Microsoft OneNote is a note-taking software developed by Microsoft that allows for free-form information gathering and multi-user collaboration. It is available as part of the Microsoft 365 suite and has been free on all platforms outside the suite since 2014. OneNote can gather users' notes, drawings, screen captures, and audio commentaries, as well as other forms of multimedia, such as videos and images. It allows for the sharing of notes with other OneNote users over the Internet or a network. OneNote also includes the Sticky Notes feature, which can be used independently. It was a separate program in Office 2003 and became a core program in most retail editions of Office 2007. With the release of Office 2010 for Windows, it has become an integral part of the Microsoft Office suite.

OneNote is available as a free, standalone app via the official website and app stores of Windows 10, Windows 11, Android, iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. A web-based version of the program is available as part of OneDrive and Office for the Web.

Overview

OneNote was announced by Bill Gates on November 17, 2002.^[2] The software allows users to create notes that can include text, pictures, tables, and drawings. Unlike a word processor, OneNote features an almost unbounded document window, in which users can click anywhere on the canvas to create a new text box at that location. OneNote saves data automatically as the user edits the file.

OneNote saves information in pages organized into sections within notebooks. Microsoft designed this user interface to resemble a tabbed ring binder, where users can directly make notes and gather material from other applications. OneNote notebooks collect, organize, and share possibly unpublished materials – as compared to word processors and wikis, which often target publishing in some way. The difference shows in certain OneNote features and characteristics:

• Pages can be arbitrarily large
• There is no enforced uniform page layout or structure.

Users can move pages in the binder and annotate them with a stylus or word-processing or drawing tools. Users may add embedded multimedia recordings and hyperlinks. They can also add embeddable content, such as YouTube videos. OneNote also integrates search features and indexing into a free-form graphics and audio repository. It can search for pictures (e.g., screen captures, embedded document scans, photographs) that depict text. It also searches "electronic ink" annotations as text and phonetically searches audio recordings on a text key. It can replay audio concurrently with notes taken during the recording. It can also extract and copy texts from pictures and documents using optical character recognition.

Its multi-user capability allows offline editing with later synchronization and merging. More than one person can work on the same page simultaneously using OneNote as a shared whiteboard environment.

On March 17, 2014, Microsoft released the OneNote cloud service API, which allows third-party application developers to integrate the service into their apps. The API runs on Microsoft's globally available cloud and sends data from applications into the user's OneDrive. OneNote can render webpages as snapshot images.

Microsoft also announced several new features in OneNote that use the service API:

• OneNote Clipper: A browser bookmarklet allowing the user to save a screenshot of a webpage to OneNote along with the URL.
• Email to OneNote: A feature enabling users to send emails to the address me@onenote.com from specified email IDs to have the contents of the email saved to OneNote.

File format

A OneNote notebook is stored as a folder with a separate data file for each section. OneNote files have a .one filename extension.^[3] A .one file can be a OneNote notebook or a OneNote section.

Microsoft upgraded the file format twice after it had introduced OneNote 2003 – first in OneNote 2007, and again in OneNote 2010. OneNote 2003 files can be opened by both OneNote 2007 and OneNote 2010 in read-only mode and subsequently upgraded to the later versions of the file format. OneNote 2010 can read and write OneNote 2007 file formats. It can also convert back and forth between the 2010 and 2007 formats.

Microsoft has documented the OneNote file format. It is an open format that can store varied multimedia content in a single .one file.^[3][4][5]

Multiple .one files can be exported to a .onepkg file, which stores mulitple .one files in cabinet file format.

Platform support

OneNote supports simultaneous editing of shared OneNote documents by multiple users when the document is stored in a shared folder in OneDrive. Dropbox was supported for some time as a sync protocol, but after Windows Live Mesh was discontinued, OneNote supported it for cloud-based storage and synchronization of OneNote files. OneNote clients, including the OneNote web app of Office Online, can view and edit them.

Microsoft made OneNote 2013 for Windows desktop available for free. OneNote for Windows and Mac is based on a freemium model. Premium features, such as SharePoint support, version history and Microsoft Outlook integration were previously available only to Office 365 and Office 2013 customers, but on February 13, 2015, Microsoft removed all feature restrictions, except creation of local notebooks (the free edition only stores notebooks on OneDrive) from the programs, essentially making the program free to use.

Windows

The first version, OneNote 2003, was only sold as a separate product for Windows, and was compatible with Windows XP and Windows 2000 as well as for Microsoft Tablet PCs with pen input. Starting with Office 2007, it was then included as part of the Office suite, as the software was positioned more as a student tool rather than a business.

A Microsoft Store version of OneNote (formerly known as OneNote MX) was available for Windows 8 and Windows RT, using OneDrive as a storage place. It is optimized for use on tablets by implementing a pie menu interface and invoking the operating system's tablet-specific functionality.

OneNote for Windows 10

In 2018, Microsoft announced that for OneNote on Windows, the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) based OneNote for Windows 10, now renamed "OneNote for Windows 10", would be the default experience for Office users on Windows. The Win32/Win64 "desktop" version would remain known as OneNote 2016 despite the release of Office 2019, would no longer receive new features, and would not be installed with Office by default, but would remain available as an option.

However, Microsoft reversed this decision in 2019; in the same year, the company announced that both versions would receive active development and the desktop version would once again be installed with Office by default. The desktop application was renamed to simply OneNote, matching the other programs in Office 365. OneNote is no longer installed with Windows starting from Windows 11, but is still available from the Microsoft Store.

In 2021, Microsoft announced that OneNote for Windows 10 would be discontinued and that it was working on migrating users and features to the desktop version. They also announced that it would be receiving some user interface changes to be more in line with Windows 11.

