About Microsoft OneNote








Microsoft OneNote pricing
Microsoft OneNote does not have a free version and does not offer a free trial. Microsoft OneNote paid version starts at US$6.00/month.
Alternatives to Microsoft OneNote
Microsoft OneNote Reviews
Feature rating

- Industry: Education Management
- Company size: 51–200 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
OneNote: a great foundation for collaboration
OneNote has become central to our documentation at our organization. Especially after the integration between OneNote and Office 365 Groups and then Teams, the addition of the Collaboration Space and Documentation Library has helped us create central repositories that can be worked on simultaneously and frequently. Administration can collaborate and share materials and use the private spaces for groups members to take their own notes or have individual content distributed to them to work on or reflect upon.
I love this product and since growing with it in my career have also expanded to use it in my personal life for notetaking, organization, and planning.
Pros
The notebook structure was very appealing to me when I first started using OneNote. Once I unbound myself from the concept of creating everything to translate to a printed letter size piece of paper it really took off. You can create your notebook and its contents to directly translate to what if it had to be printed. But you can also transform it to a fully interactive collection. With links to various other locations in the same notebook, other locations and materials on the internet, and even embedding videos and other documents directly in the pages of the notebook you can make the reach of the content presented to extend beyond the boundries of the document itself.
Cons
The different versions - When OneNote transitioned to the web, it was during the focus on the Metro UI in Windows 8 and it suffered for it. The simplicity of what the web version could do was crippled by the ability of the internet browsers at the time. Over time it has increased in parity between the desktop version and the web, however - the Metro UI designed app has lingered and its design has stayed truer to the web version than the original desktop version. It is getting harder to find the desktop version that has content central and navigation to the left, top, and right sides. The web, mobile app, and "for windows 10" versions make navigation subjectively more complex when you have extensively robust notebooks.
Reasons for Switching to Microsoft OneNote
It proved to be the most logical and user friendly to translate hierarchical structures of documentation, collaboration, and communication the way we needed to get the most buy in and participation from the community.
- Industry: Information Technology & Services
- Company size: 51–200 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Digital notebook
It is good. When you have a product that does what promise to do, you cannot be unhappy. The product is also flexible. Different from other products, it enables efficient collaboration: you can easily share notes to your colleagues and maintain always the historical data.
Pros
The facility to take notes and share with other people is the selling point of the product. If you need a tool for doing that, OneNote is the right one. You can also organize simply your notes, write documents and add pictures/external content (the possibility to add media is another important feature to consider in the product). You can divide your notes/documents in sections/pages, this helps on searching for what you need. For example, you can have an entire section dedicated to a specific customer, in this section having the notes organized by date.
Cons
There are no particular pain points. I heard some complaints about the navigation but it follows the standard of other Microsoft products. I would only improve the search feature, in particular from a look and feel perspective.
Alternatives Considered
Notepad++Reasons for Switching to Microsoft OneNote
I prefer using OneNote when you need to enrich your notes with pictures, tables, and other media content. When you are in this situation, OneNote is the best tool. If instead, I have only text notes, I prefer Notepad++- According to what I have to do, I choose the right tool.- Industry: Health, Wellness & Fitness
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Another great tool from Office 365
Pros
If you learn to work with OneNote on daily basis you will be amazed how powerful this tool is. You can simply create your notes with all the data you need, filter quickly. You can collaborate with your team on your notes, share MoM and so on. We use it on daily basis for all this tasks.
Cons
It is a little bit like using Word, formatting can be sometimes challenging and for task planning I would prefer using Microsoft Planner for example.
- Industry: Computer Hardware
- Company size: Self Employed
- Used Daily for 1-5 months
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Review Source
Many problems for a renowned product
I would give this a 3/5 star but considering how well-known and popular it is, then I can't give it more than a 2 star. It's ok.
Note this is the windows Microsoft Windows 10 version which is not the same as the Office 365 Onenote 2016 ... let alone others.
MS Whiteboard has issues but is much better overall.
Pros
Pros: Wide range of functionality. You can convert to different file types and insert files into it rather easily. It has great cloud support and is overall easy to access.
Cons
Cons:
There is great support for onenote on the web, but at least 90% of the searches I've done to troubleshoot an issue or functionality apply to one type of Onenote and not another... for some reason. I've spent many hours troubleshooting options that don't exist for one type or another. Example:
The ink-to-math is not present in this version. The ink-to-draw is not present in the office 365 version. Why?
There is a view option of fitting what's been drawn to the page width which will also show up if printed to a .pdf. What's bad is that there is no option for displaying where the pages end. I saw a comment from a developer about this saying that it would be too difficult. But I know they could figure out a way to do that. There are so many option. Just have the length of each page increase if a user increases the width to the right. That could cause issues if the user wants the content displayed on certain pages. So, have the page separators actually splice the content shown and add whitespace if page width/length grows ... or shrink/grow content of pages accordingly like a picture. Or, when in "page view mode" like this, warm the user if they are trying to grow pages sizes ... or just have a fixed page size in this mode!
My main issue: Why it is so glitchy with an epen. If I tap the screen it wants me to type - this happens a lot when I'm scrolling and not tapping also. The developers didn't input an option to make the pen the default and disable tap to keyboard.
- Industry: Security & Investigations
- Company size: 51–200 Employees
- Used Daily for 1+ year
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Review Source
My Review for Microsoft OneNote
Pros
It is easy to use and you can access your notes from different devices if you can connect to the internet.
Cons
Nothing at the moment that I dislike since it can do what I need it to do; note taking and back up the notes.