Become a OneNote ninja

If you’re anything like the team at LMS Group, OneNote is one of your best friends! If you’re a OneNote fan, you might already know some tips and tricks on how to elevate your notetaking, but we have some great tips below to take your notes to the next level.

Scan documents directly from your phone

If you need to get a copy of a document into OneNote, there's no easier way to do it than with Office Lens, a mobile app for iOS and Android from Microsoft. After you install and configure Office Lens, you can use it to take high-quality scans of documents with your phone. You can then upload them to any number of destinations, including OneDrive, email, and OneNote. Just choose the notebook you want to copy it to, and you can use OneNote as a permanent storage for important documents. 


Convert handwritten pages to text

If your device works with a stylus, you might already use it to jot handwritten notes in OneNote. But did you know that you can convert those handwritten notes to digital text.

1. Click the "Draw" tab in the ribbon and click "Lasso Select."

2. Drag the lasso around the text you want to covert.

3. In the ribbon, click "Ink to Text."

OneNote will convert your note into text as best it can. There may be errors, but the text will be editable, and you can copy and paste it into other documents. 


Maths

You can use OneNote to do simple maths problems by writing out the equation you want to solve. For example, you can write "200 + 400 =" and OneNote will fill in the answer. You can perform any common maths problem, including addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

If you’re looking to do more complex maths, such as equations, OneNote can also help you with those.

1. Using a stylus, draw an equation. 

2. Drag the lasso around the text you want to covert.

3. In the ribbon, click "Math."

4. To convert the drawn equation to text, click "Ink to Math." Or click "Select an action" and choose one of the available options, such as solving or graphing the equation. 


Record meetings

You can use OneNote on a laptop to record meetings and take audio notes. Not only that, but you may also "bookmark" important moments during the recording, so you know exactly where to go to hear a specific moment from the meeting. 

1. Click the "Insert" tab in the ribbon and then click "Audio." OneNote will start recording immediately. 

2. If you hear something you want to be able to easily find later, type a note in the OneNote page. It can be a short, one-word keyword or you can type a detailed description.

3. When the meeting is over, click "Stop" in the ribbon.
 

Easily clip webpages to OneNote

OneNote Web Clipper is a browser extension for Google Chrome. After installing the extension, open a webpage you want to copy to OneNote and click the extension icon in your browser's toolbar. By default, the extension will load a preview of the entire page, but you can click options like "Region" to snip just parts of the page. You can then choose which OneNote notebook to copy it to. 

 
Turn off ‘special formatting’ when pasting text into OneNote.

When you paste text from a webpage, it copies the special formatting from the page, and adds a link to the page for easy reference, which can be annoying if you just want the text. But you can turn off this feature. 

1. Click the three dots at the top right of the OneNote window and choose "Settings."

2. In the Settings pane, click "Options."

3. Scroll down to the bottom and, in the "Paste Options" section, set the dropdown menu to "Keep Text Only" and slide the "Include link to source" button to the left to turn it off.