Use note tag colors to prioritize information on a OneNote page

I got a question from Denis last week that went like this:

"[I] have different priorities on my daily To Do pages, and would like to be able to change the [background] color of the note containers based on priority/urgency levels. Is this possible…?"

This is a request we get every now and then, and the short answer is no, this is not directly possible. But there is a workaround I sent to Denis that goes like this.

In this case, I imagine Denis has separate paragraphs of text that need to be colored differently based on priority. The fact that they are in separate containers won't turn out to matter, because you can use customized note tags to highlight the text. First, click the drop down arrow for Tags on the Home tab and choose "Customize Tags":

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Then click the New Tag button and create a tag named Urgent, and set the highlight color to whichever color you want to use, like this:

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Then click OK. It will get added to the top of the list:

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and is assigned the shortcut key CTRL+1 be default. You can use the arrow keys along the right to move it down. I moved it to position 4, then renamed (modified) the Remember for later and Definition tags to be Medium and Low priority, respectively.  I did not make a screenshot of moving Urgent down or renaming the other tags.

Now I can select any text on a page and hit CTRL+4 to tag it high priority, CTRL+5 for medium and CTRL+6 for low. I could also create more ("critical", "optional", etc…) and color code them accordingly. Then when I look at a page I could see something like this:

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and be able to tell which task was at a given priority by its highlighted color. I can also use the Find Tags option with its functionality to create a summary page with only the given priority items as well.

I hope this tip helps, and feel free to send me any other feature wishes you have for OneNote.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John