Summary
If you use it right, OneNote is tremendously useful, but it still has some weird limitations. Perhaps the biggest limitation with tables has finally been fixed at long last.
Microsoft is currently rolling out a couple of highly requested additions toOneNote. The first major update, and arguably the most anticipated, is the introduction of cell merging within OneNote tables. This feature gives you the ability to combine two or more adjacent cells, either horizontally or vertically. If you happen to use any tables, you’re probably expecting the same kind of functionality you would get on a table in, say, Excel or even Word, but not being allowed to merge tables is probably a major and horrible oversight. By merging cells, you can now do things like creating actually decent table headers that span multiple columns, group related content under a single heading, or structure information in a more visually intuitive manner.
To use the new feature, you need to select the desired adjacent cells within a table, right-click to open the context menu, and select the “Merge Cells” option. The same command is also available under the “Table” tab on the OneNote ribbon. Once merged, any content within the selected cells is automatically combined and aligned within the new, larger cell. Full creation and display capabilities are available to Insiders using OneNote on Windows, Mac, and iPad (Version 16.100.715.0 or later). Those on OneNote for iPhone, Android, and the web can currently only view pre-merged cells, though the capability might come to them eventually down the road too.
The second addition is comparatively a smaller one, but it’s something many will consider an important quality-of-life improvement. OneNote now supports a “Paste Text Only” shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + V on Windows and Cmd + Shift + V on Mac. It’s pretty straightforward: it lets you paste copied text while stripping it of all original formatting, such as fonts, colors, hyperlinks, and background styles.
Pasting content from webpages, emails, or other documents often results in a patchwork of inconsistent styles within a single notebook—this isn’t a problem unique to OneNote, but it’s something that results from the copy format also copying most formatting by default. You typically have the option in other apps to paste that text without the formatting, and even when you don’t, it’s typically straightforward to remove formatting after the fact. With the new shortcut, the pasted text automatically adopts the default formatting of the target OneNote page, ensuring visual consistency and reducing the need for manual reformatting.
The “Paste Text Only” command can be executed via that keyboard shortcut, by right-clicking and selecting the option from the context menu, or through the ribbon menu by navigating to Home > Paste > Paste Options > Keep Text Only. Again, it’s something that’s present in a lot of apps, but it was a surprising oversight on OneNote, and it’s good to finally see it addressed.
Both of these additions are now being tested by Insiders, and we can’t wait until they make it into the stable version of OneNote.
