Merge content containers to consolidate like ideas

- [Instructor] At some point while editing documents, you probably discovered that cut, copy, and paste can be your best friend and a time saver. These commands are available and they work great in Microsoft OneNote. If you need to merge two content containers together, cut and paste may have been your go to actions. I'm going to show you a trick that works even better. I have a couple of text containers here that I'd like to merge together. Now, there's a way that this will work and a way that it won't work. So I'm first going to show you what not to do, and this is intentional and by design for another reason that you may do this.

So I'm going to grab the Bohemian Landon container, and I'm going to left-click and I'm going to drag it over to the container that I'd like to merge it into, and you'll notice that as I do this, it's not actually merging the contents together. We can see an overlap in the text at the bottom of the original container and the container that we just moved. Now, you might want to do this by design if you're lining up like objects. A screenshot, or something else that you want to have in a similar area but keep them distinctly separate, right? But what if we do want to merge the text of these two containers together? Well let's try another way that actually does this for you.

So I'm going to reposition this container back over to the right where it originally was. Now, I could move portions of this container into the container to the left, and to do that I would actually just select that area. In this case though, I want to move everything that is part of this container, so we're going to left-click and drag to select all of the text, and the image that's within that. Once we've done that, we're going to look for something that's going to be just outside the border of this container. It looks like a baseball home plate, and we can see that right now it's over to the left of the image.

Depending on where your mouse cursor was last positioned is where you're going to see this. So if we're towards the top of the image, notice how it moves and it snaps up to the top as the mouse cursor moves as well. While the mouse is positioned over this icon, it turns into a four-way arrow, indicating that if we left-click and drag, we're now moving the contents of what's selected. Since we have the entire container selected, we're going to be moving everything. Let's go ahead and left-click. Hold that down and drag, and we can see that it is now repositioning the text. Once we get into the border of this other container that we're merging it with, you're going to see all of the information snap into place based on where the mouse cursor is positioned.

Now this doesn't look too great yet, right? But once we actually get it over to the left edge, you'll see how it's kind of taking on the shape of that container, and it's positioned the Bohemian Landon container at the top, and what was originally in this container is positioned at the bottom. While still holding the left mouse button down, as I move my mouse cursor within this container, we can actually merge that content into whatever area we want, so if we want to have this in the middle of that original content, or even if we keep going to the bottom, we can position this to be in the bottom area of the same content.

Great, that's exactly where I want it. I'm going to left-click and release and we're done. We've merged the contents of those two containers, and it is now one distinct container. I hope you get great use of this trick. It's one of my favorites, and I hope it becomes one of yours too.