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1. The OneNote service runs on the Microsoft cloud and provides a RESTful interface for programmatic access to OneNote content. The OneNote API is lightweight and simple—it's built on JSON, HTML, and OData, so you can use it with any language or platform that supports HTTP requests.
2. OneNote, digital note taking app - Office Microsoft OneNote has your digital notebook needs covered. With OneNote 2016 we've made our notebook organizer tools even stronger and collaboration easier. Microsoft OneNote.

Applies to: Consumer notebooks on OneDrive | Enterprise notebooks on Office 365

Using Microsoft Onenote For Ocr

Get into a new Way of Learning Microsoft OneNote 2019 (or OneNote for Windows 10). Getting started, basics.

OneNote is a popular note-taking tool that's available online and on many mobile and tablet platforms. By integrating your apps with OneNote, it's easier than ever to create empowering apps on your favorite platforms and reach millions of users worldwide.

Take advantage of OneNote's notebook, section, and page hierarchy and easy-to-use API to help your users plan and organize ideas and information.

Note

When you use the OneNote API, you agree to the Microsoft API terms of use.

Platform overview

The OneNote service runs on the Microsoft cloud and provides a RESTful interface for programmatic access to OneNote content. The OneNote API is lightweight and simple—it's built on JSON, HTML, and OData, so you can use it with any language or platform that supports HTTP requests.

Here's a simple view of the OneNote API development stack.

First, your user must be authenticated and grant access to your app. Then you get an access token that you use to interact with OneNote content. In addition to CRUD support for OneNote resources, the API also provides capabilities such as optical character recognition (OCR), full-text search, and business card extractions.

Using the OneNote API

To use the OneNote API, you send HTTP requests to specific endpoints off OneNote's service root URL:

https://www.onenote.com/api/{version}/{location}/notes/...

You can use the OneNote API to do things like create, view, and manage pages in personal, site, and group notebooks. To give you an idea of how the API works, here's a simple POST request that creates a page in the current user's default notebook.

If successful, the request returns the following response—in this case an OData representation of the new page in JSON format.

See Create pages for a closer look at POST pages requests.

Why create OneNote apps?

Integrate OneNote to create apps that people will love. You can use the OneNote API to create and manage notes, lists, pictures, files, and more in OneNote notebooks.

Collect and organize notes and ideas

Use OneNote as a canvas where users can add and arrange their content. The OneNote API makes it easy to write apps so students can take notes and do research, families share plans and ideas, shoppers share pictures—all the things that interest people most. Your app can grab the information people want, send it to OneNote, and then help them organize it.

Capture information in many formats

Capture HTML, embed images (sourced locally or at a public URL), video, audio, email messages, and other common file types. OneNote can even render webpages and PDF files as snapshots. The OneNote API supports a set of standard HTML and CSS for OneNote page layout, so you can use tables, inline images, and basic formatting to get the look you want.

Use the OneNote ecosystem to enhance your core scenarios

Tap into other powerful OneNote API features. The API runs OCR on images, supports full-text search, auto-syncs clients, processes images, and extracts business card captures and online product and recipe listings. Use OneNote as your digital memory store in the cloud for notes and lightweight media, or as a data feed for domain-specific data.

Reach millions of OneNote users on all major platforms

Use OneNote to increase your app usage. Pre-installed on new Windows devices, available for popular platforms, on the web as OneNote Online, and part of Office 365—100+ million people worldwide actively use OneNote. When you publish apps that leverage the feature-rich OneNote environment, the cross-platform market potential is simply too big to ignore.

Get started with the OneNote API

Use samples and tutorials to start coding fast, try out our interactive consoles, or dive deeper with our documentation.

OneNote samples and tutorials

These samples and tutorials show the basics of using the OneNote API on different platforms (see all our samples on GitHub).

*MSA = Microsoft account authentication, Azure AD = Azure Active Directory authentication

How-to and conceptual articles

When you're ready to dig deeper, browse our how-to and conceptual articles to learn more about what you can do with OneNote.

SDKs for OneNote development

OneNote apps can use the OneDrive API SDK to get the access tokens that are required for all requests to the OneNote API. The SDK makes authentication easier for you. You just provide your identity information and integrate a few calls, and the SDK handles everything from sign in and consent to getting, storing, and refreshing tokens. Then, you can make REST calls to the OneNote API. Our iOS tutorial shows how you can use the SDK in a OneNote app.

