A challenge with helping OneNote users

One point of confusion that can come up when we try to help OneNote people with questions is understanding the exact question being asked. For instance, I saw this question on the discussion group:

"If I am typing a series of notes as separate 'paragraphs', how can I start a new paragraph from the keyboard?

<snip>"

The key word here is "paragraphs" - when I think of paragraphs, I think of written prose and the construct used there. Applying that line of logic to this question doesn't make a whole lot of sense. "Just hit enter" would be the response, and that seems far too obvious to be useful.

So I made a guess that the definition of "paragraph" this user was using was what OneNote calls a container on the page. It's the little box outline that gets drawn when you start typing to show the boundary in which text flows, among other things.

So I had to guess when I replied that hitting the down arrow a few times will move the cursor out of the current container and make a new one.

This is what it looks like after I created the second container.

In this case, my guess was correct - this is what the user wants. My method of creating the second container is a bit much for this user, so I will see what else I can find. I'm just glad my definition of container matched the definition of paragraph. Otherwise, we could have gone back and forth for quite a while before we both understood the same question in the same way.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John