OneNote finally has custom tagging

Posted by nathanb
Jan 21, 2019 at 04:40 PM

Just an FYI, as this is a pretty big leap in functionality of the ‘universal’ version. Of course the original Windows desktop version has had this feature forever, but it was trapped within one PC installation and the custom tags wouldn’t sync. I checked my Android app and the interface isn’t yet available.

The way OneNote does tagging is fairly unique (as far as I know) in that they are ‘inline’ tags that describe content down to the paragraph level as opposed to at the note level like Evernote and almost all the rest. There’s of course trade-offs to this, and which way is ‘better’ is subjective. I wish OneNote (or any other platform) could have two content metadata systems. A page/note level system for structural tagging (like Evernote) and another for inline content like OneNote.

OneNote’s tag method can be very powerful for project management and learning notes. If you have a meeting or just a narrative about a new project, you can tag individual sentences as to-dos and highlight all sorts of items as things like ‘to-learn’, ‘question for x-person’, etc. Then you can search and see a summary list of all those tagged things within that project/subject etc. I always liked adding that metadata to my content as it naturally occurs within its native context. It is fairly simple though. You can’t build a nested tag structure like in Evernote and there’s not really a ‘dashboard’ view where you can filter/navigate via tags.

One can make the argument that OneNote’s system isn’t really ‘tagging’, though ‘tagging’ is a very vague and subjective term. It might be more accurate to call it inline keywords. It’s really hard to compare to other platforms, as the vast majority of note-database software is better when the information is more granular. Like every idea/quote/event/todo etc should have it’s own separate note/page with it’s own metadata and tags. OneNote is much more powerful when you combine a lot of different things within a single page and take advantage of it’s ‘infinite canvas’ concept. Like you can have tables, collapsible outlines, pictures, audio, etc all in a big two-dimensional array. So a OneNote notebook should have far less pages to describe the same content as an Evernote notebook. Arranging a bunch of mixed content visually means you can embed a LOT of related information within a single page which is an organization paradigm that most platforms aren’t good at…. but the drawback is content tends to get buried and orphaned as there aren’t clues about what a notebook contents are besides drilling down via a single hierarchy. A creative application of this inline tagging is essential to keep track of ‘living’ content within your piles of stuff.

As an example, here are some ways I used to use this inline tagging https://imgur.com/uVRt47U I have gotten away from that, as we’ve been in this limbo period where Microsoft abandoned the great desktop version for the dumbed down universal verson. But now that the Universal Version finally has the single best feature of the old OneNote, I’ll need to revisit how I used to use it and see if it would work as well as it did before.

I think another feature they recently added was attaching OneDrive docs as links, which would be great but I haven’t had a chance to test it yet. Hopefully we’ll see an integration with ToDo, then it’ll finally be the cloud-enabled way to do what desktop Outlook/Onenote could, which was the best integrated tasks/calendar/notes system I’ve ever used.