Focus on OneNote | Office 365 (Webinar recording)

TRANSCRIPTION

Ziad: Hello and welcome everyone. My name is Ziad Paracha, and I’m an account executive for Encore Business Solutions. And we are continuing our Office 365 webinar series, and today’s focus would be on OneNote. So, OneNote is one of those applications that when you start using it, you can’t really imagine anything else without it. Think of OneNote as a digital work notebook. Now, as other applications within the Office 365, there’s both an online version of OneNote as well as a desktop version. We’ll be working primarily on the desktop version in this session, but I will introduce you a little bit to the online portal as well.

Now, I’ve already downloaded and pinned the OneNote to my start tasks…tab here. You can also do that as well, so may be different if you are kind of following along with the OneNote presentation here today. But, you know, what’s really important to know here is that, you know, many people will come up to me and say, “Well, what’s so different about OneNote that you can’t already do with like Word or any other note-taking applications that are out there?” And you know, every application has its own purpose, so for Word, you know, it would be great for linear texts and writing. But you can’t really do everything in the Word application that you can do in OneNote. Word is very structured, doesn’t have as many capabilities like tagging and tasks. With OneNote you can have a single place to gather all of your notes and information. It makes it a lot easier and it’s more creative and personal, really. OneNote has capabilities that allow you to easily take notes, you can add images, links, you can share, save, you can update and share those notes between team members to make it more efficient and easier to access without having, you know, to consolidate all the notes afterwards. You can also use this as, you know, kind of like taking meeting minutes or for any other subjects within your departments as well. It’s a very, very efficient tool for your daily use in your business and, you know, it’s great for sharing collaboration and encouraging that form of team chemistry.

So, I already have launched a OneNote, as you can see here. Now OneNote is compatible for iOS and, or Macs, right? As well as…and you have a familiar experience with PCs, right? So OneNote can be launched on your desktop, so if you have a Mac or a PC it could be, you know, compatible with a mobile, Android, or iOS, as well as you can launch it in the web of a browsers as well like Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, and so on. So, the last notebook I was looking at is just the one that I just created here as our intro page. So let’s take a look at the overall structure of OneNote before we kind of begin with the rest of the presentation here today.

So, you can see on the top here it’s got the ribbons here similar to how other Microsoft applications are as well. So if you go onto file for instance, you can have all sorts of information like what the information of the book is, you can create new workbooks, which we’ll do just in a second here. You can open and browse previous workbooks as well that are synced into your either OneDrive or SharePoint sites, or anywhere in your folders that you can browse as well through your desktop. You can print a particular workbooks as well, and of course share them, which we’ll kind of talk to as well you can share these kind of links with people, share meeting invites, you can move notebooks around, and, you know, you can kind of make it more personal with an invitation message as well. You can export the data and send it of course. And we’ll talk a little bit more about this tab as well. Then you’ve got the Home tab here with, again, familiar experience functions of Word with, you know, your paste features, your fonts, and bolds, bullets, and numbering, right? Everything is kind of present there. You can choose, you know, highlight and choose your font color, change your heading styles. We’re going to talk about something that’s really cool in OneNote called Tags, and of course you can do your meeting invites and stuff here as well.

So, let me just move this around. All right. Perfect. Then you have the Insert tab here as well, where you can actually create tables, you can file attachments here, it’s actually linked into Excel spreadsheets as well, so you can actually export and import Excel spreadsheets onto your notes as well which is really, really great. We’re gonna talk about screen clipping and more of the screen clipping features as well throughout. You can add pictures, links to videos, recordings, you can insert date and time, so for example, just in this area here, I can insert a date and time and you can automatically have, you know, a live real time of what what’s happening or when this event took place. There’s really cool page templates that you can set up as well, and of course there’s some mathematical things and symbols that you can create as well.

