Microsoft Onenote is a note-taking program for free-form information gathering and multi-user collaboration. It gathers users’ notes, drawings, screen clippings, and audio commentaries. Notes can be shared with other OneNote users all over the Internet or a network.
OneNote is available as part of the Microsoft Office suite, it is also available as a free, standalone app via the official website, the app stores of Windows 10, macOS, iOS and Android. Microsoft also provides a web-based version of OneNote as part of OneDrive and also Office for the web.
key pionts
- OneNote is a Microsoft Office app similar to Evernote or Dropbox Paper, for taking notes and storing information.
- OneNote lets you create notebooks for different topics, with each notebook featuring any number of sections and unlimited pages.
- Within a OneNote notebook, you can take notes, type or write with a stylus, add drawings and photos, store links, and more.
How OneNote organizes your material
OneNote uses the metaphor of a notebook, complete with books, sections, and pages. Your copy of OneNote can have multiple notebooks, each dedicated to a different topic. You might have a notebook for both official work and one for personal information, for example, or you might create a handful of different notebooks for each major project.
Within the notebook, you can create sections to organize your notes even further. If you work in sales, for example, you could create a different section for each different client. Finally, within any section, you can have an countless number of pages, making it easy to track information over long periods.
What you can do in OneNote
Once you set up a notebook and create a section, you are faced with a blank page. Like any word processor, you can start typing.
OneNote will offer Word-like tools in the ribbon atop the screen: different font selection, text style, bullets and numbering, highlighting, and more. You can also create tables to organize your notes and insert images, photos, audio, and video. The app also grants users the ability to create links or paste in URLs from web browsers.
If you are using OneNote on a tablet or a pc with a stylus, you can also draw, sketch, and write notes longhand.
Sharing notes
OneNote is a versatile tool that you can use privately, or share with others – and with yourself on different devices.
If you store your OneNote notebooks in the cloud on OneDrive, then it is possible to open OneNote on any device connected to your Microsoft Office account. Whether that’s a phone, tablet, PC, or laptop, you’ll always be in sync with all your notes across devices.
You can share entire notebooks with other people using the Share button in the ribbon, though know you’re sharing the whole notebook, not only a section or a page.
A feature called Replay lets you create a page of notes and then play it back like an animation. This is a tool you can use in the classroom or for delivering a presentation.
Important things you didn’t know you could do with Microsoft OneNote to improve your productivity
When it comes to digital note-taking apps, Microsoft OneNote checks all the boxes. It’s reliable and fairly intuitive, and works seamlessly across devices, no matter if you’re a Windows user, a Mac user, or both.
Scan documents directly from your phone
If you want to get a copy of a document into OneNote, then it is the easier way to do it with Office Lens, a mobile app for iOS and Android.
now, After you install and configure Office Lens, it is possible for you to take high-quality scans of multi-page documents with your phone and then upload them to any number of destinations, including OneDrive, email, and OneNote. Just choose the Notebook you want to copy it to, and you can use OneNote as a permanent storage for important documents.
Convert handwritten pages to text
If your pc, tablet, or mobile device works with a stylus, you might already use it to make different sketches or jot handwritten notes in OneNote. But you can also convert those handwritten notes to digital text.
- Click the “Draw” tab in the ribbon and click “Lasso Select.”
- Drag the lasso around the text you want to covert.
- In the ribbon, click “Ink to Text.”
OneNote will convert your handwriting to text as best it can. There will be errors, no doubt, but the text will be editable and you can incorporate it into other documents.
Do simple math
You can use OneNote to do simple math problems just by writing out the equation you want to solve. For example, you can write “100 + 400 =” and OneNote will fill in the answer. You can perform all common math problem like – addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, for example – in the same way. OneNote will even respect the order of operations, such as “(1 + 2) * 6 =.”
Solve complex equations
OneNote can do lot more from simple grade-school arithmetic – there’s a good powerful math engine under its hood. You can use a stylus to write an equation, then ask OneNote to convert it to text so you can use it in another document. But that’s not all: in many cases, OneNote can graph or solve the equation as well.
- Using a stylus, draw an equation.
- Drag the lasso around the text you want to covert.
- In the ribbon, click “Math.”
- To convert the drawn equation to text, you need to click “Ink to Math.” Or click “Select an action” and choose one of the appropriate available options, such as solving or graphing the equation.
Record meetings
You can use OneNote on a laptop to record meetings and take audio notes. its not ends here, you may also “bookmark” important moments during the recording so you know exactly where to go to hear a specific moment from the specific meeting.
- Click the “Insert” tab in the ribbon and then click “Audio.” OneNote will start recording immediately.
- If you hear something you want to be able to easily find later, type a note in the OneNote page. It can be a short, one-word keyword or you can type a detailed description.
- When the meeting is over, click “Stop” in the ribbon.
Your notes should now have small “Play” icons to their left. When you click the “Play” button, OneNote will play the recording from the moment when you started typing that note.
Easily clip webpages to OneNote
OneNote Web Clipper is a browser extension for Google Chrome browser that may make you wonder how you ever got by without this web clipper. After installing the extension, open a webpage you want to copy to OneNote and click the extension icon in your browser’s toolbar.
By default, the extension will load a preview of the entire page, but you can click options like “Region” to snip just parts of the page. You can then choose which OneNote notebook to copy it to.
Make a team wiki
A wiki-style encyclopedia doesn’t have to be complicated and you don’t need to use any specialized tools. OneNote,Truly, is a great way to create a shared space with documents, processes, meeting notes, picture or any other kind of content you want to share and collaborate on.
To build a wiki-like page in OneNote, you simply need to create links to other OneNote pages. To Do That, “Copy Link To Page” by Right-Click The Name Of The Page You Want To Link
Now, to create the link on another page, select the page text, right-click and choose “Link.” Paste the link into the “Address” field and click “Insert.”
Share this wiki Notebook by clicking “Share” in the upper right corner and sending an invitation to everyone on your team. Make sure you set it to “Can edit” so everyone can make changes to your Notebook.
Replay a sketch
If you create a sketch or drawing, or even jot down notes with a stylus, you can take use of a clever feature in OneNote to play it back like a short video, watching exactly how it originally unfolded. It’s a great teaching aid, for example – you can use it to play back how a sketch was made one step at a time, or how to solve a math problem.
- To give replay to a drawing, click the “View” tab in the ribbon.
- Click “Replay.”
- If promoted, drag a selection box around the part of the page you want to play back, or just click “Replay everything on the page.”
Turn off special formatting when you pasting into OneNote
OneNote does something that’s often helpful: when you paste text from a webpage, it copies the special formatting from the page, and adds a link to the page for easy reference. That’s great if you’re researching, but can be annoying if you just want the text. The good news is you can turn off this feature.
- Click the three dots at the top right of the OneNote window and choose “Settings.”
- In the Settings pane, click “Options.” 3. Scroll down to the bottom and, in the “Paste Options” section, set the dropdown menu to “Keep Text Only” and slide the “Include link to source” button to the left to turn it off.
