OneNote development

  • Article

Applies to: Consumer notebooks on OneDrive | Enterprise notebooks on Office 365

OneNote is a popular note-taking tool that's available online and on many mobile and tablet platforms. By integrating your apps with OneNote, it's easier than ever to create empowering apps on your favorite platforms and reach millions of users worldwide.

A sample OneNote page.

Take advantage of OneNote's notebook, section, and page hierarchy and easy-to-use API to help your users plan and organize ideas and information.

Note

When you use the OneNote API, you agree to the Microsoft API terms of use.

Platform overview

The OneNote service runs on the Microsoft cloud and provides a RESTful interface for programmatic access to OneNote content. The OneNote API is lightweight and simple—it's built on JSON, HTML, and OData, so you can use it with any language or platform that supports HTTP requests.

Here's a simple view of the OneNote API development stack.

Development stack for OneNote apps on various platforms. Apps use OAuth 2.0 to access OneNote content.

First, your user must be authenticated and grant access to your app. Then you get an access token that you use to interact with OneNote content. In addition to CRUD support for OneNote resources, the API also provides capabilities such as optical character recognition (OCR), full-text search, and business card extractions.

Tip

You can use SDKs to simplify the auth process.

Using the OneNote API

To use the OneNote API, you send HTTP requests to specific endpoints off OneNote's service root URL:

https://www.onenote.com/api/{version}/{location}/notes/...

You can use the OneNote API to do things like create, view, and manage pages in personal, site, and group notebooks. To give you an idea of how the API works, here's a simple POST request that creates a page in the current user's default notebook.

POST https://www.onenote.com/api/v1.0/me/notes/pages

Authorization: Bearer {token}
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Accept: application/json
 ...

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
    <title>My new OneNote page</title>
    <meta name="created" content="2015-09-9T12:45:00.000-8:00"/>
    </head>
    <body>
        <p>This is a simple HTML page.</p>
    </body>
</html>

If successful, the request returns the following response—in this case an OData representation of the new page in JSON format.

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Location:https://www.onenote.com/api/v1.0/me/notes/pages/0-37e6dad...
X-CorrelationId:8943c159-ee49-4c71-8cd0-ebf0861d07a6
Date:Sun, 09 Aug 2015 21:36:40 GMT
Content-Type:application/json; odata.metadata=minimal; odata.streaming=true
 ...

{
  "@odata.context": "https://www.onenote.com/api/v1.0/$metadata#me/notes/pages/$entity",
  "title": "My new OneNote page",
  "createdByAppId": "WLID-0000000048219837",
  "links": {
    "oneNoteClientUrl": {
      "href": "onenote:https://d.docs.live.net/73dbaf9b..."
    },
    "oneNoteWebUrl": {
      "href": "https://onedrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=73dbaf9b..."
    }
  },
  "contentUrl": "https://www.onenote.com/api/v1.0/me/notes/pages/0-37e6dad.../content",
  "lastModifiedTime": "2015-09-09T12:45:00Z",
  "id": "0-37e6dad8c6eb489294656ad878431666!209-73DBAF9B7E5C4B4C!153",
  "self": "https://www.onenote.com/api/v1.0/me/notes/pages/0-37e6dad...",
  "createdTime": "2015-09-09T12:45:00Z"
}

See Create pages for a closer look at POST pages requests.

Why create OneNote apps?

Integrate OneNote to create apps that people will love. You can use the OneNote API to create and manage notes, lists, pictures, files, and more in OneNote notebooks.

Collect and organize notes and ideas

Use OneNote as a canvas where users can add and arrange their content. The OneNote API makes it easy to write apps so students can take notes and do research, families share plans and ideas, shoppers share pictures—all the things that interest people most. Your app can grab the information people want, send it to OneNote, and then help them organize it.

Capture information in many formats

Capture HTML, embed images (sourced locally or at a public URL), video, audio, email messages, and other common file types. OneNote can even render webpages and PDF files as snapshots. The OneNote API supports a set of standard HTML and CSS for OneNote page layout, so you can use tables, inline images, and basic formatting to get the look you want.

Use the OneNote ecosystem to enhance your core scenarios

Tap into other powerful OneNote API features. The API runs OCR on images, supports full-text search, auto-syncs clients, processes images, and extracts business card captures and online product and recipe listings. Use OneNote as your digital memory store in the cloud for notes and lightweight media, or as a data feed for domain-specific data.

Reach millions of OneNote users on all major platforms

Use OneNote to increase your app usage. Pre-installed on new Windows devices, available for popular platforms, on the web as OneNote Online, and part of Office 365—100+ million people worldwide actively use OneNote. When you publish apps that leverage the feature-rich OneNote environment, the cross-platform market potential is simply too big to ignore.

