Back in March this year I was incredibly excited to hear that Microsoft had finally released a version of OneNote for Apple MacBooks running OS X. However, it became immediately apparent this was “OneNote Lite” with heavily restricted functionality and I blogged about my frustrations here.

Early this morning I saw a tweet showing that Microsoft had released a crucial update that would bring the long-awaited functionality to Mac users, on both OS X and iOS platforms:

Full information can be found on this link but the key benefits are:

1. Access your work or school notebooks on your Mac stored on OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online (on Office 365).
2. Open and insert files, including PDF files, into your notebook pages.
3. View your password protected sections.
4. Improved organization, capturing content, and sharing of notes.

The first point is critical for students at St Andrew’s College, many of whom bring a MacBook to school (numbers of Year 9 Students with Apple devices shown here).

I made a screencast for our students to use to help them connect to OneNote on their Macs:

This was also posted on the front page of our Moodle LMS for increased visibility.

In some ways this free update helps close the circle of functionality for our College – whilst not enjoying complete parity, MacBook users now have far greater ease of access to OneNote which is a tool that increasing numbers of our teachers are using in their classrooms.

A neat feature to see added to the iOS versions of OneNote would be inking – the ability to use a stylus within OneNote on the iPad or iPhone. Here’s hoping this is not too far away!