enough.
This natural directory hierarchy can work in both positive and negative directions: opening and closing books.
For example, when it is necessary to establish a knowledge system for a certain topic from scratch, such as onenote, one can first do a reading on the same topic, and the reading process can be carried out in onenote:
