OneNote, Microsoft’s cross-platform application for taking and organizing notes, received a useful update on the Mac adding support for OCR, or optical character recognition. OneNote version 15.7.1, which is rolling out on the Mac App Store now, adds the ability to scan images from OneDrive notebooks for text.
Once OneNote’s OCR system has ran, you can actually copy the text and save it to your notes just like if it were a editable text file from the start. Searching images for text is currently possible for new images added to OneDrive notebooks, but a future version will make text search possible on existing images as well.
The update also includes the ability to toggle viewing authors and closing the window without quitting the app. Microsoft also added support for iCloud Drive on its iOS versions of Office yesterday.
What’s New in Version 15.7.1
• OCR for Images – Search for text contained within images in your OneNote notebooks. OCR is now supported on new images added to OneDrive notebooks. You can even copy the image text and add it to your notes. Existing images will also become searchable soon!
• Hide authors – You asked, we listened. Now you can hide author initials in shared notebooks from the View tab.
• Close Window – This has been a popular request. You can now close the OneNote window without quitting the app!
• Bug fixes
Microsoft OneNote for Mac is available for free on the Mac App Store; OneNote for iPhone and OneNote for iPad are also available for free.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
If this is free, it’s going to upset Evernote.
Still waitng for embedded document support…
This is great…but what about the next Office for Mac preview???????
Are you referring to OCR in ‘printouts’ added to OneNote? I think this article says that the OCR is available through images but not PDF’s or what they call ‘printout’
I used to use OneNote extensively on my touch screen Thinkpad, but haven’t tried it in years. I now have been using Evernote exclusively since it launched. Are there compelling reasons to give OneNote another try?