Touring OneNote

OneNote divides information into notebooks, sections, and pages. You can start OneNote from the Start menu (Start All Programs Microsoft Office Microsoft Office OneNote 2007). Rather than represent a file, each notebook is a separate subfolder within the Documents OneNote Notebooks folder within your Windows Vista user folder. (In XP, the My DocumentsMy Notebooks folder holds the notebook subfolders.) Each section you add to a notebook appears as a file within the folder for the notebook, and that file stores the information for the pages in the section.

In the OneNote Window, this arrangement translates to a Notebooks navigation bar at the left, where you can click a notebook’s button to display the sections for that notebook (Figure 38-1). Tabs for the sections within the selected notebook appear above the page area. Clicking a section tab selects that section, displaying page tabs for the pages in the section at the right. Click a page tab to display the contents of that page. OneNote also includes Standard and Formatting toolbars onscreen by default, and as in some of the other Office applications, it includes additional toolbars that you can hide and redisplay on an as-needed basis by right-clicking an existing toolbar or choosing View Toolbars.

Figure 38-1. Clicking selects a notebook, section, or page.

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As Figure 38-1 also shows, OneNote by default includes three notebooks to help you get started. The top two notebooks, Work Notebook and Personal Notebook, include starter sections and pages. When you select each section tab, the default page that it contains provides ideas for the types of information you might include on a page in that section, as well as gives you help and shortcuts for adding that type of information.

The bottom notebook, named OneNote 2007 Guide, includes two sections of information to help you learn how to use OneNote. As shown in Figure 38-2, the first page in the Getting Started with OneNote section even prompts you to practice adding a note.

Figure 38-2. OneNote helps you practice taking a note.

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If you want to close the starter notebooks that come with OneNote or any other notebook, right-click the notebook’s name in the Notebooks navigation bar and then click Close This Notebook in the shortcut menu that appears. You can reopen a notebook at any time by choosing File Open Notebook, navigating to and clicking the notebook folder in the Folders list at the left side of the Open Notebook dialog box, and then clicking Open.