OneNote To Do Tag update to a purple round poor quality Tag

Question

OneNote To Do Tag update to a purple round poor quality Tag

Rohan 90

Hi,

I am looking for feedback as to why the last OneNote To Do tag post with a thread to the recent changes to the square To Do tag found on the front end home page of OneNote for what I believe was implemented right from the earliest version of Microsoft OneNote until last week. This has left all OneNote pages displaying a round tag & when ticked it turns purple. When this is generated as a pdf as I expect many others might do the tag generation is one of the poorest images I have seen be generated from OneNote desktop. Usually OneNote is brilliant with the pdf's it generates & the images for the square boxes (which ever colour you decide if you were lucky enough to avoid the front end To Do blue box tag) are clear & professional. I am now embarrassed to generate any reports now using this tag where it has been located throughout all our templates with daily use by many staff.

Does anyone on here have any of the same issues & have a solution to this issue which MS seem to have no answer for & am told to just accept it with no choice on our end.

I look forward to see others opinions & feedback about this change.

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Answer accepted by question author

Ryan-N 15,645 Microsoft External Staff Moderator

Hi @Rohan,

If you agree, I can help you create a feedback post on Microsoft’s Feedback page regarding the issue mentioned above. After that, I will repost the feedback in this thread. This may help increase engagement with the feedback and support the issue being more effectively escalated to Microsoft’s OneNote development team.

I look forward to hearing back from you.

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3 additional answers

Your answer

Answer 1

Charlie Bender 0

As others have said, here is Microsoft "fixing" things that do not need to be fixed.

I appreciate the workaround going forward, but this is a really bad decision and will cause untold hours of work to restore the better-looking check box.

Rohan 90 Reputation points

2026-08-19T12:44:42.21+00:00

Hi Charlie,

Its months on from the "Fixing" Microsoft dis & there is still no Unfixing their mistake. I use OneNote for company compliance records with a very structured system across many fields of the business. I have now in the last few weeks been looking at moving away from OneNote as it becomes untrustworthy when changes like this get done that gives users no notice of the impending changes & no way of reverting to how they have designed their data to look.

Our OneNote has also had numerous syncing issues over the last 3+ weeks which has compromised our data & made the OneNote system untrustworthy even more. 3 weeks with Microsoft & no clear communication that they have found a fault within their end of the system & fixed it but only "We discussed your concerns internally, and the team has performed additional backend diagnostics and corrective actions to address any potential service-side inconsistencies that may have been affecting your tenant." I would like to know what the "corrective actions" were so I can understand if the changes made restore my confidence in OneNote which is fading fast.

Lets hope they pay attention to online comments & feedback. This is where it is good to see others such as yourself provide comments in order to try get them to correct the errors they make.

Answer 2

Ryan-N 15,645 Microsoft External Staff Moderator

Hi @Rohan,

Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A forum.

Thank you for contacting us. I would like to provide you with the following information:

If you would like to change the To Do tag from a circular shape to the old square shape, please follow the steps below:

Step 1: Click on the tag
Step 2: Select Customize tags
Step 3: Select Modify tag
Step 4: Click on Symbol and choose the old square shape

I hope this information is helpful. Please follow the steps above and let me know if it works for you. If not, we can work together to further investigate and resolve the issue.

Thank you for your patience and understanding. If you have any questions or need further assistance, please feel free to leave a comment on this post so I can continue to support you.

I look forward to continuing the conversation.

If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

Rohan 90 Reputation points

2026-01-29T22:38:49.92+00:00

I have likely over 15000 pages, all with complex fields & designs all with this original front end To Do tag but its position has been hijacked by this ugly round, poor quality, pixelated circle. My challenge to anyone is how do I update 15000 pages, some with 20 plus Original To Do tags on now rendered as round/ purple circles & generate to pdf very poorly.
Rohan 90 Reputation points

2026-01-29T22:45:23.6066667+00:00

I know most things in OneNote but not all & am always up for good updates to my primary system I focus on, consistently giving 5 star feedback & would try convert anyone I could to use OneNote on both PC & Android(the pair are brilliant) but this update has shocked me & cant believe there are no options or choice in the matter. This is where I am reaching out to the Microsoft community as a whole to see if anyone, anywhere have come up with a solution. Hopefully MS will do!
Ryan-N 15,645 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-01-29T22:48:40.5466667+00:00

Hi @Rohan,

Thank you for your response.