The drawing feature’s really neat as well. We’ll try it out as well with some of the techniques. So if you have like a tablet or any other, you know, capabilities on your screen to do that, you can, that’s perfect. History, you can actually recycle notebooks and look at different versions of those notebooks as well. You can find authors who created them and/or show those kinds of authors. So if I go find authors, you can see all of the authors that have worked on this notebook. And in this case I’m the only one. But, you know, it’s important to kind of be able to see who is doing, making what kind of edits in the notebook that you’ve shared.

Of course, spelling mistakes, and you can link notes as well. Really cool feature here that it has is password protection. You can actually lock certain notes as well so that no one can have access to info outside of the people who already have the password and that should only be you. And you can view various different things and settings. So, for example, you can have lines on your page, if you want to take notes in that way, or you can have a grid system for example, or you can just, you know, be fun with it and just have nothing, and so on. So that’s kind of how it primarily looks.

If you go kind of into let’s start with a totally fresh notebook, so we can have our fun there. So you can, there’s doing two ways. One is if you just go into the file section that I just did and click New. And you can see all the recent notebooks that are there, any other place that you have been and really all I want is a new notebook in my system. So this is actually linked into my local disk right now, but you can of course store it in your OneDrive and/or your SharePoint sites, and so on so forth. So let’s just call it New Sample. For now, let’s create that. And as you can see, it will ask you for, or it tells you, your notebook is created and if I want to share it with other people. For now, we’ll just keep it to ourselves. And here you go, you have a totally new section that’s created. Now, what’s really cool is actually I can change this, let’s say if I can do it by double clicking. I can just change the title right here, and let’s call it, you know, Encore, that will be the subject, sorry. Right here would be Encore Webinar, right? And that automatically changes there, or you could do something else and right click and rename, and you’d come to the same feature as well. Now, if you right click as well, there is a whole bunch of different functionality here where you can actually export right through here instead of going to File. You can also delete this particular section of the workbook, which we’re not gonna do at this point. You can move or copy this section. You can merge it with multiple other sessions, so if you want to join some notes together you can do that using this feature here. You can copy the link to this section to paste in another section which we’ll do. But for now let’s create a new section here and you can see we’ve got another section that we can just call Sample 2, for instance.

Now, in Sample 2, let’s say I don’t like that yellow color because I’m very picky with my colors and I want to have our nice purple. And here you go, you’ve got the entire page. And it’s really nice on the eyes to kind of have, to know, you know, you’ve got different colors to kind of look at. I can also password protect this section particularly, right? So, if I say this section is something that I don’t want anyone else to view, I can set up a password, just create a new password right here, and it’s a password that you should remember. And you are the only one who would have access to this protected section of the notebook. Now, so there is a notebook which I have right here. These are three notebooks that I’ve created. This is the one that we’re currently working on, the New Sample. And then you have sections that are on the top here. This is similar to how Excel has spreadsheets but theirs is on the bottom. So, OneNote has it on the top here with sections. And then there are pages, which are right along here. So, this is like, you know, you’re flipping through a digital page. And I can add new pages here. So let’s say this page I’m gonna call a heading over here. I’ll just call it Agenda. And as you can notice here, as I’m typing the agenda here, you can see that my title has changed here as well. So it’s great for saving and keeping track of your pages, which is completely different from my second page which doesn’t have a title at all, at this point.

So, you know, here’s our Agenda note right now. Now, of course, another feature that I want to show you before we go dive in a little deeper is you can actually pin this to the side. So, if you don’t like the view on the top here, you can actually create a view on the side, and that way you can see multiple notebooks at the same time and work collaboratively within each one. You can also close workbooks. So for example, in this workbook I don’t need this workbook anymore, I can just right click on that and close it. Now, by closing this workbook it doesn’t mean that you have deleted the workbook. You’ve just made your OneNote a little more cleaner to use. For you to be able to close and actually permanently delete your workbook, you would have to actually go into your OneDrive or your SharePoint, wherever you’re saving these notebooks, and actually delete it through there. So, it’s really great actually because you will always have a backed up version of what you’ve closed, just because you’re not using it. So it makes it nice and simple to use here as well. And again, you can throw it away here or you can, you know, copy and share this link as well.

