image: Shutterstock / MS_studio

Microsoft's powerful and popular note-taking app, OneNote, is about to get a visual refresh to the Home tab on Android devices.

The main change to OneNote mobile takes effect on the Home tab in the app, Microsoft announced in a blog post. It will let users capture naturally with text, voice, ink and camera as well as remember rich note preview cards. 

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OneNote has been downloaded from Google's Play Store over 500 million times but it also exists in a crowded market filled with apps vying for attention among people who own devices with styluses, from iOS and Android smartphones, tablets and Windows 10/11 laptops.

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Microsoft also lets Samsung Galaxy owners sync Samsung Notes with the OneNote feed to create a bridge between Galaxy Android and Windows devices.  

The Home page displays recent Notebook pages, Sticky Notes, and Samsung Notes from all signed-in accounts in a single unified view. 

OneNote users on Android can tap on a note card to view or edit the note or long-press on it to take a quick action.

The new OneNote for Android lets users arrange notes on the Home tab and sort them by the date they were updated, the creation date, or alphabetically. Users can apply filters by note type, Notebook Page, Sticky Note, Samsung Note, or by a signed-in account.

There's also a swipe-down gesture to sync notes while a long press on the note cards offers shortcuts to delete, move, copy, share and add notes to a smartphone's home screen. 

Integration between OneNote and Microsoft's Lens PDF scanner is another area to receive refinements. Microsoft brought Office Lens to iOS and Android in 2015. The app lets users take pictures of receipts, business cards, whiteboards, and sticky notes, and then save them in text format with OCR to OneNote. The new integration offers a range of filters and image-editing tools that lets users extract text from a document and transfer it directly into a note.    

There's now voice dictation in nine languages with 18 more in preview. The settings options (three vertical buttons) also allow users to take a Sticky Note from the Home Tab. 

Finally, Microsoft has improved the login experience for new OneNote users with automatic single sign-on (SSO).  

Microsoft recently updated OneNote with new inking features, better page sorting, and AI-powered dictation capabilities. 

The company is working through the unification of its two OneNote apps for Windows. The latest OneNote app is available as part of Microsoft 365, comes pre-installed with Office on Windows 11, and can be downloaded as a free standalone app. 

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