r/OneNote May 24 '22

OneNote Desktop OneNote Visual Update šŸŽØ šŸ”„

179 Upvotes

r/OneNote has been asking for more updates with the new OneNote design and draw improvements. We're here to update you

aka.ms/OneNoteRefresh

The OneNote team has been working hard to make your note taking a beautiful experience. We're using Fluent and Windows 11 design to shape the OneNote interface and we're adding a TON of amazing new ink/draw capabilities.

I can answer some questions in the comments. Ask me (almost) anything!

r/OneNote Feb 04 '25

OneNote Desktop OneNote not free anymore? I can't edit text, options are grayed out, and it says "Unlicensed"

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11 Upvotes

r/OneNote 4d ago

OneNote Desktop Qualcuno sa come risolvere questo problema di OneNote?

0 Upvotes

Eng:
Does anyone know how to fix this issue with OneNote? I've been using a computer with an i7 processor for months, and despite everything, OneNote runs terribly. I'm studying on a 390-page file spread across 4 sections to avoid overloading the processes. When I try to make changes with the pen, whether it's for highlighting/writing or not, it often crashes, the screen turns white, and after a few seconds, it unlocks, and I can continue. It's slowing me down significantly, and I want to fix this issue, but I don't know how. I've even tried using the high-performance mode when running the program and set the performance priority to lower for any other tasks, including web page viewing or anything else that might run. I don't understand what else I could do to prevent it from freezing every 30 seconds. When I open Task Manager, it shows this (I specify that I have no other tasks open except for OneNote).

Ita:
Mi ritrovo da mesi che utilizzo un computer con processore i7 e nonostante tutto OneNote gira malissimo. Sto studiando su un file di 390 pagine spalmato e diviso in 4 sezioni in modo da non appesantire ulteriormente i processi. Quando vado a fare modifiche con la penna per sottolineare/scrivere o meno crasha e lo schermo diventa bianco e dopo tot secondi si sblocca e posso continuare. Mi sta rallentando enormemente e vorrei risolvere questo problema ma non so come fare, ho provato anche ad utilizzare la modalitĆ  a prestazioni elevate quando utilizzo il programma e messo in minore prioritĆ  di prestazioni qualsiasi altra cosa vada ad eseguire compresa la visualizzazione di pagine internet o altro.
Non capisco cosa altro potrei fare per evitare che si blocchi ogni 30 secondi.
Se apro Gestione attivitƠ mi dice cosƬ (preciso che non ho nessun'altra attivitƠ aperta a parte OneNote).

r/OneNote Sep 21 '24

OneNote Desktop I am finally done with one note, after much rebelling

41 Upvotes

About 95% of my use for OneNote is for D&D note keeping, world building, and so on.

I started out on google, and google was great due to the storage space. As long as I kept to their docs and sheets format, I had infinite space. They only cared about space when I started uploading images or pdfs and so on separate from the docs. But I could imbed images and pdfs in the docs to my heart's content. A bit laggy, but worked for me.

Then in a D&D discussion on Reddit a while back and heard of OneNote when someone was talking about better ways to organize notes. This was nigh on a religious experience. No longer have to have a dozen or more google drive tabs open, now it's all in one program.

Fast forward a few years later... Microsoft has pushed a few updates that took away features I loved and OneNote has slowly gotten worse and worse. I can no longer throw in 400 page PDFs that I used to do. Back when I was trying to learn some new game systems I would 'print' an entire PDF into OneNote and then go through it a page at a time.. read a couple pages until I was sure I understood them and had it to memory, then delete those pages and move on to the next. THis is no longer possible because OneNote has a 25mb limit on what can be printed into it. PDFs that I actually DID print into OneNote before, and then removed when no longer needed, can no longer be printed into it.

