Microsoft has today announced an update to their note-taking app, OneNote which now let’s users import and view Videos natively in their notebooks.
The company says, that it had been testing a variety of multimedia and collaborative features for OneNote, that its now ready to share with us all. You can now easily add video content from YouTube, Vimeo, Sway and more to your notes, by just copying and pasting the link into a dialog box after choosing the option to Insert a video in the notebook, for Windows 10, Mac and iOS users(the sad part of this news is that this update is available just for Office 365 Users).
After inserting the video you’ll see an embedded thumbnail that can be played at any time from within the note itself. Microsoft soon expects to extend this functionality to OneNote Online, wherein you can directly copy and paste the link in the Canvas Area to embed the video. We’d love to see the same done for all other platforms, instead of having to paste a link in the dialog box.
The OneNote for Windows Mobile has also bagged a great feature addition, where you can ease the pain of typing out ideas, by just recording the notes and saving the audio recording to your notebook.
The OneNote for iOS now has a Lasso Tool which will allow you to select and arrange multiple types of files, like audio recordings, images, text, shapes, etc. all at once.
OneNote Online got a nifty little feature update called ‘Smart LookUp’ which is powered by Bing and helps you see contextually relevant search results pertaining to the word you’ve highlighted in your text. This will help you write better, by exploring the reference materials in the smart lookup column on the right. To know more about Smart LookUp, click here.
Another update to the OneNote Online platform is the demarcation of notebooks, into Recent, My Notebooks, Shared With Me, and Class Notebooks, which will make it easier for you to search and organise notebooks if you’re a frequent user of this note-taking app.
Scott Shapiro, the product marketing Manager of the OneNote team, describes the Library feature saying,
We’ve re-shelved the notebook list and now you can distinguish between your personal notebooks, notebooks that others have shared with you and OneNote Class Notebooks you belong to. Now, when you open OneNote Online, you’ll be able to clearly see these categories listed out.
In addition to the OneNote application updates, the Microsoft’s pocket-scanner Lens has introduced the feature to scan and insert multiple photos at a time on the iOS application, while you can now also rotate the photo(or scan) taken, which was earlier a pain in the neck as you had to scan the rotated document again to get the correct result.
So, the OneNote is growing to be one of the better note-taking platforms out there, thanks to the acquisition of WunderList by Microsoft, that has bolstered its note making team. We hope to see other huge changes in OneNote soon, while other note-taking apps sit on their hands thinking of adding new features.