Now, like I mentioned it is syncing as well, and I’ll show you where notebooks are synced in. But you can actually check the syncing status of how, whether or not it’s been up-to-date. So, my last sync was actually just a little while ago and some of them were, so they’re all up to date and this one, we just created and it’s currently syncing and, voila, it’s synced. And so you can manually do that as well. You can also see that here in the Info section. So these notebooks are and have been synced. And what I can also do here is I can share or move it straight from here or I can change the location of where I am saving it. So right now it’s on OneDrive in our company OneDrive. I can change that location to SharePoint or anywhere else that I can do. But we’re not gonna do that, we like the way it is, and we’ll move forward.

So, if I go right into the work here, I’ve already created a couple of them, so I’m gonna make use of some of my previous ones. Let’s say for my agenda, I want to create, you know, my agenda, I want to make sure that I have an agenda that I can just copy and paste from different places. And I could do that right through here, and it’s just a simple copy and paste. But before we do that, let’s try to make it look a little nicer by adding some images. So, we can go right into our, you know, Google for instance. Here’s our logo. Simply copy and paste, or you can clip this image on OneNote, which I can do as well. But I’m just gonna copy and show you how this functionality works. And it’s just a simple pasting feature, or I can Control-V and it will populate into this size now. I don’t have to wrap this text or do anything with it further, you know, it moves wherever you want to move it. I can size it to any size I need without it having to ruin its formatting or anything like that. And let’s just, you know, place the image anywhere we want without any sort of hassle at all.

Now, what’s really cool with OneNote is it’s not the same structure as Word where you have to kind of write in a linear fashion and then change the formatting. I can type anywhere, so I could type here, I can type here, right? I can type anywhere I need without any sort of issues. And as you can see, it also has the correct grammar and spelling, so you can, you know, fix that up as you need to do for your feature. Now, there’s lots of other things that you can do here as well. One thing I’m gonna kind of show you guys is this feature called the Clipper. So you can actually get this feature just by saying “OneNote clipper” on Google, and depending on which one you’re using. I’m using Chrome. I’ve already installed this feature but it’s just an extension and you click here and you just install OneNote Web Clipper, and then it would pop up right on your corner here. So, what that really does is, let’s say I want to copy and paste certain things from the web, and I told you I would show you this. So, we’re gonna start out with let’s say a resume, so, we’ve got chicken parmesan is what I’m gonna be making today for lunch. You can just click OneNote Clipper right here, and it will actually take the web page and give you like different versions that you can copy this as. So I can either take the entire full page as is and put it into my workbook, or I can actually take a region of it that I like and it’s kind of like just, you know, one of those clip features. Or the one I really like is one they recommend is for example, I just need the recipe, it gives you that kind of information. Let’s do that and it makes it really clean to look. Let’s see how that looks on our OneNote though.

So if I clip it, it’s gonna clip this entire page, and I can actually view it in two ways. I’m gonna click View in OneNote and this is actually gonna populate into my web browser to show you the online OneNote, online feature. And it has all of the same sections and notes that I’ve created from my previous desktop version that I was showing you. So if you see here, you’ve got all the entire recipe, it’s got the title, it actually has a link so you can refer back to it. It tells you all the information that you would need, including ingredients and steps. What’s really cool here as well is it’s actually already automatically got it tagged to a to-do list. So you can check mark as you go down what you’ve done and what you have not done while you’re cooking. And then of course you can feed your family and everyone’s healthy because you’ve actually not missed a step. So, moving forward.

