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OneNote 2010 and Onenote Web App
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Posted by Lucas
Jun 15, 2010 at 04:10 PM
Office 2010 just came out of beta (ahead of schedule, I believe), and they’ve now unveiled the new suite of web apps as well. I had been eagerly looking forward to the OneNote Web App, although it turns out to be rather disappointing as an outliner.
First, regarding OneNote 2010 (desktop): I own a copy of Office 2007, and I’ve been using OneNote 2007 more and more lately. I like the ability to integrate outlining and word processing, for instance. For me, the changes in OneNote 2010 were not particularly welcome, although your experience may vary. A couple changes that stood out for me:
—-With the new ribbon menu, the buttons for expanding and collapsing outlines have disappeared. Apparently the only way to expand and collapse now is either to double click on a selected outline, or to use keyboard shortcuts. See http://www.onenotehelp.com/2009/11/19/keyboard-shortcuts-for-onenote-2010/
—-Responding to user requests, Microsoft changed what happens when you make a list bulleted. In the 2007 version, adding and removing bullets only changed the appearance, while the hierarchy remains unchaged. (I found this very handy.) In the 2010 version, making a list bulleted also makes it slightly indented, similar to the default behaviour in Word. The problem is that the indenting can bring unwanted changes in outline hierarchies, if you add bullets to only part of a list. (The indent from the bullet is equivalent to a demotion.) There doesn’t appear to be any simple way to restore the 2007 behaviour, which I certainly prefer.
—-At least in the beta version of OneNote 2010, there appeared to be a bug that affected creating a new page as a subpage of an existing page (using the context menu). Also, the visual representation of pages and subpages has been changed so that instead of making the visual page tab of a sub-page shorter, now the page tab label text is simply indented while the label itself remains the same length (hope that makes sense).
As for the OneNote Web App (office.live.com), it has very limited functionality (as well as limited documentation). Most importantly, there appears to be no way to expand and collapse lists, so it doesn’t seem to have much promise as an outliner. (They do make it straightforward to open an online OneNote doc in OneNote 2010, but I’ve already deleted the beta and I’ll probably forego buying the new version. There doesn’t appear to be an easy way to download an online OneNote doc to open it in OneNote 2007, although perhaps someone will figure out a hack.)
So, I’m going to stick with OneNote 2007, but I’ll still be on the lookout for a good online notebook/scratchpad that enables both simple note-taking and outlining in an integrated environment (OneNote-style tagging would be great, too). Eventually perhaps Google Wave will be supplemented with the right extensions to do the trick.
Lucas
Posted by dg
Jun 27, 2010 at 03:40 AM
I upgraded from OneNote 2007 to 2010 and was really upset when I saw the Outline toolbar had been deleted. But actually, the OneNote help menu said outlining capability had been removed altogether. I didn’t realize the capability was still there, but only accessible by shortcut keys. Thanks for pointing that out…I don’t mind using the shortcut keys.
Like you, I was very disappointed in the OneNote web app. For all the advertising it’s really disappointing. Very limited capability. Unfortunately Evernote is a much more capable note-taking web app than OneNote 2010’s web app.
—
dg
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Feb 15, 2011 at 07:56 PM
Has anyone else been using OneNote 2010? I just installed it. So far I have mostly positive impressions. The issue with outline is either fixed or I didn’t quite get it, because it feels to me that outlining in ON2010 is improved from 2007—not dramatically, but incrementally so.
I like the new wiki link feature—encase a word or phrase in [[double brackets]] and OneNote finds a match for that page across your open notebooks, and if it doesn’t find one, creates one in the current notebook/section.
The search function is vastly improved. I found the way search results were displayed in 2007 to be one of the weakest aspects of OneNote, and one reason I didn’t use it as often as I would have liked. In 2010, search results are display in an easier to access list, which I find much quicker.
Tables work better in 2010—mainly, when I paste a tab-separated list, it becomes a table, unlike 2007, in which that feature never worked fine for me. This makes it a lot easier to bring text from a spreadsheet into ON.
I am still using Windows XP, so I am not used to—nor do I yet like—the ribbon method! Perhaps I’ll get used to it, but I wish ON 2010 provided an option to display menus the old fashioned way.
Overall, I like OneNote 2010 so far. I anticipate using it a lot more now.
Steve
Posted by Mitchell Kastner
Feb 15, 2011 at 09:35 PM
Steve,
Do you or anyone else know of Onenote user group or some other authoritative source?
Mitchell Kastner
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Feb 15, 2011 at 09:56 PM
I don’t know of any user groups for OneNote, but here are links to a couple of blogs related to it:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/descapa/
http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-onenote/
These are Microsoft sanctioned blogs, so I’m not sure you’ll learn anything radical at them, but they are probably good for some tips and tricks.
Steve