Category: Microsoft OneNote

One of the biggest benefits to Android as a platform is its flexibility.  Google, much to their credit, has made it very easy for developers – including companies that compete with them – to produce apps for Android to sell or give away.  Microsoft, much to their credit too, has taken advantage of this openness.  The Redmond, Washington company as certainly competed with Google and more directly Android but equally, have produced great apps that allow you to stay within the Microsoft ecosystem without too much pain.  In fact, really no pain.

If you are new to Android but your personal and/or work life is surrounded by Microsoft applications, take heart.  You will find that Android is more than capable of giving you a rich, powerful Microsoft experience without the sacrifices in other areas.  I’m of course referring to Windows Phone.  Clearly the Microsoft experience on Windows Phone was outstanding but even the apps on that now all-but-dead platform lacked when you compared them to those for Android or even iOS.

In this How To I’m going to highlight some of the key apps from Microsoft that will make your Android phone (and in most cases tablets) a solid performing and excellent user experience for those who have their digital work or personal lives in Office 365, OneDrive and other apps.  While those apps are expected, it is the other apps that Microsoft offers that may be a surprise to you.

Microsoft has begun rolling out a nice update to OneNote, bringing several fixes along with some key updates for those with accessibilities needs.  In the update, users can now have alternative text on images and embedded files in a page.  That means for those who cannot see images, they can have alternative text which can be read to them by recognition software.  This has been a common practice in web design for many years (in fact, every image on ClintonFitch.com has alternative text) and it is good to see it come to a productivity app like OneNote for those who need it.

That’s not the only change of course.  There is now the ability to view images outside of OneNote itself.  Now when you tap on an image in a note, you can choose to open that in another app to view that image.  To this point, once you embedded an image, you had to view it within OneNote.  Also, related to this, you can view embedded files outside of OneNote too.

Microsoft has released an interesting update to OneNote, their note taking app and service for Android.  In this latest update, version 15.1.6821.4825 for those keeping score at home, you can now use the app without having to sign up for a Microsoft account.  The idea of course is to encourage people to try out the app without forcing them to sign up for a Microsoft account first.  Given that Microsoft is making a big push to move people from Evernote to OneNote, it somewhat makes sense.

For long time Evernote users, the thought of leaving the service is daunting if for no other reason that the fear of losing notes and notebooks or, even worse, having to copy and paste all those notes into a new app.  That is the scenario that faced me at the beginning of this year.  As a long time Evernote user, my company standardized on Office 365, of which OneNote is a part of the suite.  In my case, I simply started using OneNote January 1st while I kept my notes in Evernote simply so I could avoid this problem.  Microsoft it seems has heard this dilemma from a lot of people and on Friday announced a new Evernote import tool for OneNote.