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Chad Kealey's avatar
Chad Kealey
Copper Contributor
May 25, 2021

Any way to create OneNote "templates"? Or, open a .onepkg file in OneNote for Mac?

A few of our academic departments are looking to replace an eportfolio application that's reaching end-of-life in July and it seems like OneNote does a LOT of what they want. The only issue is that for most programs, the students need to structure them in a very specific way. We can create a "master" notebook and export it to a .onepkg file, which can then be "opened" in OneNote 2016 (on Windows) to create a new notebook with the exact structure of that master. However, about 60-70% of their students are Mac users, and the Mac version of OneNote doesn't recognize that file type. 

 

For the time being, we suggested creating the master and generating a view-only share link to it so the students could open it up (in the Mac or Windows 10 app) and copy the sections to a notebook they created themselves. The faculty are not thrilled with this approach. 

 

It seems like MS provides the ability to export/import OneNote notebooks or sections, but only when they're stored in a "personal" OneDrive account (not in OneDrive for Business). I've been looking around for alternate solutions that would be practical (ie: don't involve custom code or Powershell), but found nothing. Since MS uses templates in some types of team notebooks (Staff, PLC and Class Teams), I'm sure it's possible, but maybe Microsoft hasn't made public the tool they used to do that.

    • Allen's avatar
      Allen
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      Chad_V_Kealey 

       

      The TechCommunityAPIAdmin is a robot, so do let me know if it replies to you!

       

      That said.. we have been doing maintenance on the M365 Community, find out more here, but please accept my apologies for unintended email spam.

       

      Kind regards

       

      Allen Smith

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    • Chad Kealey's avatar
      Chad Kealey
      Copper Contributor
      Thanks. I was kind of hoping to do it without creating a Class Notebook. The idea is for each student to have and manage their own, independent notebook/portfolio (these are doctoral or masters-level students). I've worked with Class Notebooks enough to know that they can be a pain. However, maybe things have changed. For example, is it possible for students to export just their section to PDF (or some other format)? Also, I know it's possible to create sections when setting up a Class Notebook, but I've not found a way to populate those sections with pages (in other words, it just creates the sections as blank "placeholders").

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