Starting in April 2025, the OneNote for Windows 10 app began displaying a deprecation notice, encouraging users to transition to the desktop OneNote app. The UWP app officially reached its end of support on October 14, 2025, together with Windows 10.

Mobile

OneNote is also available for cell phones. Microsoft currently has a standalone OneNote app for iOS and Android.

OneNote Mobile for older Windows Mobile smartphones and pocket PCs was included with OneNote 2007. It was released with Windows Phone 7 in 2010. OneNote Mobile went multi-platform in 2011 when a version was released for iPhone and Symbian as part of Microsoft Apps. In 2012, Microsoft released OneNote for Android in a surprise move.

On July 1, 2013, Microsoft released version 2 of its app for iPad, containing significantly updated features, to correspond more closely to those available on the Windows platform. On August 19, 2014, Microsoft updated OneNote for Android tablets to include handwriting support and touch-friendly navigation. This version supports notebooks stored in OneDrive or SharePoint. In 2022, the Android version got a major refresh.

Mac

On March 17, 2014, Microsoft released OneNote for Mac. It is compatible with OS X Mavericks and above and can be downloaded for free from the Mac App Store.

The release of OneNote for Mac was part of Microsoft's broader strategy to make its Office suite more accessible across different platforms, and it marked the first time macOS users natively without third-party solutions. This move was seen as a response to the increasing number of users who were working on multiple devices, including those running macOS. By offering OneNote for free, Microsoft aimed to attract new users and integrate its note-taking service into the broader ecosystem of Microsoft Office applications.

Features

OneNote utilizes a simple section/page metaphor that resembles a spiral-binder notebook, with navigation buttons to browse entire notebooks. Notebooks also have full-text, cross-section search capabilities. Parts of a page can be tagged using either preset or user-defined flags, which allows users to mark important paragraphs and complete to-do lists; linked summaries make flagged paragraphs of an entire notebook viewable.

A few pre-defined page templates (i.e., for class notes) can be used instead of the default blank template.

Users can insert images, videos, tables, hyperlinks (including from websites and between pages in a notebook), screen clippings, multimedia, audio, handwriting, and text into pages. They can also drag and drop content from web browsers to OneNote, with the option of preserving most formatting and automatically linking back to the source website. Users can also embed PDFs or other Office files (such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations) into OneNote pages.

OneNote has Outlook integration, including note pages linked to Contacts and Calendar items, as well as buttons to send emails to OneNote. It is also possible to email OneNote notes as HTML documents, allowing users who do not have OneNote to read them.

Users can protect an individual section using a password to encrypt its contents. It also allows for multiple users to collaborate and share notes in real-time.

OneNote has a built-in calculator for simple equations. For example, typing 19.72/12= followed by a space will result in an answer being placed.

Key shortcomings

• Limited generic export capability or API functionality.
• No equation capability makes it very difficult to take notes in statistics, math, or science courses (if trying to type notes; there is no difficulty taking these kinds of notes with OneNote when using a Tablet PC). This is due to a lack of OLE support; in other Office applications, Excel documents can be embedded in Word documents can be embedded.. etc, but this is not supported as of OneNote 2007.
• Occasionally moves notes to other areas of the page. This can hamper formatting.
• OneNote Mobile does not support ink writing on a Windows Mobile PDA.
• OneNote 2007 notebooks, sections, and pages cannot be opened within OneNote 2003 and cannot be converted to OneNote 2003 format, thereby limiting the ability of different users with different versions to interact.
• OneNote Mobile does not have a "send to" option to send notes to an e-mail address.

In August 2004, Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for OneNote 2003 which fixed several shortcomings and added several significant new features such as date/time stamping, import of notes from Pocket PC and video recording, as well as shared sessions and a button to transfer a "page" of notes to Word 2003. The current release of OneNote 2003 is Service Pack 2 (which includes all the changes made in Service Pack 1).

In January 2007, Microsoft released OneNote 2007. OneNote 2007 is included in Microsoft Office 2007 Home & Student Edition, Enterprise Edition, and Ultimate Edition.

Version History

Release history

Version	Release date	Notes
OneNote 2003	November 19, 2003	Separate program in Microsoft Office 2003.
OneNote 2003 SP1	July 27, 2004
OneNote 2003 SP2	September 27, 2005
OneNote 2007	January 27, 2007	Core program in most Microsoft Office 2007 editions.
OneNote 2010	July 15, 2010	Integral part of most Microsoft Office 2010 editions.
OneNote 2013	January 29, 2013	Part of all editions of Microsoft Office 2013.
OneNote 2016	September 22, 2015	Part of Microsoft Office 2016.
OneNote for Windows 10	November 19, 2019	Not part of initial release of Microsoft Office 2019.
OneNote 2021	October 5, 2021	Part of Microsoft Office 2021.

Note that all release dates are "retail availability". "Release to Manufacturing" ("RTM" or code final) is usually 2–3 months prior.

Competitors

Since the introduction of OneNote, EverNote, and GoBinder have emerged as competitors on the Windows platform. There are many notebook applications available for the Apple Macintosh. The open-source application BasKet is the most noteworthy competitor in the Linux/Unix field. It also competes with Google Notebook, a web-based note-taking and web clipping system.

Two free-form databases on the Windows platform are askSam, from askSam Systems, and Info Select, by Micro Logic. Both have been available since the mid-90's. Info Select for the Palm Organizer provides bi-directional synchronization between Info Select databases on a Windows computer system and Info Select databases on Palm PDA's.

References

External links

• OneNote at the Microsoft Store
• Microsoft OneNote at Wikipedia