Adding Evernote functionality to OneNote

[Tamagotchi 46]

We all have personal preferences - how things should be done. Good apps allow these to be changed in settings. Better apps will allow you to add functionality too. OneNote allows you to do both.

OneNote allows you to change the default settings

For Office365 the desktop apps have a "settings" page that offers an impressive number of options. 

OneNote permits addons to add new functions

OneNote is built on "gardeners" model for note-taking - everything is manually changed to how you like it. Evernote has a different approach - set things how you want it and it applies to note. Some options in OneNote are therefore lacking. 

The way to standardise your note environment is with macros. You do not need to write them yourself. Onetastic is an addon that allows macros to be picked from a library and downloaded to OneNote. There is a macro in the library for everything. 

The Evernote to OneNote importer saves the notes as pages and in groups of 100 as sections of a NoteBook. As search is primarily how things are found, the order of the sections or notes is not that important. 

Using macros for adding and arranging

In OneNote, sections are displayed in tabs across the top, and pages down the right (set under the options menu). This leaves the right of the screen for the search results. Creation and modify dates are not normally displayed in OneNote. I did not like this.

This is just an example I decided for my work environment I wanted: 

1. The sections sorted alphabetically. (4 seconds)
2. The pages sorted by modified date, descending order. (5 seconds per section)
3. Standardise note formatting to Calbri 11 text for better reading (2 minutes per section)
4. Standardise data format across all notes

This is done with macros. Install the addon, download the macros from the library, test each macro on a test section to check it runs as expected, and run the macro on all notes. This easy to do. The only thing you need to be careful about is there is no undo button for adding text, like creation dates, to notes. Notes have histories, however. 🙂