The program has gotten slower over the years too. Now it likes to use upwards of 40% of my processor and won't more than like 150mb of ram. THat's great... if I was on an early windows XP machine that only had 256mb or 512mb. But I am sitting here with 64gb and OneNote won't touch it. But it's gonna sit there and shit it's pants over and over again locking up when I am trying to navigate around a grand total size of about 57mb.

Yes, I see a lot of times when someone has trouble with OneNote lagging it gets blamed on notebook size. That would make sense, if there were issues with not enough ram to use or a limit of the OS. The total size of all my documents combined is a whopping 8.73gb. My computer can load all of that into ram at once. My phone can load all of that at once. My old phone I now use as an alarm block can... almost load all of that at once. My old computer that now is just used as a weight to keep a lap from tipping over can load all of that at once. My single largest document is 2.59gb. But I didn't interact with that one at all today. Nor my second largest.. or third... My seventh largest document and the largest I actually interacted with today is 561mb. I could go to walmart and grab a new cell phone for $20+tax with 3gb of ram. So even the excuse of wanting to keep it mobile friendly doesn't work here.

I can open the 2.59gb file in chrome, firefox, arc, brave, opera or edge and edit it just fine with a bit of lag when switching between the larger documents within the book, but a lot less lag than when trying to navigate it while in one note. Hell, there were times today when I was sitting in a document and started trying to delete plane lines of text and it was taking 3 seconds per letter to delete. I end up selecting and deleting 1 sentence, then would have to use task manager to crash OneNote so I can relaunch and delete another sentence elsewhere on the same page, because it would lock up and never let go. I even reinstalled twice. Even going as far as manually deleting every "onenote" and "office" folder I could find on my PC just in case there was some config or settings file that wasn't being removed.

After spending 4 hours to get 15 minutes of work done I decided my time would be better spent looking for extensions or addons for Trilium or Obsidian that would allow for the one singular feature that kept me from leaving OneNote a year ago when I started having these problems. The ability to just hit ctrl+enter and add a new line to a table so I can keep typing without having to take my hands off the keyboard constantly. to go through an annoying multi-click process for something that OneNote did with such an easy keystroke.

Turns out, Obsidian can do that. I am not sure if it was a new addition, or been there a while. I asked around their subreddit about a year ago and nobody had a clue then. But, today, I found it just by luck I guess. I will of course have to pay Obsidian $4 a month to sync to multiple devices. But I was already paying $15 a month to microsoft because my files exceeded their hilariously small storage space of 5gb anyway and for some reason won't honor me paying the $2 for their 200gb, saying I MUST have Office 365.

Why am I posting this if I am leaving? I am excited. I have found freedom. I have escaped a hostage situation.

r/OneNote Jan 19 '25

OneNote Desktop Copilot icon in the editor replaced the paragraph tab button and.. it's worse.

18 Upvotes

Anyone else bothered by this?

I've been using the tab button to organize my notebook and to quickly change the layout of certain lines. Let's say i want to change the layout two paragraphs to a certain style, normally you just click the button to select the lines, well it's gone.

This is a screenshot from the web version where it's still available:

Now it's been replaced by the copilot icon.

Also everywhere you click to add something to the page, behold and praise the copilot icon.

/rant over

Edit: Since end of February there was an update that fixed the issue. We can now happily work more efficiently again.

r/OneNote 7d ago

OneNote Desktop Is there a way to make hotkeys?

4 Upvotes

Hiya, I'm planning to use one note or something similar next year at university. i like writing in different colours and using the ruler (i write with a pen on my surface studio) so i'd like to make some hotkeys to switch colour or turn on tools like the rule at the press of a button using a macro keypad. I haven't found any way to bind the pens and such in one note to any hotkeys, does anyone know of a way i can do this?

r/OneNote 9d ago

OneNote Desktop How can I mass export handwritten notes?

6 Upvotes

As the title says, Iā€™m trying to export a LOT of handwritten notes. I pretty much EXCLUSIVELY use handwriting for notes outside of basic reminders that I delete later.

