

Overall, the original OneNote conceptual model required some unlearning for most users. Microsoft made it possible with OneNote 2007 to seamlessly share notes among multiple people, which anticipated the concurrent-authoring approach in Google Apps, Microsoft Office Online, Quip and other tools. OneNote also did away with the traditional File/Save model, automatically saving all changes. In many ways, the release was a break from the other Microsoft Office, with a flexible page-centric notebook model that had more in common with web-based authoring than the file model of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Microsoft OneNote was announced by Bill Gates in late 2002 as "an application designed to allow people to capture notes in one place and then organize and use them more effectively" and had its first release as part of Office 2003. OneNote's walk in the Windows wildernessĪlthough notetaking and sharing apps are new to many people, OneNote has been available for over a dozen years. To edit any pages, you’ll do so from one of the four tabs lining the top of every Notebook.OneNote has been misunderstood in part because of rapid evolution and in part because of Microsoft's Office 365 strategy. Need to scribble a few additions on top of someone’s grocery list? OneNote is tablet and stylus compatible, or you can even use your mouse if you’re feeling particularly artistic. RELATED: What's the Difference Between Office 365 and Office 2016?Īfter you’ve got your pages set up and you’re ready to start creating notes of your own, you’ll notice that OneNote works in a bit of a ‘scrapbook’ fashion, where text, images, and even drawings can all be spliced together in the same note to create a corkboard of various ideas and brainstormed concepts in a single place. If you want to overlay images on top of text, OneNote won’t stop you. While on the surface this may sound a tad overwhelming, once you start digging into OneNote it all starts to flow together seamlessly, and makes for an extensive note-taking app that doesn’t leave any stone unturned when it comes to packing as many features into one program as possible.
