SharePoint Productivity - Dock 365 Blog

How to Use Microsoft OneNote for Project Management

Written by Jessica Northey | 3/8/18 2:02 PM

The first step for any project with OneNote is to make sure your team is familiar with the software. It’s a promising idea to get everyone up to speed before taking on an important project. Moving forward with the idea that your team has access to OneNote and has the fundamentals down, let’s dive into how this software that comes with your Office 365 subscription can boost your productivity with project management.

Customize Your Visual Cues

Now that you have the basics down, it’s time to customize many visual aspects to make the program looks aesthetically pleasing for each user. You can change things such as the font, page background as well as the tab colors to organize projects with visual cues.

Go to Options and look for “Default Font” to choose your favorite one.

Organize projects by the page color under the View tab, you can also make it look like notebook paper.

Change the default tab colors from yellow, green and red to a distinct color by hovering over the tab heading and right click with your mouse to find the color options.

Based on the project you’re managing, easy customizations as mentioned above can be a game changer for saving time with visual organization. For example, you can have one project tab color as yellow and all the page backgrounds are yellow to keep notes organized faster.

Suggested Blog: Go Paperless with OneNote and SharePoint Online

 

The desktop version has template options to use per section or set your default.

Insert Options for More Organization

Within OneNote, click the Insert tab to find an array of options to organize your notes. This is an area where you can create a table, insert a file or photos related to topic, link to a website link, record audio, include stickers and meeting details as well as the Researcher tab for online sources.

Insert a sticker for fun as well as searching online within OneNote to keep track of sources.

Insert PDF files, link text to a website and record audio notes all in one section.

Create an Organization Strategy

With all the options of notebooks, sections, sub-categories and more, the options for organizing for project management has plenty of options. Now it’s time to determine the organization strategy to stay on top of your numerous tasks and deadlines. Here are some tips to help you get started.

Links

Desktop version has additional options for linking text to a different tab within OneNote or create a new page in the same section. You can also use this panel to link to a webpage.

Tags

With the Desktop version, click the Home tab and see the Tags section to insert tags for to do lists, remember later for blog, important tasks and much more. See the small icons to the left of the text. You can also customize tags by making your own “New Tag”. Click the option “Find Tags” to see a summary of the tags you’ve created.

Search

When push comes to shove and you need to quickly find something, use the search feature to find what you need.

Learn more about how to use SharePoint intranet and Office 365 for your Project Management Portal

Additional Options

Microsoft OneNote online and desktop versions gives the flexibility to work at your desk or while you’re on the move from a mobile device. Learn more from Microsoft videos in a six-part series here:

 

Suggested blog: 5 Ways for Project Management with a SharePoint Portal