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Tools and add-ons. Evernote Conversion. (Free: Windows, Mac). (Free: Windows). (Free: Windows) OneNote on the Web.
Related Subreddits. for those of you who like writing notes with a pen. for general news about MS. for general windows news and support. NVM, I just found the 'actual' OneNote. Yeesh this is pointlessly confusing. But now I have both OneNote (came with computer) and OneNote 2016 (just installed, seems to have all features).
![Onenote for mac tutorial Onenote for mac tutorial](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125419712/295819276.gif)
How do I uninstall the one that came with the computer? I never want to use it again. Neither the give an option to uninstall. Typical Microsoftish confusion. Further issue: If I'm using the browser version, is there no way for that to have all the features of OneNote 2016 desktop version that I had to download manually? Or is it stuck in the OneNote feature set that came with my desktop?
In addition to To Do Tags, which I mentioned earlier, the desktop versions of OneNote (Windows PC and Mac) allow you to choose from dozens of ready-made tags and even create your own.
Gah, perhaps I should stick to Evernote. Very much pointlessly confusing. It's hard to tell exactly what Microsoft is going for here but part of it is that the UWP (Universal) app can run on phones, tablets, desktops, servers, anywhere, all with the same code, so starting to move people over to it is a good idea in that regard. Of course, until it reaches feature parity, it's like throwing hurtles in front of users. This article talks about how to uninstall built in apps.
OneNote is in the list. They aren't supposed to be uninstalled but at least there is a way to do it cleanly if you really want to (and I do!): The browser version is always going to be more limited than the full program, but at least it's available from any internet connected device anywhere.
It's more like an accessible stop gap for when you're in a pinch. In that regard, it works pretty well.
Funny, I used to love Evernote but the incredible feature disparity between different platforms drove me nuts. The Windows client never got any attention and it was painful to work with images. A new release last year fixed my particular issues but I've settled on OneNote Desktop everywhere except my phone, and I'm OK with that. I feel like the only thing worse than the inanity of OneNote is the smug inanity of Evernote:-$. You don't really need to choose between the universal OneNote apps and desktop. You can use both depending on your situation and they sync nicely.
The non-desktop apps are good for viewing and light editing (like referring to a shopping list in the store). I use desktop and android versions every day. Only use I'd have for the UWP Windows version is if I had a tablet PC like a Surface. That version is optimized for that sort of input.
The point is that any edit you make from any of the interfaces will show up instantly in the other versions. No reason to purposely avoid one, just pick which one to use for each use situation. Please don't interpret this as defending the huge functionality gap between the different OneNotes, it drives me nuts. As for your tags inquiry, custom tags for desktop will sync and therefore tag-summaries will always show them. Though all you'll see in the 'universal' versions is that name and symbol and you can't do anything with them.
Also if you customize your tag menu in desktop and sync to another desktop, the tags will revert to the default set. The custom tags as they are now are a legacy function from the days when OneNote was intended only for desktop on a single PC. To work around this I take a screenshot of my custom tag list if I ever change it so when I inevitably have to re-enter them I keep the same tags.
IMHO, OneNote tagging isn't real tagging (except for maybe the to-do check/box, which actually syncs). It's more accurate to describe it as keywords. Good for describing information within pages like highlighting does. But it's not good for helping you organize your information in different ways like Evernote's tags do.
Also notice that OneNote's 'tags' are at the paragraph level, so you can add all sorts of descriptive tags to lots of various things within a page. Evernote tagging is at the note level itself, not the content within the note. These are two different philosophies about how to organize digital notes. It means Evernote is better with many short notes when you want to add a bunch of categorizing metadata at the note-container level and OneNote works better with much more information per page because you can arrange and describe your information better at the floating paragraph level.
So when trying to compare OneNote vs Evernote, I think it's a mistake to just clone the organizing structure between them because of the different organizing philosophies. Another 'legacy' desktop function is the Outlook (desktop) integration with tasks/calendar which works amazingly well but doesn't sync. I'm just a user so obviously it's all educated guesses. But the custom tag interface or the Outlook integration hasn't changed since the 2007 version. If Microsoft proves me wrong I'll be a very happy camper. The tag thing isn't that huge a loss though since there never was a central tag system.
Meaning if you tagged a book as 'to-read' there was never a tag menu where you could see the count of how many 'to-read' things you tagged let alone clicking that tag to just show you a filtered list of all 'to-read' tagged items. It sort of does this with the tag summary interface but really that's just a search that finds all the tags in that targeted notebook or section. That's useful, but completely independent of your actual apply tag menu. That's why I think of it as fancy keywording. You could add the custom tag 'yuge' and tag an item in a page, then remove the custom tag from your menu. That little 'yuge' tag will still show up the tag search years from now (on desktop anyway) and it's little custom icon will even show on mobile if you happen to be looking at that page. But you never could, nor ever will be able to do rename that tag title from 'yuge' to 'huge' and have that update all the existing things tagged with 'yuge'.
So really it's like adding flair to your notes that you can filter by in the same way you'd filter by keywords. So it's not necessarily a waste of time to use custom tags. That info won't go away. Just know that it's only good for describing content inline, it's not a good idea to use it to help with note organization or other metadata. Sure you can do that on desktop and this feature has existed and has been exactly the same since 2007 (maybe even 2003, I didn't use that one). That function mimics some of what a true tagging system does but it's really closer to keywords than tags.
![Symbols Symbols](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125419712/801052877.gif)
Problem is the word 'tag' is so generic these days that it can imply anything from keyword to connected metadata. Like on facebook you can 'tag' your name on a photo to enable views based on who's in the picture that is independent of what 'album' the pic is in. It's a managed classification tool. Two years from now if a woman changes her maiden name then all those tagged pics would follow.
The 'tags' are all connected on the database. On twitter, a hashtag is just a loose way of describing a topic and is more open ended. Like if you typed in #Kony2012 in a few posts and decided to change the tag to #KonyForever you'd have to go through and change every one of them because they aren't truly connected to each other. Essentially they are unconnected keywords meant to be pulled together by search summaries. Evernote's tagging system is more like facebook's photo tags and OneNote's tagging is more like twitter's hashtags (keywords). Many people don't care about the difference and might not even notice. For others, the difference is night and day and completely changes how we can go about making sense of our digital stuff.