Default Note Location

Hello, I am Di Ye, a program manager on the OneNote Team and I am writing to share where we put the content your Apps create in users' OneNote notebooks.

Where can users find their content created through the API?

In OneNote, all information is stored in a hierarchy that looks like this: Notebook >> Section Group (optional) >> Section >> Page.

Each POST to the pages endpoint creates a new page in your users' default section in their default notebook. As OneNote has been around quite a long time, the names of these have evolved somewhat, so it's a bit more complex than we'd like.

• If your users are pretty new to OneNote, they’ll find their content in the Quick Notes section of <User's First name>’s Notebook on OneDrive.
• If your users have been using OneNote for a while, their notebooks may have a different name, like Personal, Personal (web) , or My Notebook and their content will be in the Unfiled Notes section.

Can you create content into a specific notebook and section?

There's currently no way via the API to select a specific notebook and section for content to be created into. All created content will go to the users' default notebook and section.

However, we are already hard at work extending our API to expose all of a users' notebooks and sections and allow you to specify where to create content for a user. We expect this to be functional in the next few months and will be asking you for feedback here as we design this.

How can you tell your users where to find the created pages?

If you are building an app or service with a UI, we encourage you to expose one of the deep links to the newly created page that are returned from each POST. These links allow your users to launch the OneNote client or OneNote Online on their device and immediately view the new page. Check out how to embed a deep link in your client.

There is also an article targeted at end users here that you can use to help your users figure it out where their default notes are stored.

Di