One of our recent posts talked about the magic and wonder that is OneNote. Used for agendas, collaboration and note-taking, OneNote has improved the writing and distribution of minutes for our team meetings. But you might wonder, especially when collaborating with others, “What if I accidentally delete all the notes from our last meeting?” or “How do I keep track of changes to the notes?” These situations can often be a pain to deal with.
OneNote has features to keep track of changes when collaborating. This can be found in the ‘HISTORY’ tab on the Office Ribbon. We’ll have a look at answering the questions raised above.
What if I accidentally delete all the notes from our last meeting?
Accidentally deleting files can happen, mostly through clicking the wrong option when editing, and sometimes through accidentally pressing the wrong buttons. Usually programs have a pop-up window that appears to confirm that you’re sure of the decision to delete. Unfortunately, OneNote doesn’t do this, but here’s a way to retrieve the deleted file:
1. In the ‘History’ section of the tab, you can see the drop-down option ‘Notebook Recycle Bin’.
2. Clicking on the icon will show a section that says ‘Deleted Pages’ for that Notebook, with the pages that have been deleted.
3. Right-click a page to move it out of the Recycle Bin.
4. Then move the page to the Notebook it originated from.
Crisis averted!
Note: OneNote permanently deletes any items in the ‘Notebook Recycle Bin’ after 60 days.
How do I keep track of changes to the notes?
Having multiple authors on the same document can be a bit frustrating. There is little to no accountability as to who edited which section or who added what content in. Here’s how OneNote does it:
In the ‘HISTORY’ tab, there are four options to go about with this situation:
Recent Edits
This option retrieves the recent edits and lets you navigate through the different edits done to the Notebook. It gives you different time frames for you to look through.
Once the time frame has been chosen, OneNote will show results for all the edits.
Find by Author and Hide Authors
When finding specific content is too difficult, sometimes finding the author is easier. ‘Find by Author’ lets you search the edits that an author made on the page.
OneNote 2013 is usually defaulted to hide authors, but you can click the ‘Hide Authors’ button and OneNote displays the initials of the author on the section that they contributed to.
Page Versions
This option is similar to ‘Recent Edits’ but looks at the edits as a whole page. OneNote displays the page versions by different authors. This way you can keep track of the different versions of the page or revert back to a preferred version.
We hope this tip will help you do wonders in situations like these!