Organizing Notes with Page Tags

To understand how page tags help with note management, we need first need to take a glimpse at OneNote's built organization system for notes.

OneNote organizes notes in a hierachical scheme which is akin to a computer file system. You can file your notes in notebooks, section groups, sections. Organizing notes into a file system like structure builds a hierarchical classification. This is very efficient for notes belonging to well understood categories such as class notes, shopping lists, or people profiles.

However, very frequently notes are multi-facetted and it is hard to decide where to put them. By adding tags to notes is becomes a lot less important where you file notes in a classification herachy. You can use those tags to help you re-discover notes coming from different angles.

Case Study: Where Should I File my Notes?

This short case study shows how tagging notes helps to re-discover notes.

Let's assume you attend a conference and learn a trick about networking.

You have a _OneNote_section for the conference notes. You also have another section somewhere else about networking in general.

Later you may need to find this trick again, but you only vaguely remember what it was about and where you heard about it.

If you are lucky you find it through browsing various places in your notebook. If not you run a OneNote search. Often times you may have an overwhelming number of hits. Depending on the search terms many of these hits may not even be related to networking. What a pain in the neck to sift through all of these hits.

How do page tags change this?

Let's use the same scenario from above. This time we add a number of tags to the page and file the note where we think it belongs most naturally (most likely in the conference's section). When we need to find that note later we use the same vague search terms as before. But this time we run a facetted search (full text search with tag filtering). We still get the mess of search results, but this time we also are presented the tags the notes in the search result have been marked with. When we now select the 'networking' tag, the search result is filtered to show only notes with that tag. This filtering approach is also called progressive search refinement as you can add more tags to the filter as needed. Adding tag filters typically reduces the search result quickly to a manageable size.

That should make life a lot easier.