I use Microsoft OneNote all day, every day, for all of my note taking, both at work and at home. For the longest time, I’ve wanted to be able to paste an image into my notes and then have a border drawn around the image’s edges, like I do in Word or Outlook emails. OneNote doesn’t explicitly support this feature though, as is evidenced by the lack of a “Format” menu ribbon when you select an image in OneNote. I am using OneNote 2016 now, by the way, but this has been a limitation for a long time, so this problem applies to older versions just the same.

The work-around I found today is pretty easy and effectively solves my problem, so I am sharing it here with you all.

The fix for this is to insert a 1×1 table wherever you want the picture to appear and then paste the image inside that table’s only cell.

Here are the steps then:

Click on whichever Note page you want to insert the image onto. Select the Insert ribbon at the top of the OneNote screen. Select the Table pulldown and click once on the “1×1” cell in that table, as shown in the screenshot above. Now that you have a 1×1 table cell on the page, you have the border you were looking for. Paste the image inside that table cell then and you’re done.

You can then format the table any way you like and so now the image has a border around it.

I hope this helps someone out there, as it’s been bugging me for a long time.

🙂