How to create a OneNote section template

Question

How do you create a template that includes multiple section groups and pages? My use case is:

I take daily notes on how my day went, progress, ways to improve, goals for tomorrow etc. These notes are summarised within a weekly reflection which, in turn, are summarised within monthly and yearly segments. These are bundled up into the Section Group for that year (e.g. 2017) with Month section groups, week section groups, and then days as pages within.

I'd like to create a template which I can import/copy/insert into OneNote whenever I require a new year. The question is, how?

Answer 1

I believe you can make a template by right clicking on a Section i.e. Right Click-> Export and then choosing a location to save the template file.

Then, in order to use it, you need to open the template file, and then drag and drop the opened template (clicking on the top left tab) and drag your mouse into an opened Notebook and it will trigger a copy past from the template.

It may not be possible for section groups though.

Here's a Microsoft forum with the full step by step instructions

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/ie/en-US/1ac66a9c-7f94-4cc7-9804-39cf61422668/in-ms-onenote-2013-how-to-make-a-section-tab-which-contains-many-pages-as-a-template-amp-create?forum=officeitpro

Answer 2

Really low tech. Create a template section or section group with unnamed titles and save a blank version in a notebook somewhere. Then just copy and paste it to the section you want your template to be.

Answer 3

You could do this by writing an app that uses the OneNote API to populate Notebooks, SectionGroups and Sections in the structure that you want. You could even make the creation of those entities happen every day/week/month at a certain time.

https://dev.onenote.com