How-To

How to View Edits and Changes by Author in OneNote

By Sandy Writtenhouse

Last Updated on June 7, 2021

You can view edit history in OneNote along with changes by author. This helps you easily keep up with your shared notebooks.

Once you begin using Microsoft OneNote and get used to the helpful features, you may start sharing notebooks. This is a great way to keep your team projects and tasks moving along. But like any other item you share, you likely want to see any changes made including who made them and when.

OneNote offers two useful features to help you and your team keep up. First, you can view edits made to a notebook by timeframe. Second, you can see which authors made changes and to what. Plus, you can combine these features for a more robust way to track your notebook edits.

View Edit History in OneNote

This feature is currently available in the OneNote desktop application but doesn’t include OneNote for Windows.

1. Open OneNote and select the notebook you want to view.
2. Go to the History tab (only visible on supported versions of OneNote).
3. Click Recent Edits in the ribbon. In the drop-down list that appears, choose the timeframe. You can pick from options like today, since yesterday, or the last several days or months.

You’ll then see all changes made within your timeframe of choice highlighted. This includes both pages and content.

You’ll also see a sidebar open with those results on the right. From there, you can narrow down your list of changes.

At the top, use the drop-down box to choose where to look for changes. You can pick a section, section group, the current notebook, or all notebooks. Next, you can sort the change results by section, title, date modified or author.

Expand if necessary to see the changes summarized in the list.

View Changes by Author in OneNote

This feature is currently available in the OneNote desktop application, OneNote for Mac, and OneNote for the web but doesn’t include OneNote for Windows.

When you review the edits to a notebook as described above, you can see who made the changes within a page’s content. On the History tab, click Hide Authors in the ribbon to deselect it. You’ll then see the author’s initials next to the changes they made.

On Mac, Hide Authors is in the ribbon on the View tab and in OneNote for the web, click Show Authors on the View tab. Although as of this writing the Recent Edits feature isn’t available for these two OneNote versions, you do have the ability to see changes by other authors.

Author edits in OneNote for the web

Keep Track of Edits and Authors in OneNote

Similar to the track changes feature in Microsoft Word, OneNote gives you ways to see what’s changed in your notebooks. Remember to view the edit history or changes by author in your shared OneNote notebooks!

For related articles, take a look at how to use the built-in OneNote templates or how to password protect and encrypt your OneNote notebooks.