I’m very sorry to hear about the issue you’re experiencing. The system’s automatic update of the To Do tag icon from a square to a circular shape has caused significant inconvenience, especially as it negatively affects the display quality when exporting to PDF.

At this time, unfortunately, there is no feature that supports changing the tag interface in bulk across multiple pages at once.

In this case, you may consider sharing your experience through Microsoft’s official Feedback Portal:

https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/

When submitting your feedback, please clearly describe the inconveniences you are encountering. This will help the OneNote product development team better understand the user experience and the impact of this issue, so they can consider improvements in future updates.

We sincerely appreciate your understanding. In my role as a Moderator, I can only provide the steps and information shared above. While we are unable to influence product design decisions and have limited access to internal development information, we will continue to do our best to support you within the scope of our responsibilities.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to share them with me. I will assist you to the best of my ability.
Rohan 90 Reputation points

2026-01-29T22:52:54.2566667+00:00

Hi Ryan,

I will be but wanted to ensure there was a space for communication on this subject here to ensure any other customers suffering a similar issue can contribute & give feedback for us all.

Regards
Ryan-N 15,645 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-01-29T22:59:08.11+00:00

Hi @Rohan,

Thank you for sharing. I truly appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback and contribute to the community.

If there are any new updates regarding this issue, I will proactively inform you as soon as possible.
Michael Stolze-Hölzber 10 Reputation points

2026-07-07T18:28:17.3933333+00:00

Thank you for sharing this workaround. Unfortunately, it isn't a practical solution for existing task lists. The only way to restore the square checkboxes is to select all tasks and press Ctrl+1 three times, which is simply not feasible if you have a large number of notes.

Another issue is that you can now only choose between green and yellow square checkboxes. The classic blue checkbox, which had been the default for many years, is gone.

And I honestly have to ask: Why, Microsoft? To-do lists have used square checkboxes ever since Schedule+. It's a well-established visual convention that users instantly recognize.

In my opinion, this is not just a design change—it has a real impact on productivity. The new circles look far too similar to the bullets in a bulleted list, making it much harder to distinguish tasks at a glance.

If you have dozens of notebooks with hundreds of pages, as I do, this seemingly small change becomes a significant usability issue. It breaks years of visual muscle memory and makes it noticeably more difficult to scan notes for open tasks.
Rohan 90 Reputation points

2026-07-07T19:24:13.68+00:00

Hi Michael,

I fully understand your pain. I still have thousands of records that in one foul unthoughtout rookie change gave me either an impossible task to recover to where I was or like you, spend months reverting to a green box which they changed in 1 update without the thought about the impact. Sadly, no one at Microsoft has bothered to fix their mistake cause if they did they would be admitting they made changes without thinking or fully testing. Sad to experience from such a great app our company rely on for compiance purposes.

Thanks for at least voicing your experience. Hooefully more do
Matt Bondy 5 Reputation points

2026-07-08T12:24:57.58+00:00

Yes, very careless of Microsoft: making changes so that lists of checkboxes on thousands of note page now appear as non-standard radio buttons that look more like big bullets, but only for new user setups so that what our different users see is inconsistent, and giving no simple way to revert back to the previous steady-state. Very disappointing!

Answer 3

User's image

I've installed Microsoft OneNote (365 Apps for business) on a new Windows 11 computer and now my square To Do list checkboxes appear round (which looks too much like bullets) on the hundreds of pages in dozens of shared notebooks. The checkboxes are all still square on other computers with the same build (Microsoft® OneNote® for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2602 Build 16.0.19725.20126) 64-bit). I can customize the To Do in the tag group menu to be square, but that does not change the To Do shortcut in the menu, and more importantly, it doesn’t make all the existing To Do’s appear square again (see attached image). On old computers, clicking the 3-way To Do tag (checked, unchecked, off) in the group and the shortcut both controlled the To Do checkbox. On the new computer, the thousands of existing checkboxes now appear round and are controlled by the round shortcut, and the square To Do button in the tag group works as an entirely independent control. I prefer not to change the registry to fix this problem, but I did import HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\OneNote\Custom NoteTags from the old computer. I now see some custom tags from the old computer, but that doesn't resolve the problem with the round To Dos. There is nothing wrong with all the existing tags, as they still show up correctly on the old computers. It's the new computer setup that is the problem on more than one new computer.