Re: OneNote: Preliminary Thoughts

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2178

Posted by srdiamond15
2004-09-05 05:12:45

I think the developers would be interested in your comments. You should post it to the Micrsoft OneNote public board.

The way they present it, they were faced with an abundance of Office features, and they intend to incorporate many more as the program matures. I think they were largely concerned about maintaining the identity of OneNote as a notetaking program. As far as I’ve been able to tell, you can’t even countrol the spacing of text. Whether more formatting power is in the offing, I don’t know, but I think it’s safe to say that it will soon have a real tables feature.

My strongest concern is with the awkwardness in moving items to different sections on folders. There are just more steps than would seem necessary. But here’s the underlying dilemma. In OneNote a section corresponds to a Windows _file_. So, moving a page to another section involves taking out a part of a file and pasting it in the appropriate position in another file. Whether representing sections as Windows files limits the interface that can be imposed on these operations, it is a somewhat complex matter to move a page to another section in one fell swoop.

Most of these quasi-database programs sem to represent the whole data structure as a single file. This simplifies backup and, I presume, makes it more straightforward to move pages anywhere you want. Wherever you go, it is still part of a single file. (Maybe someone who knows a little programming will say this is preposterous. That’s possible.)

I imagine Microsoft opted to make a section a file, instead of making a file correspond to the “My Notebook” folder, because its multi-media capabilities would otherwise produce files too large to run efficiently.

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