Change Paper Size Microsoft Onenote Mac

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Hello Dear Reader --

I have been a Microsoft Customer since before there was even Microsoft Windows. I have been a Microsoft Office Suite user since at least Office '97. About 15 years ago, I discovered what I consider to be Microsoft's 'hidden gem': Microsoft OneNote. [The reason I use the term 'hidden gem' is because, until recently, it has not been heavily advertised or promoted by Microsoft, but it is the most delightful application to work with, second only to Microsoft Word.]


In this pane, you will specify everything that has to do with measurements of your page. This includes paper size and margins. To make it easy for you, you can click the downward arrow in the Size field and select one of the several standard paper sizes OneNote 2016 offers. For example, you can select Letter as your paper size. Microsoft OneNote 2016 features several settings you can customize to maximize the user interface and experience. Below we share 18 easy ways to customize OneNote. Keep in mind that the desktop version offers you the most options from this list (as opposed to the free mobile or online version, though many of these customizations apply to those.

Microsoft

Despite Microsoft’s attempts to keep abreast of the Operating System marketplace, I finally had enough of using Microsoft Windows when I spent over $1,500 to purchase a new ‘convertible’ ASUS Transformer Book, which was equipped with Windows 8.


One of the reasons that I purchased this particular PC was so that I could use it as a tablet device, like my iPad. However, I was very, very dismayed when the new OS did not support even my little fingers opening and closing documents. Microsoft had made no attempt whatsoever to make it’s applications and OS touch and finger friendly.


Secondary to this, I had a roommate who moved in and she owned a Mac. It was having some problems and, despite my trying, I could not help her with it. So, we took it to the local Apple Store and they happily checked it out and informed us that it was too old to run the latest Mac OS, but that they had brought it as far to being current as they could.


They treated this 10 year old Macbook like it was a brand new, $3,000 iMac and they treated us like we were royalty. It was at this point that I decided that my next computer would be a Mac.


Long story short, my Partner saved up the money (about $3,000) and purchased for my birthday the latest iMac. [I specced it out with a Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 3 TB ‘Fusion Drive’, which has a portion that is solid state to speed up the overall operation of the iMac.]


I thought that working with Office on Mac would be a ‘piece of cake’, since there was an Office version that had been recently released for the Mac OS. Needless to say, I recently discovered that this is definitely NOT the case!


When I printed my OneNote pages from my Microsoft Windows PC, which I opened every time from a custom template that I had customized from a Microsoft OneNote Template, with my logo added, they would usually print correctly on 8.5 x 11 inch paper and, should I have used a slightly larger font, it was very easy to either shrink them to fit the page, or reduce the size by a certain percentage to make the page fit 8.5 x 11 inch paper.

Change Paper Size Microsoft Onenote Machine


Flash forward to just a week or so ago, and despite the fact that I installed the latest version of Office for Mac [2016], with the latest version of OneNote, the printed pages would not FIT on 8.5 x 11 inch paper AND the OneNote software actually enlarged them a bit so that it would print the right hand side of the page on a second sheet of paper.


Change Paper Size Microsoft Onenote Mac

I called every technical support line that I could, from my Epson Printer, which is the same printer that I used with my Microsoft Windows PC, to Microsoft and then back to AppleCare.


When I spoke to a Senior Advisor at AppleCare, he tried and tried to get my OneNote pages to print correctly and he even said that he enjoyed the challenge and my problem got his vote for best question of the day. Nevertheless, he could not rectify the problem and suggested that, perhaps, if I installed a Virtual Machine software on my iMac and then ran Windows 10 on that with the latest version of Office installed there, it just MIGHT print my OneNote pages correctly and / or give me the option to ‘reduce them to fit the paper size’.


Well, after researching VM ware and deciding to use Parallels, and installing the trial for that, and then getting my Windows 10 from my old laptop and installing that into Parallels, I was optimistic that my OneNote pages would finally be able to print on my 8.5 x 11 inch paper size.


Change Paper Size In Onenote

Change paper size microsoft onenote mac

Needless to say, the printer options were NOT available as they were on my MS Windows laptop convertible, so I could not get my OneNote pages to fit on the paper, despite the fact that they were created from the exact same template which printed fine on my MS Windows PC!


