Hyperlinks in OneNote 2010

One of the most powerful functions of Microsoft OneNote 2010 is the use of hyperlinks. When I started working with OneNote, I completely underestimated this feature. But the more I worked in OneNote, the more I realized how great the links within OneNote work, and how much the right use of the links enhances your notes.

What makes links within OneNote so special?

• It is extremely easy to use links. I will explain later the different ways to use links within OneNote.

• Using links within OneNote speeds up your work. Just imagine you’re looking for a specific information you know you wrote down a couple of month ago. But obviously you didn’t use the right keywords, because your’re always ending up on the wrong pages. And that happens more than ones. Well, the second time it happens to you, you just insert a link to the right place once you found it. And when you are heading the wrong way the next time, once you end up in the dead end, your link will lead you the way to the right information. (… trust me, it works. Happened to me more than once )
• When you’re using OneNote as a knowledge base that you work on with more than one person, than the use of links will make the single bits of information that every user adds get connected to each other. And so, they will be put into a bigger context and improve the quality of the overall content. Basically, the use of links will make OneNote 2010 work just like a Wiki. With all the advantages, but without the drawbacks (like the missing offline functionality and the more complicated usage.)

How do you add links in OneNote 2010?

When inserting a link, you can basically chose one of two approaches, you can come from two directions:

• You start by markig the word that will lead you to the link destination, orDu markierst das Wort oder das Element, welches zu einem anderen Ort führen soll, oder

• you start at the page where you want the link to lead you.

If you want to start with the word that will lead you to the destination, you start by marking it, and doing a rightclick on it. In the manu that will appear, choose „Link…“.

In the window that openes, you have two possibilities:

• You can choose a page in an existing Notebook as destination. Than can be a page in the notebook that you’re currently working in (here „Note Taking Tools). But it could also be a page in another Notebook. So you have the possibility to make links between notebooks.
• You enter a URL or the link to a file on your computer. When you enter the path to a file, it will be opened with an according program (so in this case a PDF reader. Or Word, if the link had been to a .docx.)

Links the other way round…

The other possibility would be to define the place first where you want the link to go. You will than enter this hyperlink to the word that will do the link.
To do that, you make a right click at any word, page or element, and choose „copy hyperlink to page“.

Now you have that link in your cache, and you can enter this path to any word or element, like described earlier. Or you simply go to any page, click somewhere and press ctrl + v. Than a link will be created.

In this special case it’s important to know that OneNote will not insert a working link, but will enter the path written out. To make it a functioning link, you have to märk the words, right click them and enter the link that is still in your cache. A little annoying, but since it just takes a couple of seconds to enter the link, I can live with it.

Tip for advanced users:

When you know your page names and section names very well, you can create a link to it by simply typing double brackets around the word like [[this]]. If the page already exists, a link will be created. If the page does not exist yet, a new page with this name will be created. By the way: On a mac, you can find the brackets by typing alt + 5 and 6.

Final Verdict: Microsoft OneNote 2010 really has a lot of thought out features regarding internal and external links. Using these features consequently will enhance your knowledge base immensely, and let you find your notes lot faster.