Insert files or printouts

- [Instructor] Notes may have more context when related files are included. I'm going to show you a couple shortcuts to add documents to a Notebook page. If you've looked around the ribbons in OneNote, you may have already discovered that you can insert files as printouts or attachments from the insert ribbon. Or by the keyboard shortcut alt plus the N key and the F key. But what if you're not working in OneNote when you want to add a file to a Notebook page? No problem. There's two ways to accomplish this. Let's start by looking at a shortcut that you can use if you're working in a document and want to send that to OneNote Notebook.

We're going to go ahead and switch over to the Word document now. Here you can see that we have the Landon Hotel document, and we'd like to send this document to the OneNote page that were just looking at. We're going to get started with this by clicking on the file tab. Within the backstage area, let's take a look at the print menu. Now we're not sending this to a physical printer, but instead from the printer list, we do see that we can send this OneNote2016. Now after selecting send to OneNote, we can make any other setting changes we need, like maybe we want to change this to landscape or change the margins of it.

Once we're ready, by selecting print, we're going to see that it's converting this word document and it's placing it into that NoteBook. Now it's not actually switching us to the OneNote Notebook, but if you look down at the bottom on the Windows taskbar, you can see that the OneNote icon is flashing. That's indicating to us that it has moved the content to that particular Notebook and within that page. But not quite yet, we still have to select where in the Notebook we'd like it to go. The recent picks area is actually showing recent places that you've worked in, like this research section and the file section.

We can also take a look at all of the Notebooks that are currently open in OneNote and select a section where we'd like to place this content. I'm going to go ahead and select the research section. By clicking on the plus sign, we're even able to see all of the files or pages that are already contained within this. Let's go ahead and click research. Now if you have a place that you commonly send files to or you're always sending information to, you also have the option to choose to have it always go to this particular My Notebook, and this section called research, by checking the box at the bottom.

I'm going to go ahead and uncheck that for now. We'll go ahead and click okay. And now we should see that conversion take place, and that actual printout of the Word document has been embedded within the research section, and it's on a new page called printout. Now that we have a printed document within the page, let's take a look at another tip that can help you if you're working in a different way. We were looking at that Word document, maybe we were making changes in line and we wanted to move that information to OneNote. But what if you're not working in a specific application, but you're looking at a listing of files and you'd like to move one of those to the Notebook? For this example, we're going to go ahead and open Windows Explorer.

There's a great shortcut that I use every day when I'm working in my files. And that's the Windows key plus the E key. It's a shortcut for Explorer. If you just remember E for explore. By doing this it opens the file explorer window. The file that we need is in the My Documents folder. So let's go ahead and navigate there. Within the My Documents folder, I can see the file that I'd like to move to the Notebook. Now the easiest way for us to do this is to have in view both this particular My Documents folder and the OneNote application.

It'll work with the way that I currently have it set up, but it's going to work a little bit easier if I can get these side by side on my screen. Now if you're working with a Windows 7, Windows 8, 8.1 or Windows 10 computer, it will work on all of these systems. We're going to left click and drag the My Documents, get that mouse cursor all the way to the left side of the screen. When your mouse cursor gets in that position you'll notice that it snaps and it shows us a border of where it's going to reposition the My Documents folder. Now I'm on a Windows 10 computer, and it's also showing me or suggesting other folders or applications that I have open that I can also see on the right side of my screen.

If you're working on Windows 7, 8, or 8.1, you may need to actually pick what you have open from your taskbar. I'm going to go ahead and select OneNote as we see it in the thumbnail here to the right. And it's going to snap into position and fill in the right side of my screen with the OneNote application. Now I'd like to add a new page where I'm going to place this file that I have within the My Documents folder. Now that I have this new blank page on the screen, I'm going to switch back over and locate that file, left click and drag that file to the page.

Whenever I release the mouse, we get an insert file menu. It's asking if I'd like to include this as an attachment or insert it as a printout. We already took a look at that file that we inserted as a printout, so let's take a look at this as an attachment. There we go. We have the attachment embedded within the new page. As we hover over that shortcut icon we can see the filepath of where this file resides. With a double click over this file, it will open the file within the native application. This is a Microsoft Word document, it will open in Microsoft Word.

Now that you know how to insert files while working in OneNote, other Microsoft applications, or even a saved place on your computer, I hope that these tips help you more quickly add that documentation and give those notes context.