Tip o’ the Week 386 – OneNote Store app updates

OneNote continues to attract love from enthusiastic end users as well as continuous improvement from the product group; the former collective shows up with many blogs, articles and addins, most of which focus on the more traditional Windows desktop app, though the product group seems to be spending more effort in building functionality into the mobile and Windows Store versions of the app.

There are clear functional differences between the two Windows versions; the desktop app has a lot more functionality, some of it shared across other Office apps. The Store version (now being referred to as “OneNote for Windows 10”) has a much cleaner design that isn’t as functionally rich as the desktop but concentrates more on ease of use and focussing on the basics that are used most often, especially cross-platform with mobile and web apps too.

e.g. As the most excellent Robert Deupree (JR) has observed, support for Tags in the Store app is considerably less useful than in the desktop one…

The Store/Modern/Metro app version of OneNote got a big update recently, surfacing some nice new functionality (some iterations of stuff that’s already in the desktop app, but more easily used or functional – check out the Researcher function on the insert menu), and a design refresh to bring consistency with mobile versions of the app.

To hear a bit more about the ethos behind this redesign, (and other interesting info) check out this interview with OneNote design director, March Roberts.

If you’re a OneNote fan, there are plenty of great resources to get more tips and help – though quite a few of the blogs you may come across are pretty dead by the look of things. The most informative and up to date is maybe the official Office blog, which regularly posts OneNote content, especially with an educational spin: a key use scenario, given the effort that’s been put into the suite of classroom tools centred around the OneNote Class Notebook.

Twitter is a also good place to go for OneNote news and articles, especially OneNote Central, the official account or OneNoteEDU for educators.

To get some more detail on what’s new, see the announcement here.

For users of desktop OneNote, the best addin remains the OneTastic suite, available in free and pro versions that offer slightly different sets of functionality.