Microsoft makes OneNote for Windows completely free by removing all feature restrictions

Microsoft today announced OneNote for Windows is no longer a freemium product. The company has lifted all feature restrictions on its note-taking service, meaning you can now download OneNote 2013 for Windows 7 and Windows 8 from onenote.com/download and use all its features without paying a dime.

Back in March 2014, Microsoft launched OneNote for Mac as a free release and began offering a freemium version of OneNote for Windows. Now the Windows and OS X versions are both free.

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More specifically, the following features, previously only for paying users, are now available to all, according to the announcement:

• Password protected sections — Add a password to protect sensitive information.
• Page history — Easily see or go back to prior versions of a page.
• Audio and video recording — Take notes while recording, and easily jump to the relevant section later.
• Audio search — Search for a word in a voice or video recording.
• Embedded files — Insert Office documents or other files directly in your notebook.

OneNote uses OneDrive to store all your notes so you can access them across all your devices. All you need is a free Microsoft account to get 15GB of OneDrive space for free, as well as no limits on the number of notes you can create or sync.

The Microsoft Office team has a lot in the pipeline for this year. The company is developing Office 2016, slated for release in the second half of this year, as well as Office for Windows 10 (touch versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook), which is also expected to arrive later this year.

If you want to try the new OneNote app, you’ll need to get the latest Windows 10 preview that arrived last month. Microsoft seems particularly eager to get OneNote on as many devices as possible — making it free and bundling it everywhere it can is of course the best way to do that.