OneNote Dashboard Template: One Page for Where Everything Stands

Every OneNote dashboard template you have seen promises a page that pulls itself together from the rest of your notebook. OneNote cannot do that. It has no formulas and no rollups, so any template claiming otherwise is either using a screenshot from Excel or hoping you do not check.

This one is built the honest way. The dashboard is a page you type, in about two minutes, once a week. That sounds like a weakness and it is the reason it works: a dashboard that maintained itself is a dashboard nobody reads, and the two minutes you spend updating this one is what makes you actually look at it.

The fifteen pages

• The front. Contents, Dashboard, Today, This Week.
• The work. Tasks, Projects, Goals, Milestones by way of the Weekly Review.
• The calendar. An undated Calendar you fill in yourself.
• Capture. Inbox for anything that arrives, Someday for ideas that are parked rather than dead.
• The rest. Rituals, Numbers, Weekly Review, Archive, and Your tag system.
• Plus a six page sticker set, so a page you have changed still matches.

The Calendar is undated on purpose. A dated OneNote notebook expires, and when it does it takes your typed data with it, not just your download. An undated calendar you fill in yourself is worth more in year two than a dated one that has run out.

The Weekly Review page is the load-bearing part. It is a short list of prompts, and it is the difference between a dashboard that is true and one that quietly went stale a fortnight ago.

What this does not do

It does not calculate, because OneNote has no formulas. It does not roll up, because nothing on the front page can read the pages behind it. It does not remind you. It goes stale if you skip the review, and that is the honest trade for having no automation at all. The Numbers page carries instructions for embedding a real Excel sheet when you genuinely need arithmetic.

The notebook package installs in OneNote for Windows. Once it is installed and saved to OneDrive it opens and syncs on Mac, iPad, Android, phone and the web, but it cannot be installed from an iPad or a Mac on its own. One purchase, no subscription.

The rest of the OneNote line

We make six OneNote notebooks, each built for one job, and they sit side by side in the same notebook stack:

• OneNote project management template: projects, the kanban board and the registers behind them.
• OneNote CRM template: clients, deals and renewals.
• OneNote meeting notes template: agendas, decisions and actions.
• OneNote calendar template: undated day, week, month and year pages.
• Kindle Scribe OneNote template: notes exported from a Kindle Scribe.

This one also comes in OneNote Templates for Work, together with the project management, CRM, meeting notes and calendar templates: five notebooks for less than buying them one at a time.