Microsoft is finally making OneNote to rule them all

As someone who has been using tablet PCs since before the Surface line even popularized 2-in-1s, I’m kind of a religious stylus user. I wrote a lot of my college notes on Microsoft’s OneNote, but over the past few years the app has lived in a rather frustrating dichotomy. You had “OneNote for Windows 10,” built on the more modern UWP code and available directly from the Windows Store, then you had A note, the classic version of the application distributed through Microsoft Office.

In my experience, the former tended to be more responsive, while the latter had a lot more features built in for power uses. But the former often got new features before the latter, as if the applications were being developed in parallel. Honestly, it’s been a bit of a headache to figure out which version can do what, and I’ve often found myself switching between the two. It’s pretty boring.

It looks like this will soon be a concern of the past. Finally, Microsoft plans to unite the two versions of the application, coinciding with the Office suite redesigned to match Windows 11.

While a few years ago it looked like Microsoft was looking to cheapen the desktop version in favor of building the UWP app, now it looks like the opposite will happen. Microsoft says advancements in Windows and Office will allow unification, with the Office version of OneNote set to get “key new and existing features currently unique to OneNote for Windows 10.”

The company also provided a few low-res mockups of the new OneNote. It’s not clear if these are two separate design ideas or if the company will let you choose between the two UIs, but they look pretty neat. The first looks more like the Office version of OneNote:

And the other is more inspired by the UWP version:

Microsoft says that whatever version you are using, you will have an upgrade path. People currently using OneNote for Windows 10 will receive an invitation in the second half of 2022 to the new version of the app, although I imagine Office Insiders will have earlier access.

To be clear, you won’t need to pay for the upgrade, as the full version of OneNote is available for free separately from the rest of the Office suite. Microsoft also warns that while it is working to make the best features of OneNote for Windows 10 available in the new version, you shouldn’t expect everyone to survive:

While we don’t incorporate the full list of OneNote for Windows 10 features into the OneNote app, we do our best to ensure that all of the best-loved features will continue to be part of OneNote. We’ll follow up with the full feature list in a future announcement.

For more on the future of OneNote, you can check out Microsoft’s post here.

Via the edge

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