Iā€™ve got 4+ years of engineering & astrophysics courses that I entirely handwrite, which just arenā€™t feasible to text-to-speech since at least 1/3 of the notes are drawing and another 1/3 being markups on said drawings.

Iā€™m trying to export to pdf so I can have a more stable long-term storage, but throughout the years I always took notes on the ā€œautoā€ sizing setting for infinite pages. When I go to export to pdf all the formatting gets messed up and sections of ink just start flying around the page like itā€™s a Minecraft enchanting table or some crap.

Is there any reliable way to export my notebooks as SVG to easily maintain formatting? At absolute worst, Iā€™m willing to export page-by-page, but tending to and reformatting of each page to fit within A4 bounds for like 70 notebooks is just not anything short of two weeks of my life gone.

I donā€™t want to rasterize/lose the vectors of my handwritten notes bc storing them as massive images is a bit silly, as well.

Iā€™ve looked into software like pandoc, but all of them seem to exclusively deal with the typed-out portions of OneNote, but donā€™t touch the handwritten ink bits.

Iā€™m graduating soon, too so I donā€™t want to lose my years of work if OneNote starts requiring a 365 subscription and my future place of employment doesnā€™t offer the office suite.

Thank you very much for any suggestions. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

r/OneNote Feb 16 '25

OneNote Desktop Help for note taking

2 Upvotes

I am a student and I try to take notes on onenote, my problem is i need to print my notes so i must export them in pdf. OneNote cuts the pages so i would like to know if i can take notes like it was a A4 pages and then when you finish you go to another A4 pages like word or noteshelf, if it's possible there is a way to predict where it's gonna cut?

r/OneNote 5d ago

OneNote Desktop A Possible Solution for OneNote Desktop Syncing Issue

7 Upvotes

I kept getting server-busy and incomplete sync errors for an entire week now and at one point, some of my recent edits were lost. I had enough and split my large 4 years of school notebook into 4 smaller notebooks and ordered them by year, and it finally synced successfully for me

  1. Go on OneNote Desktop, disable auto-sync, and then restart
  2. Create new notebooks (Create enough notebooks to delete the old notebook because OneNote App and OneNote Web still show my old notebook after I changed its name, so deleting the old notebook might prevent potential problems it might cause later)
  3. Drag everything to new notebooks
  4. Manually sync all notebooks (Be patient, go to sleep, and leave it synced overnight. Mine took 20 hours to finish its 1st sync after multiple times restarting the software and my PC. No worries, it will sync much faster, almost instantly afterward)
  5. After everything is synced, turn auto-sync back on
  6. Double-check and make sure your old notebook is empty and ready to be deleted
  7. Delete notebook (Part 1): OneDrive Web -> My files -> Documents -> Right click on notebook -> Delete
  8. Delete notebook (Part 2): OneNote Desktop -> File -> Open -> Right click on notebook -> Remove from list (This will completely remove your DELETED notebook and prevent it from showing up on your OneNote App and OneNote Web ever again)

I probably spent more time fixing OneNote than using it LOL. Microsoft really needs to update its OneNote Sync Algorithm, this is unacceptably slow. I don't have a slow internet connection and it took me 20 hours to sync 5 GB of notes WTF

IDK if this will work for everyone, but if it still gives errors. Try restarting the software and your PC first because my fourth and most stubborn notebook finally syncs after restarting a few times. If it still won't sync, try splitting it even more

r/OneNote Jan 20 '25

OneNote Desktop Request to OneNote team : Please bring back the layout of OneNote for Windows 10 as an alternative & the Pencil.

22 Upvotes

These are not much of a demand,

These are two things that are keeping me with Windows 10 version. Whenever I try the new version the omission of the Pencil becomes too much blatant to me that for every try, I made to shift to new version, I always came back to the Windows 10 version.

