Advanced Note-taking Preview

In addition to typing, writing, and creating various lists in OneNote, you can perform a variety of advanced organization and note-taking operations. Figure 3.8 shows a note with a variety of advanced features.

Figure 3.8. You can record audio, add note flags, and create lists in OneNote.

Recording Audio in OneNote

If you have a laptop or Tablet with a built in microphone (or a microphone attached to your desktop computer), you can record audio from a meeting or conversation as you take notes. OneNote is smart enough to add markers to the audio recording to record what you're typing during the recording. So if you record a two-minute conversation and type five separate sentences during those two minutes, OneNote can highlight the sentences you were typing during each segment of the recording. Recording audio is covered in depth in Chapter 17, "It's Too Quiet in Here, Let's Add Some Sound."

Adding Flags to Your Notes

You can type pages and pages of notes while in meetings or working on projects, but if all you do is type, your notes might look rather boring. It's not easy to find information on a huge page of notes without some flags and highlighting. Figure 3.8 shows three of the nine types of note flags. You can flag lines of text or writing as questions, to do's, important, a definition, or to remember for later. Five of the note flags are predefined. Four note flags are undefined by default. You can customize any of the nine note flags to meet your needs. You might create a note flag for further discussion or one for each major project you're working on. Later, you can use the Note Flag Summary task pane, shown in Figure 3.9, to display all note flags in the current section, current page, or your entire notebook.

Figure 3.9. The Note Flag Summary task pane helps you keep on top of your note flags.

The Absolute Minimum

In this chapter, you saw a preview of a wide variety of OneNote's features. You learned a little about

• How you can use the various components of OneNote's structure to organize your notes

• Using Note Flags to create to-do lists and flag important items

• Recording audio in OneNote to further enhance your notes

Now that you've seen what OneNote can do, the next chapters will show you how to use these features in your everyday use of OneNote.