Before we look at how you can keep all
elements of your electronic notebooks organized, let’s first examine
how you can organize content that you’ve created or imported on your
notes pages.
OneNote 2010 is great tool for capturing thoughts
and ideas that you’re just starting to ruminate in your head. But it’s
just as great at taking early ideas, writing drafts, and half-baked
plans to the next level by streamlining your notes about them into a
more cohesive plan or narrative.
Whether you’re organizing your notes only for
yourself to keep things straight, or you’ll eventually put together a
proposal or presentation to persuade someone why the time is right for
your ideas, OneNote can help you.
Merging Note Containers on a Page
Those features are immensely
helpful when you’re still in the process of taking notes, collecting
information, or capturing ideas.
When you’re ready to clean up some of your early
drafts and begin to put those thoughts and ideas in order, you’ll see
that note containers offer a couple of additional tricks to help you
organize and consolidate the notes they contain.
For example, note containers provide the capability
to merge text from one note container with the text in another. This
lets you move important items into your main notes, leaving the things
that don’t make the cut on the side, where you can review them once
more before deleting them. This is especially useful if you’re tasked
with organizing ideas that come out of a brainstorming meeting, for
example, where you might have several note containers created by people
who contributed their suggestions and ideas.
By merging multiple note containers into one, you
can simplify tasks such as formatting and sharing when the main flow of
text has been combined.
To see how this works, follow these steps:
1. | Click anywhere on a blank page and type a line of text.
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2. | Click
outside of the note container that holds the text you just typed and
then type a second line of text so that you’re left with two separate
note containers (see Figure 1).
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3. | Move the mouse pointer over the line of text in the second note container until you see the four-headed arrow icon next to it.
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4. | Using
the left mouse button, click the arrow icon and then drag the text over
the first note container until the text pops into place. You’ll notice
that OneNote offers to snap the text to certain indentation choices
near the margin by hesitating at points while you drag (see Figure 2).
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5. | Align
the text you’re dragging to the first note container with the text that
was already there, and then release the mouse button.
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The reason I like this approach better than, say,
cutting and pasting text from one note container to another is because
I get immediate visual confirmation of where text comes from and where
I want it to end up. Additionally, I can always change my mind and
organize consolidated text again in its new location, as you’ll see in
the next procedure.
For best results, snap text out of its
original note container by dragging with the mouse in a diagonal or
vertical motion. If you drag horizontally, OneNote will assume you want
to change the indentation of the text you’ve selected and extend the
width of the note container. Remember that you can always use the Undo
command (Ctrl+Z) while practicing if you need to correct a mistake
before trying again.
