The Digital Notebook: OneNote in Windows and Office, with introduction to Class Notebook

By Ina Koys

To keep information snippets in a notebook that can't be lost, that always stays up to date, that does not get dog-ears, can reach any size and takes texts, pictures, videos and sounds, shares and finds them quickly - that would be great! You have such a notebook in Windows 10, but only few use it. If you want to make it communicate with Outlook

• Language: English
• Publisher: Computertrainerin.de
• Release date: May 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9783947536726

Ina Koys

Ina Koys is an experienced instructor for Microsoft Office. Many questions are frequently asked in trainings, but seldom covered in books. Now she answers some of them in her originally German "short & spicy" series. A little accent will add to the fun :-)

Book preview

Microsoft OneNote comes in two versions: one, that is part of the Office package and the other one, that is part of Windows 10. They are similar but do offer slightly different benefits.

Here, we are going to talk about what would be better for which purpose and how information can get synchronized across multiple devices, i.e., your desktop and your mobile.

In private, many users are already using OneNote, in companies it differs to a large extent. OneNote is great to keep smaller and bigger information snippets that otherwise would disappear somewhere never to get found again. Moreover, it provides a technically simple base for cooperation in teams with remote members. Indeed, there are only two types of people, the ones in love with OneNote and the others who don’t know it yet. So let’s have a look at what it offers – I’m sure, there is something in for you, too!

As already mentioned, we can get OneNote from different sources. Depending on the timespan you are using your machine, you may have it already installed with any of the packages from Office 2010 onwards. If not sure about it, you now should conduct a search.

All reasonably recent Windows systems have a search window in the Start menu or the left side of the task bar. It may not be visible in the first place, but most of the times, in Windows 10 the search window looks like this:

Into this window, simply type OneNote in order to get existing installations. It is quite likely you have one or two of them. More about that later. Let’s first see what can be done if the bottom left part of your screen looks different. Using previous Windows versions (you really should update them by now!) you can click the Windows logo in the bottom left corner and then will see the search window in the lower part of the Start menu. Under Windows 8 and 10 you may not see the search window at all. But never mind: after activating the Start area by clicking the Windows symbol you can simply write without clicking any specific area – the search will start automatically.

Here, I get the information of two versions of OneNote installed. The upper one is from the installed Office 365, the other one came in with Windows 10.

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This case will normally only occur under Windows 10 with one of the Office packages now or previously installed. From Office 2003 to Office 365 OneNote used to be part of the Office pack, even though not with all licenses nor all installations. It’s only missing by default in Office 2019. Starting with Windows 10, a slightly modified OneNote became part of the operating system and therefore, is available for all users. This version is getting developed and improved continuously along with Windows. Hence, after a while, it may differ from what was up to date when writing this booklet. This is a situation Microsoft intended for its users and we should get used to it.

For quite a while, Microsoft only promoted the Windows 10 version of OneNote. But indeed, the users demanded the benefits of the Office version. Microsoft gave in and now offers OneNote 2016 again for free in all upcoming installations. The different benefits are as follows:

OneNote in