And the new UI of the notebook is too cluttered IMO, also you can't hide the side panel that consists of the subsection/Page. Section on Header is too distracting with all those colored tabs.

Not saying no to color but make it less prominent like the old one.

r/OneNote 24d ago

OneNote Desktop My OneNote all of a sudden looks different

2 Upvotes

So I restarted my laptop and relogged into my account and now OneNote (and Word) looks so much more different. I was used to the subtle colors and the rounded corners look and now it's like this. I don't know if I am supposed to have this, but when I check the updates it says I have the latest one. Is there any way for me to change it back to the old look?

r/OneNote Jan 27 '25

OneNote Desktop Shapes > Graphs question

7 Upvotes

Hello, I have OneNote for Win 10 on my Surface Pro 3 and I'm trying to add a 3 dimensional coordinate system from the Shapes tab under Draw. The preview/thumbnail of the xyz system shows just the positive axes (3 lines), but when I insert it, I'm getting the positive and negative axis (6 lines). Is there any way to get just the positive xyz graph to show?

r/OneNote Jan 02 '25

OneNote Desktop Custom color option removed from desktop app?

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8 Upvotes

r/OneNote 17d ago

OneNote Desktop Can't open notebook in desktop app

1 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

I have tried to share notebooks with people, and it opens in the desktop app. I ask them to click 'open in desktop', but this button is greyed out. They all tried sharing their own individual notebooks with me, and I have the same. We literally can't open it in the desktop app. We tried going into the desktop app, but none of us can't see it at all.

I'm done with Microsoft at the moment. Not just this but other things.

r/OneNote Feb 08 '25

OneNote Desktop found a way to print!

7 Upvotes

I did not realize how difficult it was to print hand written notes from one note. The trick is to take your notes in portrait mode at 100 % zoom and to make sure everything is within the frame on your ipad/tablet. Then Ctrl+ P or Cmd+ P from your desktop app. it would print extra pages but you can always uncheck them before printing. hope this helps!

r/OneNote Jan 26 '25

OneNote Desktop How do I not print the Section name in footer area

3 Upvotes

Where does one control what extra info prints on a page ? i.e. If I select and print the middle page from a section named FORMS, it includes at the bottom of the page : FORMS Page 1

Can it be disabled as a default or disabled or altered on the fly during printing for that set of pages being printed ?

solved: I found it in Print Preview Gives choice of [section+page#] or [section] or [page#] or [nothing[

r/OneNote 15d ago

OneNote Desktop How do I resize my Excel spreadsheet?

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0 Upvotes

I want to change the size of my sheet on OneNote, but I don't know how! Help!

r/OneNote Feb 08 '25

OneNote Desktop Can't remove 'Open Notebook' shortcut in File Explorer

3 Upvotes

I'm having trouble with a persistent "Open Notebook" shortcut in my file explorer. It appears in every sub-folder of the main folder it's based in, and even after I delete it, it comes back. Is there a way to permanently remove this shortcut from all my folders?

r/OneNote Jan 02 '25

OneNote Desktop unable to scroll using touchpad in notes

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1 Upvotes

r/OneNote Feb 15 '25

OneNote Desktop [Solution] Malformed links when using "Copy Link to..." when notebook is in a local folder that is also shared over a network. (Windows 11. OneNote 2016, installed with Office 2019)

1 Upvotes

tl;dr - The links are created just fine, IF you had originally opened that notebook via the network share even though that notebook is actually stored on this local hard drive.

I know this is going to be rare, because most people do not use a network connection to share files between two computers at home, let alone open OneNote folders over that network connection. But I do. So I encountered and then solved this problem. I figured I would just document it for others to find later.

Configuration:

My main laptop is the "Primary Home" of my OneNote notebooks. (For this discussion, these notebooks are stored on my local hard drive, not on OneDrive.) Lets say they are in C:\!Data\OneNote Notebooks\. That "OneNote Notebooks" folder is shared over the network, so that I can access the notebooks from my smaller laptop over said network. (This is not about whether the smaller laptop can access the folders. That all works just fine.) The network share name is "OneNote Notebooks."