So let’s go back into our desktop here. Now, this is syncing. So right now that recipe is not here as of now. It is syncing into our agenda, but it will create a new tab right here when that is complete. Now, you might be wondering how long does that take. Usually does not take very long. We are demoing here, so obviously things always go wrong during the demo and it will probably take a little bit longer than we expect it to. But it’s shouldn’t take too, too long, it syncs in fairly, fairly, fairly quick here. But you can also, you know, so that’s on my work account. Now if I was to clip is and I don’t want it on my work email, I can actually change the location of where I want it, where I want this section to be, and where it’s going to be located. So let’s put that into the new sample, which I’ve created already, and let’s clip that. And that will show automatically into this account here and it will come, so we’ve got, you know, the new section here that has some information, and we can show you that as well.

Now, within that clipping feature as well, let’s say, you know, let’s get more business-ey. Let’s go on to news for instance and we want to look at Trump. Okay, we’ll look at some politics here. And let’s say you want to clip portions of this news, right? So you can go back into this extension here. Click OneNote Clipper, right? And, one too many times. I guess the news does not want me to watch Trump. Okay, perfect. Again, it comes out to a feature…oh, very good. Right over here, come on, OneNote. Okay, that’s a little slow. Okay, anyways either way, I can either copy and paste right through here and I will have the same information, or I can clip it. So I showed you the clip feature before. Let’s copy and paste that onto our…anywhere onto our notes, right? So I can copy and paste it. You can see what’s really cool here is you’ll have the exact link, as well as the text that comes. But it also show you a URL of where you retrieved that from and you can adjust that at any time.

Now, let’s say if I’m working on this slide, this slide here, and I want to make for some reason this in my agenda I want to make that a link. Now, I can do this in one of two ways. I can either highlight the text and just create a link, and I can show it where it’s gonna link to. So let’s say it’s going to link it to the same one but right here. Now, anytime I click this feature, it will take me to this page, right? So I can create links on the fly, and that’s really, really clean because you can have a whole bunch of links in one page that will link to many different areas or departments, right? And again, then I can work and view this file over here as well.

What else is really cool is let’s say if I was to have, so I already created this section here. Let’s say I wanted to have a meeting history of what’s been going on. So I can actually go to the home and I can look at my meetings that I have for this week or today, and all the things that I’m doing. So let’s take a look at this webinar one for instance. Let’s do that in a cleaner slide here. So if we go Home, there’s meeting details. Let’s talk about this webinar meeting that’s taking place. My meeting subject, date, location, and all the participants that are going to be involved in here can be placed right in this meeting as we speak, right? As well, what you can do is in that meeting, let’s say you’re taking notes, you’re not gonna remember everything you’re saying because you’re sleepy half of the time. You can record an audio or a video version of it and that will be synced here. So if we were to record it, it will show you that it’s recording and it’s recording what I’m saying right now or whatever the presenters are saying right now. I could also at that point then stop that recording when it’s there. So I can just click here. I can stop that recording, it’s an audio recording. And that recording will be plugged in right here in the notes. So I can play that and do it, but I don’t wanna do that because it’ll just mess with my audio here.

I can also email that page. So this is a really cool feature here, is what you can do is you can email that particular page and you can do this in many different ways. So I can email it to all the participants, I can add more people with the audio and all the meeting minutes that we’ve combined, just one click, just using one click, right? So, we’re not gonna save anything over here. We’re gonna continue on to looking at some of the other features here as well. So I showed you how we can insert images, showed you how we can do meetings, you can actually record. But let’s get into the more of the fun part here and we can actually draw, right? And now I’m gonna be terrible at this because I don’t have my pen for my Surface today, but let’s draw with our hands and see if we can somehow make some sense out of it. We don’t need the lasso, let’s get the touch, and I want to pick a color. Hi, everybody. Okay, almost there.

