How to Add Stickers to OneNote on Windows, Mac and iPad

Digital stickers in OneNote are pictures, so you add them from the Insert tab: Insert > Pictures > From File on Windows, Insert > Picture on a Mac or in OneNote on the web, and Insert > Pictures on an iPad. Once a sticker is on the page, you can drag it anywhere, resize it from a corner and copy it to other pages. PNG files with transparent backgrounds look the most like real stickers.

Below is how to add stickers to OneNote in each app, how to build a sticker page so your favorites are always one copy away, and how to keep a decorated planner from getting slow to sync.

What Makes a Good OneNote Sticker

A sticker is simply a small image. What separates it from a photo is the background: a sticker should have none, so the page shows through around its edges. That comes down to the file format.

• PNG can store transparency, which is why digital sticker packs usually come as PNG files. The area around the artwork stays see-through on any page color.
• JPG cannot store transparency. A JPG sticker always sits inside a solid rectangle, usually white, which looks like a pasted photo on a colored or dark page.
• A checkerboard you can see in OneNote means the gray and white squares were saved as part of the image. Image viewers use a checkerboard to show transparent areas, but if it appears on your page, the file has no real transparency and needs to be re-exported.

Size matters too, both for how the sticker looks and for how heavy your notebook gets. These are the widths we design to:

Sticker type	Suggested width	Examples
Small icons	150 to 250 px	Checkmarks, weather, moods, stars
Standard stickers	300 to 500 px	Labels, badges, event markers, doodles
Headers and washi strips	800 to 1,200 px	Week banners, page titles, tape strips

How to Add Stickers to OneNote on Windows and Mac

The desktop apps give you the most control over placement, so they are the best place to decorate a lot of pages at once.

OneNote for Windows

These steps are for OneNote on Windows, the desktop app that comes with Microsoft 365.

1. Click the spot on the page where the sticker should go.
2. Choose Insert > Pictures > From File.
3. Select the PNG file and choose Open.
4. Drag the sticker into position. To resize it, drag one of its corner handles.
5. Right-click the sticker for more options: Rotate turns it 90 degrees or flips it, and Restore to Original Size undoes any resizing.

OneNote for Mac

1. Click where you want the sticker.
2. On the Insert tab, click Picture.
3. In the Choose a picture box, select one or more stickers and click Insert.
4. Drag each sticker into place. Hold the Option key while you drag to turn off the alignment grid, which helps when you want a sticker slightly off-center or tucked into a corner.
5. Control-click a sticker and use Order (Bring to Front, Send to Back and so on) to stack overlapping stickers.

OneNote on the Web

In a browser, put your cursor where the sticker belongs, choose Insert > Picture and pick the file from your computer. It works well for adding one or two stickers, though the desktop apps are faster for decorating many pages.

How to Add Stickers to OneNote on iPad

On an iPad, OneNote’s picture button opens your photo library, not the Files app. Sticker packs usually arrive as a folder or zip of PNG files, so the first step is getting them into Photos.

1. In the Files app, open the sticker folder. If it is a zip file, tap it once to expand it.
2. Tap Select, choose the stickers you want, tap the Share button and choose the option to save the images. They land in your Photos library.
3. In Photos, create an album called Stickers and add them to it, so you are not scrolling past camera shots later.
4. In OneNote, tap the page where the sticker should go, then tap Insert > Pictures.
5. Open your Stickers album, tap the sticker you want and confirm.
6. Drag the sticker into place and pull a corner handle to resize it.

If your Apple Pencil draws a line when you try to move a sticker, select the sticker with your finger instead. On an iPhone, the same stickers go in through the camera icon on the toolbar, then From Library. For pen settings, page navigation and handwriting tips, see our guide to using a OneNote digital planner on iPad.

Build a Sticker Page You Can Copy From

Inserting from files every time gets old quickly. A better habit is to insert each sticker once onto a dedicated sticker page, then copy and paste from there. Because the page lives inside your notebook, it syncs to every device, which makes it especially handy on an iPad.

1. Add a section called Stickers at the end of your notebook, where it stays out of the way. Our guide on how to organize OneNote covers where supporting sections like this fit.
2. Create one page per theme, such as Everyday, Moods and Weather, Holidays, and Headers.
3. Insert the stickers in tidy rows with a short typed label above each row.
4. To use a sticker, select it, copy it (Ctrl+C on Windows, Command+C on a Mac, or tap it and choose Copy on an iPad), go to your planner page and paste.

Here is a simple layout for an Everyday sticker page:

Row	What goes in it	Example stickers
1	Status markers	Done, in progress, cancelled, moved
2	Appointments	Doctor, school, meeting, call
3	Home	Laundry, groceries, cleaning, bills
4	Moods and energy	Five faces from great to low
5	Headers	Today, This Week, Notes, Goals

Our OneNote digital planner comes with a digital sticker pack, and a sticker page like this is the easiest way to keep it within reach while you plan.

Keep Stickers From Slowing Down Your Notebook

OneNote keeps the full picture file you insert, which is why it can offer Restore to Original Size on the right-click menu. Dragging a corner to make a sticker smaller changes how it looks, not how much space it takes. Each section of a notebook is also stored as its own file, so every section you paste a sticker into keeps its own copy of it.

That makes the size of the source file the thing to control. A sticker designed at 2,000 × 2,000 pixels has 4,000,000 pixels. The same sticker saved at 500 × 500 has 250,000, one sixteenth as many, and still looks sharp at sticker size on a tablet screen.

Here is what that means over a month of decorating, using example file sizes. Say your full-size PNGs average 400 KB each and the resized versions 50 KB, and you put 3 stickers on each of 30 daily pages, 90 pasted stickers in all.

Version	Per sticker	90 stickers
Full size	400 KB	36,000 KB (about 35 MB)
Resized	50 KB	4,500 KB (about 4.4 MB)

In this example, resizing first means roughly 31 MB less for OneNote to sync to your iPad and phone. Your own numbers will differ, but the ratio is why it is worth doing.

To resize stickers before you insert them:

• On a Mac, open the PNG in Preview, choose Tools > Adjust Size, set the width from the table above and save. PNG transparency is kept.
• On Windows, use any image editor that exports PNG with transparency, then insert one resized sticker and check that its background is still see-through before converting the whole pack.
• Keep the originals in a folder outside OneNote in case you ever need a bigger version.

A few more habits keep things light. Put only the stickers you actually use on your sticker pages, not the whole pack. Skip stickers on pages you rarely open. And if pages start taking a while to appear on your iPad, our guide to syncing OneNote across devices explains how to check sync status and clear a stuck section.

For ideas on where stickers earn their place in a planning routine, such as marking deadlines on a monthly page or flagging priorities on a weekly spread, see how to use OneNote as a planner.

Your next step: pick ten stickers you would genuinely use this week, resize them to about 400 px wide, and build one Everyday sticker page before you decorate anything else.