OneNote for Claude

Talk to your OneNote notebooks. Search your notes, pull action items out of meeting minutes, or write a new page — without leaving the conversation.

Install · What you can ask · Privacy · Troubleshooting

You   What did I write about the Q3 roadmap?
Claude Found "Q3 Planning" in your Work notebook, updated July 12.
       You listed three priorities: ship the beta, hire a designer,
       and move billing off the legacy system...

You   Add a note that the beta slipped to September.
Claude Added to "Q3 Planning".

Install

Claude Desktop

1. Download the latest release — the file ending in .mcpb

2. Double-click it. Claude Desktop installs it.

3. Ask Claude: "List my OneNote notebooks." A browser window opens to sign in to Microsoft.

That's it. No terminal, nothing else to install.

If double-clicking does nothing, open Claude Desktop → Settings → Extensions, and drag the file onto that window.

Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code, and others

Add this to your MCP settings:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "onenote": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@joneericdelacruz/onenote-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Restart the app, then ask it to list your notebooks.

Requires Node.js 20 or newer.

git clone https://github.com/JonEricDelaCruz/onenote-mcp.git
cd onenote-mcp
npm install
npm run setup

npm run setup signs you in and configures your AI app automatically — it finds the config file, backs it up, and adds this server without disturbing anything else you have configured.

Related MCP server: Local OneNote MCP

What you can ask

Anything you'd normally dig through OneNote for:

• "Find my notes about the vendor contract."

• "Summarize everything I wrote last week."

• "Pull every action item out of my meeting notes and make me a checklist."

• "Create a page in my Projects notebook with today's date and these next steps."

• "What was the budget number in the Q3 planning page?"

Sections can be referred to by name — "Ideas" or "Learn / Cooking" — so there's no need to look up IDs first.

Your privacy

Your notes never pass through anyone else's server. They go directly from Microsoft to your own computer. There is no hosted backend, no analytics, and no telemetry.

Your sign-in stays on your machine. It's handled by Microsoft's official authentication library and stored in your user config folder, readable only by your account. Nobody — including the author of this tool — can see your notes or your credentials.

It asks for the minimum. By default it requests access only to your own notebooks — not notebooks shared with you, not group notebooks. You can make it read-only in the extension settings.

Deleting is protected. Claude has to state the page's exact title before a delete goes through, so it can't remove the wrong page by mistake.

• Dependencies: four, all from official publishers — @modelcontextprotocol/server, @azure/msal-node, zod, open. Nothing in the tree runs an install script. CI fails on high or critical advisories and warns if an install script ever appears.

• Network: the only hosts contacted are graph.microsoft.com and login.microsoftonline.com. Nothing else, ever.

• Page content is untrusted. OneNote HTML is parsed by a small in-house parser (src/parse-html.mjs) that cannot execute scripts, fetch resources, or touch the network. Content is converted to text and never rendered.

• Credentials: stored via MSAL's token cache at mode 0600 inside a 0700 directory, written atomically, outside the repository. onenote-cli signout removes it.

• Sign-in: authorization code + PKCE over a loopback redirect — the flow Microsoft recommends for desktop apps. Device code flow is available but off by default, since new Microsoft tenants block it as of July 2026.

• Releases: built by GitHub Actions from a tagged commit, published to npm with provenance, and checksummed. The build refuses to produce an artifact containing .env, credentials, or test files.

Full disclosure: PRIVACY.md explains every permission line by line, lists every network request the tool can make, and shows you how to verify each claim yourself.

Found something? Open an issue.

Settings

In Claude Desktop, open Settings → Extensions → OneNote for Claude. Everything is optional.

Copy .env.example to .env. All optional except where noted.

For a strictly read-only setup, set both:

ONENOTE_SCOPES=Notes.Read offline_access
ONENOTE_ALLOW_WRITE=false

The first makes Microsoft itself reject any write; the second disables the tools locally. Use both.

Troubleshooting

Start here:

npx @joneericdelacruz/onenote-mcp doctor

It checks every layer — Node version, configuration, credentials, whether Microsoft is reachable, and whether your AI app is wired up — and prints exactly what to fix.

Claude doesn't see the tools — Fully quit and reopen Claude Desktop (not just close the window). Then check Settings → Extensions to confirm it's enabled.

Sign-in window never appears — Run npx @joneericdelacruz/onenote-mcp auth in a terminal instead. It uses the same saved credentials, so signing in there also signs in the extension.

"Consent required" / AADSTS65001 — Approve the permission screen Microsoft shows. On a work or school account, your IT admin may need to approve it for you.

"Your administrator has configured..." / AADSTS50105 — Your workplace restricts which apps people can sign into. Ask IT to allow it, or supply your organization's own application ID in the settings.

It worked, now it says I'm not signed in — Your Microsoft session was revoked, usually by a password change or a new IT policy. Just sign in again.

Device code sign-in fails — Expected on most accounts now; Microsoft blocks that method by default for new tenants as of July 2026. Leave ONENOTE_ALLOW_DEVICE_CODE unset to use the browser instead.

Nothing here helped — Open an issue and paste the output of doctor. It contains no secrets.

Development

npm test        # 112 tests, including end-to-end protocol tests
npm run check   # syntax check
npm run audit   # dependency advisories
npm run bundle  # build the .mcpb
npm run doctor  # diagnose a local install

test/server.test.mjs spawns the real server and speaks JSON-RPC to it, covering both the current 2026-07-28 stateless protocol and the older initialize handshake that today's clients still use.

onenote-mcp.mjs      MCP server: tool definitions and schemas
onenote-cli.mjs      CLI: setup, doctor, and direct commands
manifest.json        Claude Desktop extension metadata
src/config.mjs       Configuration and validation
src/auth.mjs         Microsoft sign-in, token cache, non-blocking auth
src/onenote.mjs      Graph client: pagination, retries, error mapping
src/parse-html.mjs   Self-contained HTML parser (replaces jsdom)
src/html.mjs         OneNote HTML to readable text
src/clients.mjs      Safe editing of AI app config files
scripts/             Bundle build

Credits

Built by Jon Eric Dela Cruz.

Originally inspired by azure-onenote-mcp-server by Zubeid Hendricks and the onenote-mcp fork by danosb. This version is a ground-up rewrite — new authentication, new protocol support, new tool design, and no shared runtime code — but it started from their work and stays MIT licensed in kind.

The earlier projects had accumulated problems that made them unusable by mid-2026:

• Wouldn't install. The package pointed at a local SDK checkout that wasn't included; fetching it produced Unsupported URL Type "catalog:".

• Sign-in couldn't complete. The device code was printed to a console no AI app displays, so users never saw it and the request timed out. Microsoft has since disabled that method by default anyway.

• Tools took no arguments. They read a leftover placeholder parameter, so "list sections" ignored which notebook you meant and "create page" always wrote the same fixed placeholder text.

• Sessions lasted an hour. A bare access token was saved with no way to renew it.

• Only the first page of results was ever read, silently hiding notes.

• Text came back scrambled — all headings, then all paragraphs, then all lists, regardless of original order.

Addressed upstream reports: #1, #2, #3, #5, #6.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.