How to Change the Look of OneNote

Microsoft's OneNote application is designed to be a digital notebook where you collect information about work, family, school, special events, travel and anything else that has relevance to your life. In OneNote for Windows 10, several customization features allow you to change the look of OneNote so it feels more personal. You can easily change OneNote color and font for new pages rearranging the sections in a notebook as well as customizing the OneNote interface colors and layout.

The default screen layout in OneNote shows the current page along with the Navigation Pane, where the titles of other pages in the section and other sections in the notebook are displayed. The Navigation Pane lets you quickly move to other parts of the notebook by clicking on a page or section, but it can be distracting when you just want to focus on the current page. Luckily you can change the OneNote layout to match your work style or the current task, choosing either the default view of the current page and Navigation Pane or a full-page view of the current page only.

Prior to Windows 10, you could use the View menu in OneNote to switch between Normal View (with Navigation Pane) and Full Page View. Starting in Windows 10, the Navigation button located at the upper left of the app window lets you quickly toggle the visibility of the Navigation Pane. The button is always available and saves you the trouble of going to the View menu to change the view.

You can color-code pages to their topics by changing their background color. For example, all the pages in a section could have the same background color as the section tab. Pages are created with a white background by default in OneNote but can be changed in Windows 10 using Page Color on the View tab. A limited panel of colors is displayed along with an option to select from a much wider range. To quickly remove the color from a page, toggle on No Fill under Page Color.

You can further customize the look of your pages by adding horizontal lines or a grid of horizontal and vertical lines to simulate the appearance of notebook or graph paper. Both options are available from Rule Lines, which is next to Page Color on the View tab. Several styles and line widths are available. You can also specify that you want all new pages created with the same rule or grid lines.

OneNote allows you to decide how the sections should be arranged in your notebooks. Don't feel like you have to stick with the default order, which is by creation date of the section. To rearrange sections, just drag a section to its new position. In Windows 10, the colored section tab will follow your mouse or finger until you end the drag. You can rearrange pages within a section by dragging them to new positions within the page area of the Navigation Pane. Rearranging sections and notebooks via dragging is also supported in earlier versions of OneNote.

The OneNote Settings panel, accessed from the menu under the three dots at the upper right of the app window, contains a few options that control aspects of the app's appearance in Windows 10. Under Options, the Color buttons let you change the background color of the entire app window rather than just the current page. Available choices are Light (default white background), Dark (black background) and Use my Windows Mode (inherit color preference setting from Windows 10). You can also specify the Default Font and font size for new text on pages under Options.