OneNote is a popular note platform from Microsoft. Drafts can send text to OneNote in a number of ways.
OneNote Action step
Drafts offers native integration with OneNote using the OneNote action step. Actions using this step can create, replace, append or prepend to pages in any section of any of your notebooks…even convert Markdown to OneNote’s HTML-based rich text. Some ready to use samples from the directory:
Save to OneNote: Saves draft to OneNote in a timestamped page, in a Section named “Drafts” of your default notebook, converting Markdown to OneNote’s native HTML rich-text format.
Append to OneNote Journal: Append draft to rolling monthly journal pages in a section named “Journal” in your default notebook.
Using advanced configuration options in the action step, you can target different notebooks, sections and pages. See OneNote action step documentation for details of options available.
Share Extension
OneNote’s iOS app offers a Share extension for creating tasks which can be used with the Drafts’ Share action. This requires no special setup or configuration, just that both apps be installed on the device. Tap the “Share” action in Drafts, and use select OneNote. The share extension offers flexibility to select the destination section, etc. The Share extension has the advantage that it can be used offline, and the OneNote app will be responsible for synching the new note to the cloud when you are re-connected to a network.
URL-Based Actions
It does not appear the iOS OneNote app supports any special URL scheme commands at this time. Please let us know if you are aware of any we missed.
Emailing into OneNote
OneNote offers the ability to email notes. Details about how to email to OneNote is available in their documentation. If you configure an email action in Drafts to send to “me@onenote.com”, it can be used to send text to OneNote - but this is not generally a great option relative to the Share extension or dedicated OneNote actions.
Curious about the comment quoted below. The markdown visuals in OneNote in the past has not been the greatest. How would I do this conversion in the Save to OneNote is extension?
Note: I’m a novice/noob when it comes to writing syntax for action steps.
Credential identifiers are just arbitrary string labels chosen by you to help identify the credentials in Drafts - they do not have any affect on the actual account linked, that is determined by what account you login to when you are redirected to Safari to authorize the first time you use an action step with a unique identifier you have not used before.
So, if you want to use more than one OneNote account, you might use an empty identifier for your personal account, and use “Work” for any action step you want to target your Work account - just be sure the first time you run one of the “Work” actions, and are prompted to authenticate, that you sign into and allow Drafts to use the right account in Safari.
Ok, so I have multiple O365 accounts (work & personal). I’ve modified the both the Default Note field and the Credentials Id and get prompted to log in to an O365 account on the first run. I log in to my work O365 account but get an error saying the notebook I set in the Notebook name cannot be found, but it does exist in that account and I can see that notebook in OneNote on my iPad as well as OneDrive. Any ideas?
Just to reply to my own question. It looks like the issue is when creating a new notebook in the Mac Desktop App. If I create the Notebook online then open in the desktop/iPad app then drafts finds it.
One possible explanation is that if the notebook hadn’t sync’d to the web, the web interaction Drafts is making wouldn’t be able to find the Notebook as it hasn’t made it up to there yet.
I can’t get the Notebook field to work at all. It just always defaults to the same notebook. Anyone else have this problem? I’ve even tried re-authenticating the onenote account and it still just defaults to the same notebook everytime.
There does seem to be an issue with Notebooks. I will dig into it and see if I can resolve. There are a few current issues with the OneNote API at Microsoft’s end, but this looks like one that may be on the Drafts side.