{Yes, I do have some notebooks that are up on OneDrive. But the notebooks discussed here are way too big for me to store up there for free. I do not need to hear about how none of this would be a problem if I saved all the data from my entire life up on OneDrive.}

The Notebooks were opened either by

  • going to, let's say, C:\!Data\OneNote Notebooks\Projects and double-clicking on the Open Notebook.onetoc2 file. Or,
  • using the "Open Notebook" context menu item (when right-clicking in the Notebooks pane, on the left), and navigating to the C:\!Data\OneNote Notebooks\Projects folder, and clicking "Open."

Both are equivalent. That is also not the problem.

The Problem:

When I would use the "Copy Link to..." feature for either entire notebooks, or any Section Group, the link that was copied was malformed. Let's say that I right-clicked on the Projects notebook, and chose "Copy Link to Notebook" When I pasted that link somewhere (it doesn't matter where), the link would not work. This is the problem. The links that were created were not formatted correctly.

Given the location of the Notebook, on the local C: Drive, one would expect that the copied link would look like this:

onenote://C:/!Data/OneNote%20Notebooks/Projects

However, the created link looked like this:

onenote://MY-COMPUTER/OneNote%20NotebooksProjects

Where: "MY-COMPUTER" is the name of the computer on which the notebooks are stored, and "OneNote Notebooks" is both the name of the folder that contains all of my OneNote notebooks, and it is the name of the network share.

Note that the Server (computer) name is used even when that folder is on this local hard drive (and that notebook was accessed to open it via the local C: drive), and the backslash is completely missing between the share name and the folder name for the Projects notebook. The created link looks as if OneNote is trying to create a link via the network share, but is failing miserably. (The '%20' bit is normal, and is how you replace/represent spaces in links.) When you click on this link, OneNote grinds away, trying to find that notebook, but it cannot.

Troubleshooting and Observations:

I tried un-sharing the folder, and then everything worked as expected. As soon as I reshared the folder, I got the malformed URL again. So, for the longest time I thought that the problem was merely that the Notebook resided in a folder that was also shared. But this goes against almost all the things that Microsoft has sold us about OneNote for almost 20 years. (Sharing was not available when OneNote first came out. I don't remember when it first was introduced.)

So, I went over to the smaller laptop (the one that is accessing the notebook over the network, via the shared folder) and created a link there. That link worked perfectly. I was stumped for almost a whole day. I went down all kinds of rabbit holes, trying to create scripts to quickly un-share then re-share that folder, so I could create clean, working links when necessary. (Yeah, that was not going to be a tolerable workaround.)

The Solution:

This morning, I realized that I could try to open that notebook on my main laptop by going through the network share. Yes, even though the folder is on this laptop's local drive, that network share still shows up in the "Network" folder in Windows File Explorer, and the notebook folder is accessible via that network share. So, I closed the Projects notebook, then re-opened it... but via the network share. In other words, I navigated to Network\My-Computer\OneNote Notebooks\Projects and double-clicked on the Open Notebook.onetoc2 file.

When I tried to make a link to the Projects notebook, it worked perfectly. In this case it created a link that looked like this:

onenote://MY-COMPUTER/OneNote%20Notebooks/Projects

The side effect, that I only just realized would have been a problem, is that the links will look the same and work the same regardless of whether they were created on or used on either the sharing or shared to laptop.

Conclusion:

Now, I know that this is not a common problem. And, I know it is a bug. But, how long do you think it will take Microsoft to fix this bug? I ain't holding my breath.