Get started with the OneNote API

Use samples and tutorials to start coding fast, try out our interactive consoles, or dive deeper with our documentation.

OneNote samples and tutorials

These samples and tutorials show the basics of using the OneNote API on different platforms (see all our samples on GitHub).

Platform Samples and tutorials
iOS iOS-REST-API-Explorer (MSA only)
Tutorial
Windows OneNoteAPISampleWinUniversal
Android Android-REST-API-Explorer
PHP OneNoteAPISamplePHP (MSA only)
Node.js OneNoteAPISampleNodejs (MSA only)
Ruby OneNoteAPISampleRuby (MSA only)
ASP.NET MVC Tutorial (Azure AD only)

*MSA = Microsoft account authentication, Azure AD = Azure Active Directory authentication

How-to and conceptual articles

When you're ready to dig deeper, browse our how-to and conceptual articles to learn more about what you can do with OneNote.

SDKs for OneNote development

OneNote apps can use the OneDrive API SDK to get the access tokens that are required for all requests to the OneNote API. The SDK makes authentication easier for you. You just provide your identity information and integrate a few calls, and the SDK handles everything from sign in and consent to getting, storing, and refreshing tokens. Then, you can make REST calls to the OneNote API. Our iOS tutorial shows how you can use the SDK in a OneNote app.

All versions of the SDK support Microsoft account authentication (for consumer notebooks), and some also support Azure Active Directory (for enterprise notebooks). See the OneDrive documentation for the current list of supported platforms.

Note

The OneDrive API SDK replaces the Live SDK. The Live SDK is deprecated but will continue to support existing OneNote applications that use it. For new development, use the OneDrive API SDK.

At some point, we may provide libraries that both handle authentication and support native calls to the OneNote API, but for now you can use the OneDrive API SDK.

Alternatively, enterprise apps can use the Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL) to access Office 365 and SharePoint-hosted notebooks. You might consider using ADAL directly if there's no SDK available for your platform or if you want more control over the auth process. Our ASP.NET MVC tutorial shows how you can use ADAL in a OneNote app.

Important

To interact with OneNote content and resources, you should always use the OneNote API. Don't use the OneDrive API.

For more information, see OneNote resources.

Connect with us

Stay tuned as we expand and improve. We always want to hear your questions and comments, help you figure things out, and keep you up-to-date. Here's how you can connect with us:

What's changed

The following entries highlight changes made to the OneNote API and documentation during the past year:

July 2016

May 2016

March 2016

  • Released GET /pages/{id}/content?preAuthenticated=true to production. When the preAuthenticated=true query string option is used to retrieve page content, the output HTML includes public URLs to the image resources on the page. These pre-authenticated URLs are valid for one hour. See One time Authentication for Public Resource.
  • Released PATCH /sections/{id} to production. This lets you rename a section by sending an application/json content type in the message body, like this: { "name": "New section name" }

February 2016

January 2016

November 2015

  • Support for Office 365 notebooks moved from preview to production. Includes support for notebooks on SharePoint sites and Office 365 groups, and the Notes.Read.All and Notes.ReadWrite.All permissions that are required to access these organization-level notebooks.
  • Released POST /sectiongroups/{id}/sections, POST /notebooks/{id}/sectiongroups, and POST /sectiongroups/{id}/sectiongroups to production.
  • Released CopyNotebook, CopyToNotebook, CopyToSectionGroup, CopyToSection to production for Office 365 notebooks.
  • Added the parentSection and parentNotebook navigation properties to pages. The default GET pages query expands parentSection and selects the section's name, id, and self properties.
  • Added the level and order properties to pages. To retrieve these properties, include the pagelevel parameter in a query for the pages collection in a section or for a specific page. Example: GET ../sections/{id}/pages?pagelevel=true or GET ../pages/{id}?pagelevel=true
  • The maximum number of characters in a notebook name changed from 50 to 128.
  • Moved the how-to and conceptual documentation. The new documentation covers both consumer and enterprise OneNote APIs.

September 2015

  • The maximum number of pages returned in a GET pages request using the top query string option changed from 500 to 100.

July 2015

  • Released two OneNote REST API explorer sample apps:
    - iOS REST API Explorer
    - Android REST API Explorer
  • Released DELETE pages to production.
  • Updated the root service URL in the how-to topics to use the new, recommended /me/notes/ route: https://www.onenote.com/api/v1.0/me/notes/

June 2015

See also