Applies ToOneNote for Microsoft 365 for Mac OneNote 2024 for Mac OneNote 2021 for Mac

In OneNote for Mac, you can insert the contents of any Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) file into your notes as a so-called ”printout” — referring to each of the pages in the file being converted to images that are sequentially inserted (or virtually printed) into your notes, similar to the way the pages might appear as sheets of paper coming out of an actual printer.

PDF file printouts that you’ve inserted into your notes can’t be edited like normal notes, so they’re a great choice if you want to keep the original formatting of the source document. You can easily annotate the pages of a file printout by sending their images to the background before writing notes over them.

Do the following:

  1. Click anywhere on the page where you want to insert a PDF file as a printout.

  2. Click Insert > PDF Printout.

  3. In the Choose a file to Insert dialog box, click the PDF file you want to print to OneNote, and then click Insert.

    OneNote inserts in sequential order each page from the selected PDF file as a separate picture. You can quickly remove any page that you don’t want by clicking it and pressing the Delete key.

Tip:  The pages of a PDF printout work just like any other pictures you’ve inserted into your notes. They can be can be resized, scaled, rotated, flipped, arranged and used as background pictures. Alternately, you can also insert other kinds of documents as file attachments in OneNote.

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