Leave a Review Microsoft OneNote
Graduate student tool
As a graduate student who works between a few devices, I hesitated to purchase an iPad in place of a laptop for my classes because I didn’t know whether I could keep everything straight and synced. However, OneNote works perfectly — If I change a note on my iPad, within a minute the change is seamlessly reflected on my computer, which makes note-taking and paper writing a breeze. I’ve found note taking with my Apple Pencil to be really enjoyable, and better than competing note-taking apps (or the default one). Being able to search handwritten notes is a feature which I never thought possible, but has made my life infinitely easier. For my student friends — a combination of Adobe Acrobat, Dropbox, Google Docs, and OneNote have streamlined my workflow in a way I never thought possible. Now, I can take my iPad with me to class or when running out of the house and I still have access to all my materials.Show lessSoccerkeep123
Terribly slow on ipad
I have used the Onenote the most in my life among all other apps. And finally transferring my notes to Apple notes and Notabilitiy. This is unbearable for how they are caring for their Apps. ios Onenote has been like this for many years and my patiences have ran out. It’s obvious this lack of performance is intentional. There is no way ipad can’t handle few notes displaying and typing and gets this slow. Wake up this is 2020 and the one of the fastest device on the market can’t even handle writing mostly a text notes right. Bye bye shabby business for causing pains to every regular people’s life. you’re not helping but causing pain. This is why more people are running away from the Windows. As for a note, all of my outlook accounts asks to reenter password so much more often and it doesn’t even acticate apple keychain during that process. It’s painful to copy and paste my passwords for 5 different outlook account once every few days. Funny thing is that if I use their app, it just works fine. They can claim it’s Apples fault but even when it is, if they care for their own app, they have to find a way to make it work. So shabby and shoddy. People know who’s the most mean company. It’s probably among MS, Google and Apple. Don’t be the first one.Show lessnick5614
Excellent across ALMOST all platforms
I have been using OneNote for several years now, at first in a work environment, later for personal use. In my work setting, using OneNote harkens back to the old Briefcase from Windows 9x era, the ability to have a ‘binder’ that is organizable by subject, tabs, etc. Different topics ordered and organized in a way that give peers easy access to useful information.
In personal use, I’ve found the ability to markup documents and images and rearrange my thoughts in blocks quite useful. It’s great for brainstorming on the fly. Used on an iPad with Apple Pencil is smooth and natural, the tools, could be improved upon, but with recent updates for Dark Mode, progress is being made.
My one complaint is OneNote on the MacOS. There is no way to store the OneNote binders locally due to Office365 integrations, the dependency on OneDrive is frustrating and locks you into the MS ecosystem. If not for the slow growth in tooling, and the lack of proper MacOS support, I would definitely award this five stars.Show lessphoenixkos
Excellent for work and school
I’ve used OneNote for many years now and find it very helpful for organizing my work and educational notes. I use it across PC, Mac, iOS and iPadOS. It is great to have access to notes on all devices and combines written and typed text, hyperlinks, screenshots, attachments. The writing is natural and smooth. The biggest shortcoming for me is the poor printing or PDF export capability. OneNote treats the document as one continuous document. This is very nice for restriction-free notes, but when it comes to printing or exporting to PDF, there should be some flexible page set up option which aren’t there. Because of this, for submitting written homework or saving notes to share with others at work, I find that I need to use other apps to get the job done with reasonable formatting. It also does not play nicely with formatting when pasting from OneNote to other Microsoft products. These haven’t been fixed in sometime. I hope this review/suggestion is read by the development team, because it would then be a very complete tool for me. Another more minor improvement would be the tables, which are self-formatting. Some improved control over those would be helpful.Show lessbig_ocean33
There are no clear instruction or Tutorial
There are no clear instructions on how to show student to work on there OneNote pages (that are not Word Documents- no self-respecting math teacher is going to do all of their student assignments in Word.) I need graphs, I need to use the “Line Tool” under the draw feature. I have gone through hours of Tutorial Videos on “how to..” but none of them have show me a student perspective so I can explain to the students how they turn their assignment and correctly link it to their OneNote Page. (My students are all using a new 7th generation iPad.)
