Working with images in OneNote

As you know if you read this blog regularly, OneNote is one of my favorite programs. It's great for notetaking and managing large amounts of information. You can create notebooks and tabs for separate projects and even search within handwritten text, images, and embedded audio.

If you paste an image into OneNote, you cannot crop it and resizing is a little different - though there are some unique features you may want to take advantage of. I'd suggest first cropping your images destined for OneNote in another program, such as Word (see Illustrate your Office documents with screen captures). Then cut and paste the cropped image into OneNote.

You can still resize images in OneNote, but you do so by dragging one of the square dots at the corners or sides of your image:

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To ensure your image doesn't appear stretched (lose its aspect ratio), you should generally drag one of the corner dots either in or out to resize. The dots on the sides will only adjust the size in one dimension.

Once you get your image sized the way you like, right click it to see more image options:

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If you like, you can Copy Text from Picture (if there is any). Depending on the size and clarity of the text in your image, you may not get a perfect translation every time (things like underlines may confound it) - but even correcting a few tiny typos can save you a lot of time over typing it all manually.

Copy Hyperlink to this Paragraph lets you set a bookmark in OneNote between places, so you can easily jump between related sections. Set Picture as Background lets you type over an image or paste other images on top of it, which can help if you are annotating or compositing your illustrations.

Finally, Make Text in Image Searchable lets you select the language of the text so it can be searched along with any other text. Mine defaults to English, but you can switch to another language if needed or disable it if you don't want a particular image searched.

Suzanne