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OneNote tip: Jumping to Frequently Used Pages

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Steve Hollasch is an avid OneNote user here at Microsoft and, with Dan's help, came up with a pretty slick system to use keyboard shortcuts to navigate to specific pages he uses all the time. He sent this in email to a group of OneNote power users we have here and gave me permission to share this with everyone. Enjoy!

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[Thought I’d share this tip I learned a few weeks ago, since it’s so handy.]

Because you can access items in your Quick Access Toolbar with keyboard shortcuts, you can create a simple keyboard shortcut to bring up a list of your recently visited pages for quick navigation.

The first step is to add the Back with history icon to your Quick Access Toolbar. To do this, open the Quick Access Toolbar customization menu at the very top left of the OneNote title bar. Select “More Commands…”.

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In the “Choose commands from:” pull down, select “All Commands”. You’ll notice two entries for “Back”: one with a context arrow on the right, and one without a context arrow. Double click the one with the context arrow.

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Because the keyboard shortcuts for the Quick Access Toolbar are Alt-1, Alt-2, Alt-3, … from left-to-right, you can now access this command with a simple keyboard shortcut. I moved mine at the very top (on the right pane), so the keyboard shortcut for my setup is Alt-1.

Now I can just hit Alt-1 to bring up a list of my recent pages in reverse chronological order, use the arrow keys to select and hit enter to jump directly to that page.

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Thanks a bunch, Steve!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2011
    I find that Ctrl-E (search) will bring up recently used pages list too. What I really want is a RANDOM button like in Wikipedia. It would be really useful for generating new ideas, discovering old thoughts. If anyone is interested in the idea... twitter me @yt8019 !

  • Anonymous
    July 28, 2011
    Search funcionality in OneNote is very poor - it can't find phrase in the middle of the word :-(, just at the beginning. This is a very large drawback for me.

  • Anonymous
    July 28, 2011
    I'll send this comment over to the search folks.  Thanks!

  • Anonymous
    October 11, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 11, 2011
    Dynsh - good feedback which I am passing along.  thanks!

  • Anonymous
    September 27, 2012
    John your post helps me immensely, thanks.

  • Anonymous
    April 29, 2015
    The comment has been removed