Okay, so as you can see, my writing is terrible. But what you can do here is not only can you draw and make anything that you would like. One thing that’s really cool is this lasso select. So you can actually select this and it’s really cool how you do it, it’s this circular thing. And what you can do now is it’s created into a image. From here, I can actually turn this ink into text. So if my writing is legible enough, it should be able to convert that right into text, which is really, really cool, right? So used to look like that, now it looks like that. And now you can actually take notes and make it all into a typed up cleaner version of doing that. You can also turn that ink into math, but we didn’t do any math, so it’s not, and I don’t want to do any math. So we’re fine. You can also turn that into math and do it. You can also change the color and thickness of your pen, depending on what you’re doing. You can create, you can use a highlighters, to highlight notes throughout, right? So we can highlight this. Let’s say for example, this portion we want to highlight. We can highlight that as well.

Now, I was mentioning tags, and I think this is really important to discuss as well, is that these tags that are listed here, you can do multiple things with it. Let’s say I have a really important section. Let’s say for instance this meeting is going to be really, really important for me to use, right? So I can go into Home, and I go right into these tags and click either, and click here, or I could just click Tag, and I say this is a very important feature that I want to do it. You’ll notice that there will be a star that kind of pops up right outside of the thing. So it doesn’t really mean anything, it’s not linked to anything, but to you it’s a nice visual to say, okay, this is something that’s very, very important. Now I can also make this, I know this is not really a to-do list, but if say if it was an agenda that we’re going over, anything like that, we can create a to-do list, this is a new to-do list that we can create, or we can create a to-do list right up in here. So we can make this into a to-do list and actually mark when it’s complete. What’s really cool as well is these tags and tasks can actually be synced into your Outlook accounts as well, right? So you can actually have the same system of tasks and tags connected to your Outlook account in doing that.

Now, let’s say you have so many notes and you’ve got all these tags going on, how are you gonna figure out which tag is what and what’s important and when. Just click Find Tags, and it gives you a summary of all the tags that you’ve created. So you can see here, we created a tag for to-do list to, you know, preheat our oven for our chicken parmesan there. But, you know, there’s other tags that you can create, and you can organize them through different sections, through different titles, and so on and so forth, and you can organize it over here, right? Let’s add a new page for instance, and you can change the title and that again I showed you how it changes. Within here though, you can also have a different view. So let’s change these into aligning for example or we can change the color of the page all-in-all. So let’s make it blue. So, really there’s a lot that you can do here within OneNote that, you know, you can’t really do with Word or any other kind of application that’s out there to be able to do that. Now there’s not nearly enough time to go through everything that you can do with OneNote, and there’s really a lot and we would have to have a full hour or two of session to be able to go through this. But let’s stop here today and we’ll continue on the rest of it. Just to give you a glimpse. That was my intention today to give you a glimpse of what it looks like and some of the things that you can really do with it, that are really cool.

So, let’s say I’m done this workbook. I can see all the statuses here. I can share this with any of the people. I can share it with a meeting. You know, I’m the owner at this point. I can also go into account and check out all of my kind of features that are here. So, I can add more services outside of OneDrive and team sites that we’re using. You could look at all the subscriptions that are here within your account, and it’s very easy to be able to do that. So we can send it as a PDF, an attachment. We can send it as a Word. So all this is really, really compatible with all the other features that OneNote has as well.

So that’s all I had for you guys today. And hopefully you guys learned a lot from this, and will be able to use OneNote for your day-to-day business. If there’s any questions or comments you’d like to have, please, message them to Melissa or just send them over using your audio and we can take question and answer at this point.

Melissa: There is one comment here, Ziad.

Ziad: Yup.

Melissa: So, it’s just important to note that if you are storing OneNote notebooks in OneDrive, it is only supported if you create or move them from within OneNote. And then, that helpful comment was sent by Pierre. And there’s a link here, so I could always send that to you.

Ziad: Perfect.

Melissa: Yeah. Other than that, I don’t think we have any other comments. We’ll just see if anyone’s raising their hand. I don’t see anything else coming in. Okay, great. Well that was great.

Ziad: Awesome. Thank you very much, guys.

Melissa: Okay. Thanks, Ziad.

Ziad: Bye.

Melissa: Bye.