In older versions of OneNote, you were greeted on startup with a built-in OneNote Guide that walked you through the basics of using OneNote.  With OneNote 2010, the Personal notebook is the only notebook that shows up by default.

Fortunately, it is pretty easy to restore the OneNote Guide for OneNote 2010.  Courtesy of Daniel Escapa on the OneNote team:

Open OneNote

  1. File-->Open—>Open Notebook
  2. Go to %programfiles%\Microsoft Office\OFFICE14\LCID\
    The LCID is the folder for your language & locale; for EN-US this is 1033
    (for me, the actual path is C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\1033\)
  3. Double click on ONGuide.onepkg (you may have to change the “OneNote Table Of Contents (*.onetoc2)” dropdown

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  1. Unpack the notebook by going through the wizard
  2. Success!

You’ll end up with a guide that shows the new features of OneNote 2010 and how to use them.

Examples:

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