Take Your OneNote Game to the Next Level With One Simple Shortcut

Microsoft OneNote is hands-down one of the best note-taking platforms on the market today. Chances are you already have it installed on your computer if you’re running a Windows machine (just look for its cousins Word, Excel, and PowerPoint if you can’t find it at first). Even for those of us who’ve come to love Macs, OneNote is available for free on the App Store.

OneNote rounds out the ubiquitous suite of Microsoft’s mainstay Office apps

At its core, OneNote is a free-form canvas that gives you carte blanche to create, format, and organize text, screenshots, tables, and media to your heart’s content, seemingly unencumbered by structure.

As a busy project manager who juggles multiple deliverables and meetings on a daily basis, I consider OneNote an indispensable tool in my productivity arsenal. I organize my notes into individual tabs for each account I oversee and build sub-tabs to help ensure I can pull up takeaways, timelines, and whatever else I may need at a moment’s notice.

Over the years I’ve come to use and love this app, one key feature has reigned supreme over all others: the ability to embed hyperlinks to other tabs/notes with a simple keyboard shortcut.

This makes knowledge retrieval effortless and ensures you’re not spending precious time trying to hunt down an elusive piece of information (that you know you captured somewhere).

After all, what good is writing down something important if you can’t pull it up later when needed?

OneNote makes this deceptively simple. Just commit the following to memory:

Hit CTRL + K (if on a Windows) or Command + K (if on a Mac)

The rest is as easy as copy and paste. Let’s see how this works.

Suppose you’re taking notes on your February 2021 monthly all-hands meeting. You create a new OneNote tab specific to this purpose:

The presenter makes repeated references to what took place in last month’s all-hands meeting. You remember taking some really good notes from that session, so it makes sense to link that body of knowledge to your current notes.

Here’s my recipe for effortless information retrieval:

• Begin by typing in a placeholder that helps you refer to the notes in question (it would be the line in red in the below example):

Yeah, I always write in the second person when I take notes …

• Navigate to the tab where the notes you want to refer to are located. Right-click the tab and click “Copy Link to Page”

• The link is now saved to your clipboard. Go back to your current notes, highlight the placeholder text, hit CMD + K (or CTRL + K if on a Windows), then CMD + V (or CTRL + V if on a Windows).
• Your placeholder text will be underlined to reflect that it’s now a hyperlink:

You can highlight and change the link’s color back to “Automatic” if you prefer the familiar blue hue

Here’s what it looks like in action:

Over the course of the past six years, I’ve leveraged this one shortcut to turn my OneNote notebooks into a powerhouse “encyclopedia” of the volumes of information I generate on a weekly basis. Offloading the burden of information retrieval to the OneNote platform has allowed me to supercharge my productivity and maximize the value I bring to my team.