Creating Your First Microsoft OneNote 2007 Notebook

Perhaps you've read my or another review of Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 and decided to purchase it, or maybe install a copy that you already have sitting around your office somewhere.

Once you've installed it, you'll want to create your first OneNote 2007 notebook right away. Here's how to do just that.

1. Step One in Creating a Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 Notebook - Choose the Notebook Theme or Purpose:

First, decide what kind of notebook you want to create. Although you can store multiple types of things in one notebook, you might want to start with a notebook that is on a specific topic or for a specific purpose. You can always create more notebooks in the future, but for right now, start with just one. (I'm writing a separate article on various types of notebooks you might want to create.)

2. Step Two in Creating a Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 Notebook - The Initial Set Up Steps:

To create your first notebook, click on file, then new, then notebook. Decide what you want to name the notebook, and what template you want to use. You'll note that there are premade templates, or you can start with a blank template. Don't sweat your template choice too much, because it is easy to change things later if desired. I personally start with a blank template most of time so that I can completely customize my notebook.

Click next. For ease of demonstration, we'll keep it simple, so next choose , "I will use it on this computer." Choose where on your hard drive you want to save it, and click on "create." That's all there is to it! You now have your first notebook created.

3. Step Three in Creating a Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 Notebook - Adding Sections:

At this point your notebook is completely empty, so you'll want to add to it to make it more useful.

Right click on the "New Section 1" tab and give it an appropriate name for the notebook you are creating. Since I am going to use this particular notebook as my writing notebook, with a section for each magazine or website I write for, I'm going to rename the section, "Associated Content."

That first tab shows up as soon as you create your notebook. To create additional sections, click on file, new, then section. You can also click on the "new" icon and choose what new item you want to created from the drop down menu.

4. Step Four in Creating a Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 Notebook - Adding Pages and Subpages:

There appears to be no limit to the amount of text, photos, etc. that you can add to that initial page in your notebook, but in order to keep things better organized, you'll probably want to put several pages and subpages under each section. Here's how:

Over to the right of your section, you'll notice the words, "new page." If you want to insert a blank page, simply click on "new page" and a new page will appear. Although I use blank pages some of the time, I really enjoy many of the colorful and beautiful decorative or practical templates available. To choose a template, use the drop down menu on the right. My only complaint is that you cannot view the template before choosing it. However, this is really not a big problem since if you want to delete a page, all you have to do is right click on the page and select delete.

Subpages work much the same way as pages. Using the drop down menu next to "new page" simply choose subpage. Subpages are yet another way to organize within a OneNote Notebook section.

My next article will give you ideas for OneNote notebooks you might want to create.