Microsoft updates OneNote for iPhone & Mac w/ top requested features

Following updates to the Office apps for iPad yesterday that introduced printing support, Microsoft announced today that it’s updating the OneNote apps for iPhone and Mac with the top requested features from users. Included in the new features for iPhone users is the ability to create new notebook and sections, a revamped look that fits in more with iOS 7, and the Office Lens feature that was already available to iPad users. 

We’ve built Office Lens into OneNote for iPhone. Similar to Office Lens on OneNote for iPad, this popular feature turns your iPhone into a pocket scanner so you can use it to take pictures of things like receipts or whiteboard notes. Then, with Office Lens you can trim, enhance and make pictures more readable. Best thing is, images are automatically synced to OneNote, and if your picture includes printed text, OneNote can recognize the text with optical character recognition (OCR) so you can search for words in the image.

The Mac app gets improved printing, drag and drop images from the web, and much more:

1. Print notes: You can now print out your lecture notes, travel itineraries or recipes by simply navigating to the page of your choice and bringing up the standard system print dialog from the menu. In addition, you can save the page as a PDF file through the Print dialog.
2. Drag and drop images: Yes, this is as easy as it sounds! If you are browsing the web for ideas for a remodeling project and find some pictures you want to capture, you can easily drag and drop those into OneNote. If you have an album on your local machine, you can simply drag and drop multiple photos from Finder into OneNote. Additionally, this update also adds image formatting tools so you can restore the size of the picture if it’s been modified from its original state, or rotate pictures as desired.
3. Format Painter: You may recognize this option from other Office applications. Format Painter is a handy tool to quickly apply the same text formatting throughout your notes. For example, if you copy and paste content from different sources with different formats, you can easily apply the same consistent format across all the content in a couple clicks. WARNING: this tool is highly addictive. Once you start using it, you won’t be able to stop.
4. Copy and paste formatted content: When using OneNote for project management, class research or travel planning, capturing content from other places into OneNote is essential. Whether it’s formatted text from a Word document, tables from Excel or webpages, you can easily capture rich content and place it in your notes so it looks the same as it did in Word, Excel or on the webpage.
5. Hyperlinks: Sometimes links can be long, unwieldy and aren’t always self-explanatory. You can now keep your notes organized by adding a display name for links in your notes.

The OneNote for Mac and OneNote for iPhone apps are available on the App Store now.