Working with Notebooks, Sections, and Pages in Microsoft OneNote Home and Student 2013

  • 5/15/2013

Creating and organizing pages

The real york in OneNote gets done on pages. All the rest (notebooks, sections, section groups) are just a framework to help organize those pages. Everything we talk about when it comes to typing notes or inserting images or ink happens on pages.

Creating a page is quite simple:

  • At the top of the page list on the right side of the screen, click Add Page. A new page is created.

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As with sections and section groups, your page will have a default name; for example, Untitled Page, which you are encouraged to change. There are several ways to rename your page:

  • Right-click the page tab and select Rename

  • Click in the page title area of the page (above the horizontal line) and enter a name for your page.

  • Enter some text on the page. In the absence of a formal name, OneNote will use whatever the first line of text is for the title of the page.

After you’ve created your page, you can change the order by dragging it up or down in the page list on the right side of the window.

After the page is created, click anywhere on the page to begin adding notes and content.

Creating subpages

A subpage is a regular page that is indented a bit in the page list in order to show that it is a subpage of the page above it. Do you have to use subpages? No, but you might want to, because an organizational construct will separate related data onto multiple pages.

To create a subpage, follow these steps:

  1. Create a new page, as described previously, below the page where you want the subpage to appear.

  2. Right-click the tab of that new page and select Make Subpage, or drag the subpage tab to the right.

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Adding and organizing notes

Adding notes to a page in OneNote is as simple as clicking where you’d like the note to appear and adding your content. Most often, that content tends to be typed notes, but it can also be ink, images, web content, and more.

To add typed text, click where you want the text to appear and begin entering text. Don’t be too concerned if you decide to change the layout later. You can move your notes around on the page whenever you want.

To format your text, select the text you want to format and use the formatting tools on the Home tab of the ribbon or on the Mini Toolbar that appears just above the selected text. You can apply various font colors, font sizes or types, effects like Bold or Underline, and also highlights to your text.

OneNote makes a basic set of Styles that you can use to format your notes. To apply a style, select the text you want to apply the style to, and then select the style you want to apply from the Styles gallery on the ribbon.

Inserting images

There are a number of ways you can insert images into your notes in OneNote 2013. First, select the note page where you want the image to appear. Then use one of the following techniques to insert your image:

  • On the Insert tab, click Pictures to select an image from your hard drive or Online Pictures to search online sources for an image or piece of clip art to insert.

  • On the Insert tab, click Screen Clipping to use the Screen Clipping tool to select and insert a portion of your screen. This is great for inserting images of error messages or other on-screen content.

  • If you have a scanner connected to your computer or device, you can click Scanned Image on the Insert tab to insert an image from your scanner.

  • In some cases, you can drag images from other applications right into your notes.

  • You can press the Windows logo key+N to open the Send to OneNote tool, then press N again to start a screen clipping action. Select a section of the screen you want to clip, and then paste it into your notes.

  • After you’ve inserted an image into OneNote, you can move it to wherever you would like it to appear on the page. Just drag the image to place it. You can also resize the image by dragging one of the image’s handles that appear at the sides and corners of the image when you select it.