OneNote may have done some updates in the last week or so, so I found how the teacher can assign and Link a OneNote page to the Assignment Tab in Teams, but the students cannot write on the page, even though Teams indicates that each student can edit their OneNote Page. I want my OneNote Assignments turned in in Teams and I want to use the “Grade” tab/menu in Teams to grade the assignment. The Grade tab give me the perfect way to open each assignment, write comments, or mark up the page, then return it to students with my comments. Why can’t there be some clear instructions on how to do this using iPads, OneNote, & Teams.Show lessLutherjj
Wonderful app (better than Evernote)
Truth in advertising: I used to work for Microsoft and was an internal “dog fooder” for OneNote back in 2002. Having said that, I will say that I left the OneNote world for many years, becoming an ardent user of Evernote. What I found, over time, is that OneNote made significant leaps and bounds in the user experience, particularly with respect to pasting in text/data from web pages. I became an exclusive user of OneNote (again) starting in 2014 (although I visit Evernote from time to time to see if it has blown past OneNote — I’m ex-Microsoft, but not “hard core” Microsoft. The trick to OneNote (or similar apps) is to establish a pattern of organization for notebooks, sections, and pages. Moving things around is easy, and OneNote’s integration with OneDrive makes things extremely easy. I now write books and articles using OneNote, as well as use it to casually keep quick notes/reminders.Show lessLetsKillDave
Missing critical features specific to the iPad
OneNote first off is wonderful. I’ve been using it for a long time for school and it is very good. With such good integration with Office and other apps there’s nothing else like it. The drawbacks of this app though are pretty severe. You cannot use 2 OneNote applications in split view, only one so you cant have a note open on one side and another on the other. This is such a productivity killer and needs to have that feature implemented; other Microsoft 365 apps have this for the iPad already. The next drawback is that ALL Microsoft 365 apps use iOS 12’s text edit touch tools as opposed to the new features implemented in iOS 13. You cannot hold the cursor down and drag it, instead, iOS 12’s touch controls bring up the ancient magnifying glass which is honestly a nightmare. Connected to this problem is at the Magic Keyboard for the iPad Pro almost has no support for text editing. It feels like I’m just using a finger as opposed to hovering over text with the “I” like on other documents. This is due to iOS 12’s touch controls that need to be updated. The current iOS used when writing this review is iOS 14. I cannot select individual letters without having to hold down left click and wait for the magnifying glass to come up. It is very annoying and Microsoft please fix.Show lessBigBoyAddison
An Unbridled “meh”
The default notepad on iphone is just fine.
I downloaded this because the app store on apple watch made it seem like i would be able to take notes on my apple watch and sync them to the phone which in turn would sync them to the cloud etc.
Nope! You can only make them on the phone and then sync them to the watch and cloud from there. You can view them on the watch but everybody’s apple watch notepad app does that, so who cares? This is like getting offered a free ride in a Porsche by your rich buddy. however; upon getting in you find out the seats are not the “bucket seats” your friend talked up, but are instead actual buckets turned upside down and nailed to springs. Also the seatbelt has been cut out so he can only drive at 3 miles per hour for safety reasons.
In short: underwhelming disappointment from what a software developer that is the biggest of the big names. Like going to the store to buy cheese and finding one you haven't had before but its from a maker you trust but when you get it hone and take it out of the package its just a pile of rotting leaves and melting wax that has been painted to look like cheese.
But then again why am I complaining it was free after-all, but then again most compost isShow lessbillythewombat
Fine if you have 365 from work or school
It’s a decent note-taking app with some good functions. I have two main gripes: Wildly inconsistent syncing, and a bug that randomly scrolls the page to the very top while not-taking. Every study session, a gray bar pops up that says it couldn’t connect to the server and my notes aren’t syncing. Also, forget about syncing large notes on a single page - I had two pages that had a chapter’s worth of notes on each page that ON would not sync at all. It was only when I meticulously copied and pasted sections of those notes one by one that I could access them on my other devices. As for the scrolling, any accidental touch of the blank space in the ribbon will send you back to the very top of the page, very frustrating to have to scroll all the way back to the bottom when all you wanted to do was change the pen. Fix these issues and add handwriting recognition and you’ll have a 5 star app. If you get office 365 for free from work or school I would use this app, otherwise notability or GoodNotes is probably the move.Show lessCarlemagne93
I’m in love.
After having OneNote for over a decade, I am just now FINALLY discovering the incredible capability and possibilities of this program. I did run into some trouble setting up, due to issues syncing with my workplace business drive, personal devices, and different versions of the program. Major headache. So, I decided to just sign in with a fresh personal account and now am thoroughly enjoying getting my new system dialed in! I continue to learn about new features.
I especially LOVE the To-Do flagging function and the ability to assign codes for different items. It is wonderfully helpful and convenient to be able to create pages,
and sections with detailed lists on my laptop and then access and check them off on my phone...as well as share, print, etc. I’m eager to keep discovering! Highly recommend.Show lessdvanesse
