Embedding in OneNote

Steel Contributor

I am experimenting with embedding objects in OneNote. There are a few services (objects) which can be directly embedded into OneNote just by inserting the URL onto a OneNote page, such as YouTube video, GeoGebra, Sway and some others.

 

Some users have demonstrated that one can wrap other objects in a Sway, by embedding it in an iframe in Sway. The Sway is then inserted into OneNote. That way you can embed almost anything into OneNote that is embeddable. However, I've experienced some problems with this approach.

 

E.g. I wanted to embed a PhET Circuit Simulation. My primary OneNote application is the Windows 10 app. I embedded the PhET Circuit Simulation into a new Sway, using an iframe, then I embedded the Sway into a OneNote page by pasting the Sway URL. As soon as I would activate (run) the Sway, the PhET simulation would open in a browser window - so not ideal, since it is not running in context on the OneNote page. When I open the same notebook in OneNote Online - it works as expected. When I open it in OneNote 2016, the PhET simulation loads and displays but is not interactive. I tried this approach with a different iframe object and had the same result, the object opened in a browser window.

 

Can anyone else confirm that behavior or am I missing something?

2 Replies

This behavior has just been confirmed independently. So, embedding an iframe in Sway and then embedding that Sway into OneNote to get interactive content, has the following result.

 

  1. In OneNote Online it behaves as expected with interactive content embedded on the page.
  2. In OneNote for Windows 10 the interactive content will open in the browser, separately from the OneNote page.
  3. In OneNote 2016 the interactive content will load but will not be interactive - it only shows an image of the interactive content.

If you want to be able to embed more interactive content into OneNote - please vote for this suggestion on User Voice: Enable iframe embedding to embed interactive content into OneNote