All versions of the SDK support Microsoft account authentication (for consumer notebooks), and some also support Azure Active Directory (for enterprise notebooks). See the OneDrive documentation for the current list of supported platforms.

Note

The OneDrive API SDK replaces the Live SDK. The Live SDK is deprecated but will continue to support existing OneNote applications that use it. For new development, use the OneDrive API SDK.

At some point, we may provide libraries that both handle authentication and support native calls to the OneNote API, but for now you can use the OneDrive API SDK.

Alternatively, enterprise apps can use the Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL) to access Office 365 and SharePoint-hosted notebooks. You might consider using ADAL directly if there's no SDK available for your platform or if you want more control over the auth process. Our ASP.NET MVC tutorial shows how you can use ADAL in a OneNote app.

Important

To interact with OneNote content and resources, you should always use the OneNote API. Don't use the OneDrive API.

For more information, see OneNote resources.

Connect with us

Stay tuned as we expand and improve. We always want to hear your questions and comments, help you figure things out, and keep you up-to-date. Here's how you can connect with us:

• Read the OneNote Developer Blog for news and helpful tips.
• Get expert answers on Stack Overflow.
• Follow us on Twitter: @onenotedev.
• Send us your ideas and comments on UserVoice.

What's changed

The following entries highlight changes made to the OneNote API and documentation during the past year:

July 2016

• Added the Work with staff notebooks topic.
• Documented support for embedded videos.

May 2016

• Added page preview support. Use the ../pages/{id}/preview endpoint to get text and image preview content for a page. Read the Page preview API blog post to learn more.
• Documented support for the ../users/{id}/notes/ location, which enables access to OneNote content that the specified user (in the URL) has shared with the current user. Enterprise notebooks only.
• Added permission management APIs that allow you to set access permissions on a notebook, section group, or section. Enterprise notebooks only.
• Added new class notebook operations: Insert sections from other notebooks, add a Teacher Only section group, delete class notebooks, create class notebooks in a specified language, send an email notification for a new class notebook. Enterprise notebooks only.
• Added support for the <pre> element in page HTML content. Now, content captured from sites like MSDN and StackOverflow renders with proper code formatting.

March 2016

• Released GET /pages/{id}/content?preAuthenticated=true to production. When the preAuthenticated=true query string option is used to retrieve page content, the output HTML includes public URLs to the image resources on the page. These pre-authenticated URLs are valid for one hour. See One time Authentication for Public Resource.
• Released PATCH /sections/{id} to production. This lets you rename a section by sending an application/json content type in the message body, like this: { 'name': 'New section name' }

February 2016

• Added the Subscribe for webhooks and Work with class notebooks topics. Webhooks is currently supported only for consumer notebooks on OneDrive.

January 2016

• Turned on throttling. Learn more about OneNote API throttling and best practices to avoid it.
• Added the Supported REST operations and Copy notebooks, sections, and pages topics. Copy functionality is currently available only for Office 365 notebooks.

November 2015

• Support for Office 365 notebooks moved from preview to production. Includes support for notebooks on SharePoint sites and Office 365 groups, and the Notes.Read.All and Notes.ReadWrite.All permissions that are required to access these organization-level notebooks.
• Released POST /sectiongroups/{id}/sections, POST /notebooks/{id}/sectiongroups, and POST /sectiongroups/{id}/sectiongroups to production.
• Released CopyNotebook, CopyToNotebook, CopyToSectionGroup, CopyToSection to production for Office 365 notebooks.
• Added the parentSection and parentNotebook navigation properties to pages. The default GET pages query expands parentSection and selects the section's name, id, and self properties.
• Added the level and order properties to pages. To retrieve these properties, include the pagelevel parameter in a query for the pages collection in a section or for a specific page. Example: GET ../sections/{id}/pages?pagelevel=true or GET ../pages/{id}?pagelevel=true
• The maximum number of characters in a notebook name changed from 50 to 128.
• Moved the how-to and conceptual documentation. The new documentation covers both consumer and enterprise OneNote APIs.

