OneNote Tip: Tagging more than one line of text with a single tag

Tagging is a very powerful feature in OneNote and is nearly the top "How To" type of question I get. I got another one this last week and I figured I would share it here.

One of our users wanted to type this in OneNote:

Hello everyone,

I wanted to point out some rodents that live in North America:

Capybaras

Rats

Chihuahuas

Thanks,

John

And the user wanted to tag all text, but only use one tag. Normally, you would see this if you applied the Important tag:

clip_image001

See how each line has the tag? This makes finding a bit noisy. Here's what the tag pane will show:

What the user wanted is this:

clip_image002

With only one tag that tags the whole set of text.

Here's how to do this: use SHIFT+ENTER to create new lines. That's it. You can either remember to do this beforehand or you can edit the text once it is in place and use SHIFT+ENTER to create new lines.

Now the Tag Summary page will look like this:

 

clip_image002

Instead of:

clip_image004

Much cleaner, right?

For those of you that have looked at our page XML, you can see how this works.

The tag gets applied to the outline elements.  Each paragraph becomes its own outline element which is why you see this behavior (even though each paragraph is only one sentence). I encourage you to experiment here - you can really clean up your task summary pane.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John