OneNote: Show guides - it's that easy!

In this article we will show you how to show guides in OneNote. Handwritten notes, memos and letters are becoming more and more popular. But what is becoming really oldschool: handwritten notes on real paper! It’s a good thing that OneNote is also available under Windows 11 Home, for example, in Microsoft Office 2021 Standard. With a suitable tablet and a digital pen, everything can be written as if you had a sheet of paper in front of you. To prevent the individual sentences from criss-crossing, you can fade in the appropriate guide lines.

This is how handwritten notes work with OneNote

Once you get used to making handwritten notes or even writing letters with OneNote, for example in the Microsoft Office 2021 Home and Business package under Windows 11 Pro or Windows 11 Pro N, the whole thing quickly feels like it used to with the sheet of paper on the desk. Above all, this digital version of writing without a keyboard offers plenty of features and advantages that can never be achieved with a simple pen or crayon. What you need

Once you have all this together, you can actually start writing. However, it is recommended – especially for the first attempts – to set up some guides.

Displaying guides

With the OneNote programme, you can not only make handwritten notes, but also, for example, solve arithmetic problems and make drawings. Everything is just the same as with paper and pen or a whole range of coloured pencils. Afterwards, however, everything should of course look reasonably tidy. This means that the written sentences should be neatly placed one below the other, if possible always with the same spacing between them. Even our handwritten arithmetic problems should not necessarily appear „lubricated“. In order to achieve this, OneNote, for example in the Microsoft 365 Family package (also in the Windows 11 Enterprise operating system), first sets up guides. Find the right guides with 4 clicks

  1. First, open the correct OneNote notebook or create a new one.
  2. Then select the „View“ area at the top of the menu.
  3. Click on the „Guides“entry
  4. Choose whether you want lined or squared writing paper and select appropriate size.

Now the open page in the notebook automatically shows the selected guides. Later, these can be easily deleted or hidden again.

Let’s get writing or drawing!

Everything set up? Great – then you’re ready to go!

Depending on the version of OneNote as a feature of, for example, Microsoft 365 Business Premium under Windows 11 Pro for Workstation

, the taskbar may look a little different. But the functions are always the same.

Under the ‚Draw‘

tab, one of the virtual pens is selected first. Everything is available, from simple pens with thin leads to fine pencils and wide highlighters.

Under „Colour and thickness“

you can now change the thickness of the strokes, letters, numbers or drawings as well as their colour.

Tip:

If certain pencils, thicknesses and/or colours are needed again and again, they can be saved as „favourites“. Over time, you can create your own personal „pencil assortment“.

At first it can be a little unusual to take handwritten notes on the tablet. For some, a little practice can be helpful. And don’t worry: you will soon find out how hard to press with the pen, for example, to achieve different effects.

Note:

The pressure of the pen can be set and checked in the driver of the graphics tablet or with a tool such as „Surface App“.

The guides now help you to write as if you had a sheet of paper in front of you – without slipping in the lines on the tablet. When everything is ready, the guides only need to be deactivated.

Header image: ©ArakiIllustrations, stock.adobe.com