If you’re someone who keeps a million and one digital and physical notebooks (and can never find the note you’re looking for), Microsoft’s all-in-one digital notebook is ready and waiting in your Microsoft 365 account — and it comes free to students, faculty, and staff with your Pitt credentials.
Here’s how OneNote can help you manage your notes without changing your routine.
📓 What Is OneNote, Anyway?
Think of OneNote less like a single document and more like a digital binder that lives on your computer, phone, and tablet all at once. Instead of one long scroll of text, you get a flexible canvas where you can type, handwrite, sketch, and drop in pictures, PDFs, and links, all on the same page, arranged wherever you want.
🗂️ Get Started In a Few Clicks
OneNote's structure is simple: Notebooks contain Sections, and Sections contain Pages (which can even have Subpages, if you love to organize in a hierarchy).
Your Notebook’s structure is entirely up to you. If you’re a student, you can create one Notebook to house your full semester, or individual Notebooks for each of your classes. Faculty and staff may want to build out a Notebook for a big project — and share it with collaborators.
However you decide to organize, you can manage your notes with ease. Re-organize by dragging and dropping your sections and pages. It’s really that simple.
✍️ However You Take Notes, OneNote Keeps Up
Some people type. Some people scribble. OneNote doesn’t make you pick.
- If you’re used to typing your notes in Word, the basics are all here — bullets, bold, headings, and more, right from the Home tab.
- If you’re using a tablet or touchscreen laptop, write and draw directly on the page with a stylus or your finger — perfect for diagrams, equations, or any notes that are easier to draw than type.
You can also insert images, files, and links right onto a page, so a lecture slide or a PDF handout lives next to the notes you took about it.
And if typing is an issue, OneNote supports Dictation, so you can talk and watch your words appear on the page instead. This feature is great for stream of consciousness brainstorming or getting your big ideas onto the page quickly.
👓 Read It Your Way with Immersive Reader
OneNote also comes with Immersive Reader, a built-in tool that changes how your notes look and sound. While it was originally designed to support users with dyslexia and other reading differences, it’s useful for anyone who wants to view their notes in a new way. Adjust font size, spacing, and background color, have your notes read aloud, or highlight different parts of speech to make dense material easier to work through.
🔍 When You Need to Find Something
One perk of a digital notebook is that you can find what you’re looking for in a few short keystrokes. But unlike sifting through endless Word documents in your digital storage, OneNote digs through the text on all of your pages. Press Ctrl+E to search across every notebook, section, and page at once — no need to hunt through each one individually.
📱 Your Notebook, Wherever You Are
A notebook is only as valuable as your ability to access it. OneNote is available as a desktop app, a mobile app, and directly in your browser, so it travels anywhere you do. Because it’s attached to your Microsoft account, everything syncs automatically across everywhere you access it. Jot something down on your phone between classes, and it's already there when you open your laptop later.
🚀 Ready to Give It a Try?
Open OneNote from your Microsoft 365 apps in your browser or download the desktop or mobile app and sign in with your Pitt credentials. Whatever way you like to take notes, OneNote might just be the upgrade that makes them a lot easier to actually use.
— Pitt Digital
