Missing OneNote After Installing Microsoft Office 2019 on Windows 10

If you start the OneNote Store App, you are given a couple of sign-in options.

Yes, they are both Microsoft accounts. Your work or school account is not your work or school account tied to your organization, it's your work or school account tied to a Microsoft service, such as Office 365 cloud services.

The work or school account option requires that you use an account associated with a business service offered by Microsoft.

The OneNote Microsoft Store app icon has a brighter purple background, while the OneNote desktop app has a relatively dull icon as follows.

Notice the desktop app is called OneNote 2016 because it's the last version of OneNote desktop app and is easily recognizable. Just like OneNote Store app, none of the Office 2019 desktop apps have a year associated with them. Microsoft supports installing OneNote 2016 with Office 2019.

At this time, Microsoft is still making the OneNote 2016 desktop app available to the customers who have Microsoft Office 2019 license. You can download the OneNote 2016 from the following links.

32-bit version of OneNote 2016 for Windows (Recommended)

64-bit version of OneNote 2016 for Windows (Not Recommended)

Although most computers and software these days are 64-bit, including Windows 10 operating system, it's best to use the 32-bit version of Office. You also want to make sure that you don't mix and match 32-bit and 64-bit applications on the same computer.

WARNING: It's best to first install and activate Office 2019, then install the downloaded OneNote 2016, otherwise your OneNote license will be displayed as "Home and Student." This is to avoid confusion. If you activate Office 2019 after installing OneNote 2016, your Office 2019 license will be added as a second license to OneNote and the default license will still be "Home and Student", which is rather confusing.

If you install and activate your Office 2019 before installing OneNote 2016, your license will be displayed properly under Product Information (File -> Account) like this.

The Product Information screen displays OneNote as a product included in Office 2019, which is not the case. I have installed Office Professional Plus 2019 dozens of times. There is no OneNote included in Office 2019 Professional Plus. There must be a reason why Microsoft left this icon. What's interesting is that even though you installed an Office 2016 product, it somehow gets attached to your Office 2019 license as if it were part of Office 2019. My best guess is that's why Microsoft still displays the icon in the above screenshot. The good news is that OneNote 2016 works like a charm with Office 2019 and because I am running Windows 10 and Office 2019 without a Microsoft account, I am able to use OneNote 2016 along with the other Office desktop apps and am glad to avoid using a store app.

According to Microsoft, what used to be called "OneNote 2016" (and "OneNote 2013" in earlier years) is now called just "OneNote." Microsoft also provides some additional details, "The OneNote desktop app on Windows is part of Office 2019 and Microsoft 365, but it can also be downloaded as a standalone app and used independently on any PC. It runs on any currently supported version of Windows — including all editions of Windows 10."

The OneNote desktop app allows you to save your data locally and to the cloud. You can also fully customize it in File -> Options. In the same article, I find some very confusing information. First Microsoft gives the impression that this is the most complete version of OneNote. Then it tells you that if you download this version of OneNote, some features may be limited.

Just so you know, there are at least 8 different versions of OneNote. If you are brave enough to try and figure out the differences between them, visit What's the difference between the OneNote versions?