As you know, OneNote is built hierarchically: Notebook > Section Group > Section > Page > Subpage. The nice thing about this is that you can set up your own structure, whatever works for you. So I tend to have a work notebook, in which I stick everything about work. Each client project gets its own notebook, with different sections like communication, design, functionality – whatever I happen to be responsible for within that project.

One day, I wasn’t happen with how I’d organised a set of sections. It just didn’t make sense. So I grabbed all the pages from one section and stuck them into another section. That worked. The only thing was that I suddenly had all the pages that had originally been in the section, then all the pages that I’d just added. So instead of being neatly sorted by the date I’d created them, it was a mess.

As a solution, I looked at OneNote Power Toys. They’re exactly what they sound like, add-ons for OneNote. There aren’t a whole lot that I found useful, but I stumbled across the Table of Contents Power Toy:

Nani Courten of the OneNote Testing Team has created a Table Of Contents PowerToy.

It creates a new Table Of Contents page for the section with hyperlinks to all the pages. It also shows the creation date, last modified date, and sorts them by last modified at the top.

Just to give you an idea of where the button ends up, as I didn’t actually realize at first:

So, for my incredibly messy and chaotic section, I was able to create a Table of Contents page with one click of the button, getting an overview of all of my pages in that section.

You can see exactly what it did via the screenshot, creating a table consisting of all pages sorted by last modified.

I have found no way to change this power toy so that it sorts by creation date instead of modification date. Even so, I find it a useful addition to OneNote.

Do you use any power toys?

The really great thing about Office 2007 is that it has a number of tools which can help with this enormously. Think about things like tagging, search folders, etc. Enter PIFEM, an email system set up by Microsoft Australia employees to manage their email and time in a more efficient way.

From Ian Palangio’s Business Productivity Blog:

PIFEM uses the out of the box Outlook 2007 features of flagging and categories to manage emails that you don’t want to action/complete immediately. Once you date/time flag an item it is no longer clogging up your brain with secondary thoughts. If you manage it well… you can eliminate a lot of distractions from email, and focus on your highest priority items with laser focus.

For those who are curious as to what it is based on, PIFEM uses Outlook functionality in combination with Getting Things Done and the 4 D’s of email management.

Ian has put together a OneNote notebook explaining how to configure Outlook to pull the whole system together. You can grab it from his post, here.

I’ve been using it for about a year now, though I’ve modified things here and there. I wouldn’t know how to work without it anymore.