Microsoft continues to add sophisticated capabilities to OneNote, even as it makes the program available across more devices and more platforms. Recently OneNote added support for the Apple Watch, tailoring the note-taking app for lightweight applications, for example making it easy to quickly reference notes you’ve stored via iPhone, or saving a quick audio note with a simple click of the watch.
OneNote continues to gain functionality on more familiar platforms, too, and today announced the addition of handwriting search for notebooks stored in OneDrive. Previously, you could search for text either from typed text or from text within images, but now OneNote, via its built-in OCR capabilities, allows you to search through your handwritten notes.
The capabilities require that your handwritten notes be stored in OneDrive, and any new notes will take 2-5 minutes to process before they’re ready for searching. If you have previously stored handwritten notes in OneNote on OneDrive, those notes will be processed and become ready for searching within the coming weeks.
Microsoft has also been making recent improvements to OneNote for the iPad, adding in the capability to swipe from the left to open a view of all your notebooks, making it easier to manage your notebooks while on an iPad.