A tip to color the background of text in OneNote 2013

A request I get every so often is background colors for outlines. Essentially, people want to color code the background for different text on a page and/or use that instead of tags to visually differentiate their notes. What they want is this:

Notice that the capybara fact is highlighted in steel coloring and the chihuahua is in yellow.

While you cannot control the color of the background of an individual outline, a feature we added in OneNote 2013 is the ability to color the cells of a table. So what you actually see above is a table, 3x3, with some empty cells and some cells with text and shading. And I turned the borders of the table off because that is more visually appealing to me.

And to get this to work yourself, it is even a little simpler since OneNote supports tables that are only one cell. Here's how to highlight some text.

First, type the text you want. Then CTRL+A (or select it all).

Then click the Insert tab of the ribbon and select Table

This will put the text you have highlighted in a single cell of a table. (ALT+N, then T, then ENTER will do this if you don't want to mess with the ribbon).

 

Capybaras make great pets

 

Now a Layout tab (for the table) will appear, and on it is the Shading button:

Click that dropdown to choose a color:

Finally, you can click the Hide Borders command to turn off the cell edges being drawn.

It's a nifty little trick that may help you lay out your notes a little better. I hope it helps.  And remember my trick about using larger tables if you want to line up cells a little better.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 31, 2013
  Hi John, Although the workaround sounds very clever, I do not see, what the problem is. Even in OneNote 2010 I CAN choose the background color of any marked Text from the context menu (right click) or viy CTRL-ALT-H. Stefan (I am the author of the first OneNote 2013 book in german btw; you would find it on amazon.de or via my still rather young blog at www.onenote-blog.de...)  

• Anonymous
  June 18, 2013
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 18, 2013
  Yep, this is only a workaround and it will be fine for some folks and come up short for others.  A good analogy here is that for some people a car is just transportation and for others it has to be "the right model" and so on.

• Anonymous
  August 28, 2013
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 09, 2014
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2014
  8bar - I forwarded your idea on to the design team as a suggestion for the future.  Thanks for the input and thanks for using OneNote!

• Anonymous
  May 01, 2014
  we need to be able to select the color of the border not the color of the cell. What's the point of a table without a border.

• Anonymous
  May 14, 2014
  Hey, Dunno if I am right here but I'd love to know how to set the background color of a note to any color and not only the given colors under "View"....

• Anonymous
  May 14, 2014
  You could use a tool like onomspy to alter the page color in the xml: blogs.msdn.com/.../onenote-spy-omspy-for-onenote-2010.aspx and use it to alter the pagecolor attribute for a page:  <one:PageSettings RTL="false" color="automatic"> to  <one:PageSettings RTL="false" color="#300000"> to get a dark red color. You could write a macro with onetastic (and share with everyone there.  Someone already wrote a "Teal" macro that looks like it could be used as the basis).

• Anonymous
  May 14, 2014
  Link for onetastic www.omeratay.com/onetastic and the teal macro is here www.omeratay.com/onetastic

• Anonymous
  June 06, 2014
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 06, 2014
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 20, 2014
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 27, 2014
  I'm actually not able to do this. When I follow the steps I don't get the "shading" option in the layout ribbon. Any thoughts?

• Anonymous
  July 27, 2014
  Are you using a notebook in OneNote 2007 format?  RIght click the notebook and select properties - does it give you the choice to upgrade to 2010/2013 format?

• Anonymous
  August 22, 2014
  2010 does not seem to have the table cell colour option

• Anonymous
  January 29, 2015
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  February 04, 2015
  Feel free to post a picture of one of your pages.  I'd like to see what you are doing.

• Anonymous
  August 13, 2015
  Thanks for taking time to post this info - it's very appreciated

• Anonymous
  October 16, 2015
  This was a good work around to my problem.  I was floored that I couldn't just color my notes as if I was putting stickies on a flip chart idea page...so I could keep each of my random thoughts apart :-)