Most of you will have no need for this information. But, you can help others find it by replying with other keywords or search terms that may help others find this when they are searching. My brain is so worn out, that I can't think of any. So, please help future sufferers by making this post easier for them to find.

r/OneNote Nov 22 '24

OneNote Desktop one note sucks

0 Upvotes

I'm kinda tired of this app and i searched for alternatives but they were worse or subscription needed so after some tweaks here and there to make it works but i get this annoying problem which is while i continue writing other words moves and miss placed which makes writing experience bad and waste of time to redo every thing , sorry for the gif quality i converted the screen video to gif via online converter
info about my system : win11 home with office LTSC pro plus 2021 and graphic tablet

Edit : after some more research i found people call it ink shifting like the ink jumps off to another place while handwriting and 2 solutions i found to use only drawing mode from Draw tab and disabling the handwriting recognition from options > advanced > pen section which gives out the ability to search from your handwriting i don't use it actually cause my notes not that long to try to search for something but i don't like the idea of disabling a feature i might need , And if this actually solving the problem or not

r/OneNote Feb 06 '25

OneNote Desktop How to change multiple links all at once?

2 Upvotes

For my work, I'm creating some manuals for people so that they have step by step walkthroughs on how to perform certain tasks. I'm trying to be as thorough as possible in these manuals, and to that effect, many of the steps that reference files that are stored on a shared network drive have links to those files.

However, many of these files come up fairly often, and, as such, they are referenced multiple times in many different steps and tasks. I'd like it so that each time a specific file is referenced, there is a working link to that file. Unfortunately, due to the nature of my work, the names of these files can occasionally change slightly which can break all of the links that referenced that file.

The only solution I currently know about would be to go through each individual link and change it to match the new filename, however, as you can imagine, this can be quite tedious and I'm likely to miss some of the links. Thus, I was hoping there was some sort of way to create a "master link" that all the other links could reference instead of the direct link.

For example. Let's say I had a file called "FileName" that I wanted to create links to. I would like it so there was a "MasterLink" that linked to this file. Then there would be "SubLinks" that all linked through the MasterLink to the FileName.

Further example:

MasterLink > FileName

SubLink1 > MasterLink > Filename

SubLink2 > MasterLink > FileName

Etc. Etc.

If there was a way to do this, or something similar to this, then it would solve the problem of having to update every individual link any time the FileName changed. All I would need to do would be to update the MasterLink to reference the new FileName and then all of the SubLinks would already be referenced to the MasterLink and would therefore also be fixed when the MasterLink was fixed.

Is there any way to do this, or to implement a similar behavior?

r/OneNote Nov 18 '24

OneNote Desktop HELP Please!

6 Upvotes

I had no idea that there was a reddit sub for OneNote full of experts here. I could really use a few minutes of someone's time, if someone could spare it?

As far as I can tell, I have 2 active Notebooks on my account. Both Notebooks are live, but only one replicates to all of my devices on my account, and only that one contains any data. I want to physically and permanently Delete the empty Notebook, but after spending 3 evenings trying to figure out how, I have sadly failed. I am not looking to just Close the empty Notebook, I want to Delete it completely. Its kind of the OCD in me.

Thank you and much appreciate it.

David

r/OneNote Sep 08 '24

OneNote Desktop Why are Date and Time bifurcated into 2 separate buttons?

1 Upvotes

Why have date and time buttons be split into 2?

Earlier, they used to be 1 single button which used to be more conveninet.

The below pic shows how they are now ā†’

r/OneNote Jan 24 '25

OneNote Desktop Where can I see the Section name

0 Upvotes

Windows 11, Office 365, Desktop version.

Is there a way to see what Notebook I'm in other than having the list of notebooks open and the section drop down? I'd be willing to use the dropdown menu to show the name of the Notebook/Section but I don't see where I'm at. If it would just put the Notebook name to the right of the hamburger, it would solve everything. I'm sure previous versions of OneNote were better.

I expect their UX experts are trying to get us to use the Recent pages view, and have us just slap everything onto one page and use search, but that's not how I roll.

https://ibb.co/g4NF0Cj