Best regards,


~Antonio Dominion

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015), OS X El Capitan (10.11.4), Microsoft Office for Mac OneNote Ap

Posted on Apr 16, 2016 8:57 PM

Onenote notebooks take up to four or five times the space of their actual content on your system drive, at least in OneNote 2016. Why is that so and how can you reduce the size?

Depending on where your notebook is saved and on the settings of the backup option, there are always several copies of the notebook eating up space of your system drive.

This shouldn’t be much of a problem if there is sufficient free space on your drive. But it’s rather common for modern PC systems to use a smaller SSD for the system and applications and a slower but much bigger hard drive for data files. No problem for applications like Word or Excel, where you would just save your files to the data drive and open them from there. But with OneNote this is very different. You can’t freely choose the storage location of your notebook files (apart from local notebooks which are only allowed in OneNtoe 2016 as part of MS Office). And there are additional copies on your system drive, some of which are not controllable at all.

Important: This article is all about OneNote 2013/2016 for Windows. The OneNote apps for MacOS, iOS, Android and the OneNote app for Windows 10 (UWP) won’t let you control the amount of storage space needed at all …. except for closing notebooks to clear their cache.

Let’s start with an overview of all notebook copies that are stored on your device. I’ll explain each of them later on.

Change Paper Size Microsoft Onenote Mac

  1. The actual notebooks and their content (locally saved notebooks only, doesn’t apply for notebooks on OneDrive or OneDrive for Business)
  2. (multiple) backup copies
  3. the local cache (for all currently opened notebooks)
  4. another cache (if you are using OneNote 2016 and the Windows 10 UWP app in parallel)

In this article I will show you some methods to reilieve your devices system disk. The best options require an additional drive or a network server or NAS. But even if there is only one drive abailable like in most notebooks, there are some measurements that can be taken to save some storage space. A short overview, details follow:

Second drive available (e.g. etwa SSD on C: und HDD auf D:):

  • move and save local notebooks on the second drive
  • move backup copies to another drive
  • relocate the OneNote 2016 cache
  • close currently unused notebooks (applies to the UWP app too)

Only one drive available

  • reduce number of backups
  • no automatic backups, start manual backups on an external drive instead
  • reduce number of locally stored notebooks or avoid them at all
  • close currently unused notebooks (applies to the UWP app too)
  • optimize notebook organisation

Locally saved notebooks

As you already know, only the OneNote 2016 desktop version, that comes with MS Office (but not the free one), lets you store notebooky not only ion the cloud, but also locally on your PC. They appear as normal files and folders (one folder per notebook, subfloders for section groups, .ONE files for sections) and of course will occupy the space that is correspondent to their content. The more embedded files, printouts or images, the more space is needed. While you may choose the location (drive, folder) of those notebooks at will, the default location is on your system drive. To be precise: In the symbolic document folder under C:Users<your name>DocumentsOneNote Notebooks.

This can be easily changed:

  1. If locally saved notebooks are open in OneNote 2016, close them. If you are not sure, whether a particular notebook is stored locally or in the cloud, you can check this. Open the backstage view (click on File) and look at the list of currently opened notebooks. Every entry also shows the storage location path. For locally saved notebooks this starts with a drive letter, e.g. „C:Users…“. If the notebook is stored in the cloud, the path starts with “https://“
  2. Go to File – Options – Save & Backup. In the upper arear there is a section labeled Save and three default paths listed below that. The last one, Default Notebook Location, is the one of interest. Click on Modifyto change the default path to another one, presumably on a different drive.

Two important remarks:

Change Paper Size Microsoft Onenote Macbook

  • Existing notebooks won’t be moved automatically from the old to the new path. You would have to do that manually using the Windows Explorer. Just move everything from the old path to the new one, preserving all names and folder structures. You may then open the notebooks from there.
  • The free version of OneNote 2016 (can be downloaded from www.onenote.com) contains the same options to alter the default path. But changit it won’t have any effect here; the free OneNote 2016 cannot handle locally saved notebooks at all.

On systems with only one drive, these methods won’t help to save storage capacity. Maybe you should consider if there are some notes that you won’t mind being saved in the cloud and reduce the content of your local notebooks. Maybe split them up or reorganize the notes accordingly.

