Know-how

Why is it possible to edit OneNote notebooks in the cloud without an active Internet connection? Does this mean that there are local notebooks in all versions of OneNote? Yes and No. Learn some basics about the cache and editing notes offline.

Onenote notebooks take up to four or five times the space of their actual content on your system drive, at least in OneNote 2016. Why is that so and how can you reduce the size?

In OneNote 2013 / 2016 you can use the wiki link function to automatically create a whole swing of new pages from an Excel spreadsheet or another text list.

Documents that are embedded in a OneNote page will always open in read-only mode. The only exception is OneNote 2013/2016 for Windows. An explanation.

As for now there are not much areas where the OneNote app for Windows is ahead of OneNote 2016. One of them is related to the search for special chars as prefixes to give you an alternative to the rather weak tagging system.

The Fall Creators update of Windows 10 has brought a change to OneDrive. Files are only downloaded to the local folder on demand. How does this affect OneNote?

Officially you should only be able to open OneNote section (.ONE) files in the Office version of OneNote 2010/2013/2016. Here is how you can to load those files into the OneNote UWP app for Windows 10.

A warning to all those who think that OneNote 2010 could be updated to OneNote 2016 for free without problems: There’s a big trap lurking here.

The backup options of OneNote 2013/2016 are set correctly but the destination folder remains empty? Maybe just a little checkmark is missing.

Since Windows 10 Creators Update (1703) the feature to create a screenshot with [WIN] + [Shift] + [S] and send it to OneNote no longer works. What now?

It’s rather easy to create a shortcut to a certain OneNote notebook, section or page. But it needs a trick to add that link as a tile to the Windows 10 start menu. Here’s how you do it.

Since early 2014 Microsoft is offering a free download of OneNote, at first OneNote 2013, now OneNote 2016. Is it really the full OneNote 2016? And why is the Microsoft website telling me I already got it?

Almost all existing OneNote versions require your notebooks to be stored in a Microsoft cloud service, namely OneDrive or OneDrive for Business. Is there a way to bypass that restriction?

If you do not want to store your OneNote notebooks on OneDrive but use Dropbox, Google Drive, Box or a similar cloud storage service instead you might attempt to save your OneNote files in the corresponding local sync folder. Not a good idea.