September 2015

• The maximum number of pages returned in a GET pages request using the top query string option changed from 500 to 100.

July 2015

• Released two OneNote REST API explorer sample apps:
  - iOS REST API Explorer
  - Android REST API Explorer
• Released DELETE pages to production.
• Updated the root service URL in the how-to topics to use the new, recommended /me/notes/ route: https://www.onenote.com/api/v1.0/me/notes/

June 2015

• Published the Use note tags topic.

See also

Microsoft OneNote is one of the most efficient, effective note-taking digital systems available. As a part of the Microsoft Office Suite, it’s often underutilized. If you’re new to OneNote, make sure you give it a try. Chances are it has a lot of features that could benefit you in everyday tasks. Here’s a comprehensive guide for beginners.

What is Microsoft OneNote?

Microsoft OneNote is an advanced digital organization software that lets users type important information into different sections for future use. It also allows for collaboration from outside sources when necessary. The type of notes users can input varies from typing, pictures and voice. If needed, users can share their entire OneNote project (notebook) online.

The difference between using OneNote and other note-taking systems is like the difference between using a physical paper notebook and an organized, 3-ring binder. OneNote is essentially a paper notebook on steroids. It’s color-coded and separated into different sections based on the type of information you need.

What are its key benefits?

As longtime computer users, it’s only natural to be used to the formatting and layout of all different word documents. In fact, whichever program we choose to type something down into, there’s a certainty that our words will line up in some sort of way. Microsoft OneNote turns this idea upside-down with its free-form structure. Typing notes into OneNote is similar to jotting something down in a paper notebook. The typical word document restrictions aren’t there.

Another important OneNote feature is the ability to share the entirety of your notes with others, who will be able to navigate them quickly. To stress the importance of this, imagine using something like Microsoft Word to record extensive notes on 5 different, important topics. You would (most likely) need 5 different Word documents saved. Furthermore, these docs would all contain a mess of unorganized notes. Sending them to an outside source would be quite messy. Now, imagine this same task but with OneNote. All 5 of the topics would fit into OneNote in a color-coded, clickable format. This is just one of many ways OneNote benefits users.

Get started with OneNote – creating and opening notebooks

The most basic OneNote task is getting your project set up. This involves, most importantly, Creating a new notebook, as well as opening notebooks that you’ve been working on previously. To create a new notebook, first launch Microsoft OneNote. If you haven’t created a notebook yet, there will be a plus (+) sign in the bottom left corner of the program called ‘Add Notebook’. Click there and type the name you wish to call your notebook. Then simply click ‘Create Notebook’ and you’re ready to go.

If you need to open a notebook you were previously working on, click the down arrow next to the current notebook at the top of the program and select ‘More Notebooks’. This will open a popup which should automatically locate all the other notebooks you have available on your system. In case yours doesn’t show automatically, feel free to use the search function for a more accurate retrieval.

Using Microsoft Onenote For School

Some key note-taking tips to know

There is a lot you can do on OneNote, which you’ll discover the more you use it. However, to get you started, here are some of the basic features you’ll need to learn:

How to input notes

The whole point of Microsoft OneNote is to take notes. In order to do so, click on the notebook you wish to take notes into. Then, click anywhere on the page (the open space on the right) and begin typing. Keep in mind that you can begin typing truly anywhere on the page – the formatting is much different than typical word processors.

How to add new sections

This is crucial because it allows us to separate our different types of notes with a simple click. For example, one page might be filled with notes about food recipes, while the other section is filled with notes about finances. The key is to create as many different sections as you need, as that’s one of the main benefits of OneNote. Inside the notebook you’re using, at the bottom left side of the page, click the plus (+) next to ‘Add Section’. You’ll be given a blank section, which you can then name and add notes to.

How to add new pages

Adding new pages is another way to organize our ideas, while giving us room to separate sections further using subtopics. A new page also makes room for new notes. To begin, In the bottom left of the program, click the plus (+) sign next to ‘Add page’. Then type the name of the page and begin writing in your notes.

OneNote has been around for quite some time, but that doesn’t mean you have to feel late to the party if you’re just starting out with it. Simply work on learning the bare basics and you’ll be able to organize your entire day with a few simple clicks.