Optimize backup settings

OneNote 2016 comes with an internal, semi-automatic backup mechanism. „Semi“, because it only works when the OneNote propgram is running and it will only back up currently opened notebooks. The default settings of this backup function are far from optimal. The default backup location is your system drive (usually C:). WHile this gived you a fallback option in event of unwanted changes or deletions but won’t protect your notes from system drive failures or malware. In addition every backup copy will occupy the same amount of space on your system drive as the original notebook. By default there are two separate backup copies, so every notebook will need triple the amount of space. By the way: If you set Back up notebooks stored on SharePoint, notebooks you have opened from and stored on OneDrive or OneDrive for business are backed up as well…even more space occupied on your system drive. Therefore you should — again on your system drive. So you should always adjust the backup options. You will find all relevant settings in OneNote 2016 under File – Options – Save & Backup A more detailed description of the backup settings can be found in this article.

If there is a secondary drive or network storage space available, you should set up the backup location there. If there is only one drive, you may reduce the number of backup copies to one. Or you might want to consider to completely switch off the automatic backup and just create backup copies “one demand” on a USB or thumb drive (click on Back Up All Notebooks Now). Of course that needs you to remember to do that on a regular base.

Keep the cache small or relocate it

For every currently opened notebook, there is another copy created on your system drive: the local cache. Basically, this is how it works: When you open a notebook (no matter where it is stored, cloud or local drive), OneNote instantly creates a copy in a special cache folder. By default this is C:Users<your name>AppDataLocalMicrosoftOneNote. Other than locally stored notebooks or backups, this is not in the “standard” OneNote format. Instead all content is split up in small portions and binary coded (so you can’t use this cache folder as a backup). The reason for this special format is found in the way OneNote allows concurrent edits in the same notebooks and even on the same pages. If OneNote would use “normal” files like Word or Excel, that would not be possible as the operating system locks a file for write access instantly, when it is opened on one device.

Every time you do any edits in your notes, these changes are not done to the saved version of your notebooks (.ONE file) but only to the cache copy. OneNote then syncs those changes in the background to the actual files. So the cache copy is absolutely needed and cannot be omitted. What you can do (again only in OneNote 2016 for Windows) is to relocate that cache folder so it won’t take up space on your system drive. Of course, you would need a second drive which is always accessible. This is how you do it:

  • Close all(!) currently opened notebooks.
  • Open File – Options – Save & Backup and locate the Cache file location settings at the bottom of the window.
  • Click on Modify… and navigate to a new path where the cache files are to be stored.
  • Restart OneNote.
  • From now on the cache is stored in that new location. Important: Although it is possible to move the cache files to a removable drive or network location, this is not recommended.

If there is no alternative cache location available, because your system has only one drive, you are out of luck. The only thing you can do to reduce the storage space needed for your local cache files is to close all notebooks you do not constantly need access too. When closing a notebook, it’s local cache files are automatically deleted. The disadvantage of this: Every time you reopen a notebook, all its content has to be downloaded again, which can take quite a while, especially for notebooks stored in the cloud.

The cache and the Windows 10 app

The OneNote app that comes with Windows 10 is using the same mechanisms as OneNote 2016. Its also using a binary cache file for all opened notebooks which it synchronizes with the actual notebook files (in this case exclusively on OneDrive or OneDrive for Business). Unfortunately, it offers no option to relocate those cache files. Even worse: It is using its own separate cache files and does not share them with OneNote 2016. That would not make much sense anyway, as you may keep different notebooks open on OneDrive 2016 and the app. So if you are using both OneNote versions on Windows and regularly switch between them, there are even two cache copies of your notebooks that occupy space, even if you have opened the same notebook(s) on both versions.

Change Paper Size Microsoft Onenote Mac Download

Apart from the described measurements there is a very ovious one: Consider what you need to store in OneNote notebooks. Especially embedded files use up a lot of space, maybe even more than you might think. If you use OneNote to store PDFs, there can be a lot of space overhead. Ther eis the original file, an embedded copy in OneNote, which uses up the same amount of space, and, worst of all, printouts. As PDF printouts are stored as image files in OneNote (PNG), those usually are much bigger than the original PDF document.