Major Microsoft OneNote Updates Rollout For PC, Android And iOS Devices

Microsoft today announced a slew of improvements to its OneNote apps. The Android update is rolling out gradually to users, so it may take up to three weeks for the new feature to be available.

Firstly, for iOS and web, users can now avail themselves of audio recording in OneNote. Embedded video is now available for Office 265 Home and Personal.

That said, the implementations aren’t equivalent. OneNote Online appears to be limited to recording audio in 90 second chunks, which is fine for capturing short snippets of speech, but not great for taking down an entire lecture.

Finally, Microsoft has detailed plans to bring video embedding to mobile devices, though the feature is headed to the desktop and web versions as soon as today. As Microsoft states on the Office Blogs page, this can be very helpful for both students and teachers. Once again, the Windows Phone app is being left out in the cold.

It’s useful for people who want to remember a particular video, but doubly powerful for shared notebooks, including Microsoft’s OneNote Class Notebook for education users. The feature was interesting, though, so it’s all good news now that Microsoft says the floating button is here to stay and that they are now calling “Badge”, which is much less awful. That product lets teachers share course materials with their class, and the feature will let them embed videos right in the notebook, rather than sending students out to a website where they might get distracted.

Microsoft unveiled Thursday updates to its OneNote note-taking app, including new features for Android and iOS devices that should be of interest to multitasking mobile enterprise users.

Back in August, we talked about a new OneNote feature called “Floatie”, which was a bad name. Click on image to enlarge. For Android users, the November update brings a badge icon which floats on the display like Facebook Messenger’s chat heads. OneNote is also now optimized for the iPad Pro, in case you have Apple’s latest gadget.

Launch the badge by pulling down the notification tray and tapping the OneNote badge notification.