OneNote: table of contents

I love Microsoft OneNote. I love OneNote so much that I can happily listen to the song that Microsoft’s Mike Tholfsen, test manager on the OneNote team wrote and performed at one point, My One and Only OneNote. OneNote helps me out every day by helping me stay organised, minimizing the amount of paper that I have with me and making sure I can find stuff again.

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?