Tip o’ the Week 393 – Searching in OneNote

Tip o’ the Week ❤ OneNote. Both the full-fat trad Windows app version (OneNote 2016), and the Store (just “OneNote”) application that has a portion of the functionality and a simpler UI. One side effect of using OneNote a lot, though, is that you might have a huge  amount of old pages in your set of Notebooks, especially if you share notebooks with your team, and end up with a Notebook for each project you’re working on.

If you’re using the regular OneNote 2016 application, and go to search content (by entering the search term into the box on the top right, maybe by just pressing CTRL+E to jump straight to it), you may find that the results you get include a lot of old content which isn’t all that easy to parse – the name of the notebook occupies much of the column showing the location of the matching page or section, there’s no date of last update or any means of sorting – so it’s hard to know what’s recent and what might be years old.

If you click on “Pin Search Results” at the very bottom of the results list, or press ALT-O, then you’ll see the results appearing in a pane to the right of the OneNote window, where you can change sorting and filtering options, and see the date the pages were last modified.

Referring to this option as “Pin” may make you think it’s a bit more permanent (such as pinning to taskbar or Start, or pinning to a menu somewhere), but it’s as easy to dismiss the results pane as it is to invoke it in the first place – just click the X in the top right of the window pane, or the close option on the drop down arrow which also lets you resize the pane or even move/undock it from the main Outlook window altogether.

There’s no obvious equivalent of this search granularity in the OneNote store app. ☹