Try the Onetastic add-in to bring tons of new features to OneNote

Omer Atay is a developer on the OneNote team, and he created Onetastic in his free time.

Here’s a look at Onetastic, an add-in to enhance OneNote functionality with a set of built-in features and an extensible macro processor that allows you to download and modify macros and add new ones yourself.

Onetastic features will light up in the Home tab as well as some right-click menus. When you install the add-in, you will see the following buttons added to your Home tab:

Let’s start with the built-in features.

OneCalendar

Onetastic comes with a standalone application called OneCalendar, which provides a calendar view into your notes. You can launch it from the Ribbon, or you can download it separately and launch it from your desktop or start screen:

From this view, you can click on a page title to navigate to that page or hover over the page title to get a nice preview of the page without going there:

The calendar will display the pages in order of their created or last modified date. If you are trying to find a page and you don’t remember the right keyword to search for it, but you know when you created or last edited it, you can find it easily here. You can also use it to track changes made on team notebooks as the new or edited pages will appear every day. Click the gear icon at the bottom right of the main calendar page to access Settings, where you can choose which notebooks should be displayed and whether the pages should be displayed on created date or last modified date or both.

Favorites

The Favorites feature allows you to bookmark your frequently used pages or sections into the Ribbon, or pin them to your desktop or any folder you choose:

Simply choose where you want your favorites to live and start adding them to the list.

Custom Styles

OneNote has a set of built-in styles which can be used to quickly format your text. However, these styles aren’t customizable. Custom Styles adds the ability to create new styles and quickly apply them:

To add new styles, you can format your text to what you like, then choose Save Selection as Custom Style and save it to the list.

Image crop

One of the most frequently requested features for OneNote is image cropping. Onetastic adds an item to the image right-click menu that allows you to crop a selected image:

Select Text From Image

OneNote scans the inserted images for text and makes it available for search. It also allows you to copy the text from an image. However, this will copy all the text in the image. If you want to select a small part and copy it, then Select Text From Image will do this for you:

Rotate/Flip Printouts

OneNote can rotate and flip images, but it doesn’t provide this feature for printouts. With Onetastic’s Rotate Printout feature you can easily rotate a printout that is inserted in the wrong orientation.

Macros and Macroland

Besides these built-in feature, Onetastic has a macro processor and editor which allows you to build macros to perform routine tasks with one click. Macros can create pages and modify page content, like inserting outlines, paragraphs, and tables. If you think this is complicated, don’t worry. Onetastic ships with lots of built-in macros and also features Macroland, where you can download more macros. Following are the built-in macros you can find, which notably include another frequently requested feature called Search & Replace.

As you can see, you can create new macros or edit existing ones, which launches Macro Editor.

Onetastic ships in 4 languages: English, Chinese, German and Turkish.

Try out Onetastic for yourself today and let us know what you think in the comments!

–Omer Atay