Microsoft OneNote has been available for free in the Mac App Store for some time. It is a great app and is more powerful than Apple Notes. Level up your note-taking with this Mac app. How to download OneNote for Mac Open the Mac App Store, search for OneNote and click the button to download it and install it.
It is a rather large 431 MB file. It's size is one of the drawbacks of the app and after installation it takes up nearly a gigabyte of drive space, whereas Apple Notes is just 13 MB.
This short video shows students that to add in drawings and other graphics (not supported in Onenote Online), they can open their online work via 'desktop'.
On the plus side, it has more features and is a more powerful application. A Microsoft account is required in order for OneNote to work and it stores and syncs OneNote files on OneDrive. A free account is all that is needed and you do not need an Office subscription. Open the app and sign in or sign up. OneNote is available on iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets, Windows PC and on the web in a browser at onedrive.com.
It is everywhere and all apps sync and use the same set of notes. OneNote notebooks, sections and pages OneNote is a great app with a lovely design that is really useful for creating and storing notes, but it does a lot more and it is not a simple note-taking app like Apple Notes. It has a book-like structure and a OneNote file is a notebook. Any number of notebooks can be created for work projects, personal hobbies and other uses.
Each notebook has one or more sections (the first column with coloured tabs in the screenshot above) and within each section are pages. Sections can be organised into groups and a section can have as many pages as you need. A section can be locked with a password, as indicated by the padlock in the screenshot above.
When you want to create a note, you choose a section and create a new page. It has a title and date, and the page can store text, pictures, web links, tables, clippings from web pages, screenshots, audio recordings, PDF and other files, equations, and so on. A page is a place to collect and store information that you want to remember.
This could be for a work project, a school project or homework assignment, a hobby and so on. Anything that requires research and note-taking can benefit from OneNote. No design restrictions An interesting feature of OneNote is that any object can be placed anywhere on the page. A page is like a blank canvas and you just click the cursor wherever you want to place text and start typing.
Other objects and drawings can be placed anywhere too. Let the mouse hover just to the left of text so the arrow appears and paragraphs can be dragged up and down to change their order. Heading and text styles can be applied.
Text boxes can be resized by dragging the right corner to adjust the width. Text boxes can be dragged around the page by clicking and dragging the header bar. A lasso tool lets you grab things and then move them around too.
Some drawing tools are provided and you can draw with coloured pens, highlight areas, erase them and so on. Draw on the screen with the mouse or with a finger on a MacBook's trackpad. Text formatting in NoeNote notes OneNote is more word-processor like than Apple Notes and there are a lot of text formatting features. It is not as powerful as Microsoft Word, but it has certainly borrowed some of its functions.
The Home tab has all the text formatting functions like font selection, different types and styles of bullet lists, text styles like heading 1, 2, 3 and so on. There is bold, italic underline, strikethrough, subscripts, font colours, highlight colour, text alignment and more.
It could be used as a word processor and the way objects on the page can be moved around makes it useful for newsletters, flyers and other simple documents. Pages print as you see them on the screen. Tables are easy to create and can be inserted from the menu. There are buttons and options to add and remove columns and rows, so you can expand it as you go. Type the table headings, tabbing between each one and then press Enter after the last one. You can then type in each row of data, tabbing from cell to cell and pressing Enter at the end of the row.
Pictures can be pasted into notes, then selected and resized by dragging the handles in the corners. Checklists and icons OneNote is capable of creating very complex documents with different types of media but it can also be used in very simple ways. For example, you can create simple lists and include checkboxes, so a shopping list or task list is straightforward and checkboxes can be ticked when items are completed. There is a collection of icons that can be applied to pages and items within pages. They can help you to organise notes and to easily see the purpose of items. Summing up OneNote lacks the simplicity of some note-taking apps and it is more complex than Apple Notes for example.
It is a sort of combination of notes app, word processor, desktop publisher, and organiser. It has better ways to organise notes, notes can be shared with other people so a team can collaborate on them, and notes can be locked with a password. There are few apps like it and it is great for those occasions when you want more than a notes app can provide. App: OneNote (Mac App Store).
Price: Free By: Microsoft Size: 431 MB macOS: 10.10 or later.