We drifted onto this subject recently. Here is some news from Ars Technica:

(https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/04/onenote-desktop-app-end-of-lifed-replaced-with-windows-10-uwp/#p3

"In Office 2019 shipping later this year, that new version of OneNote [i.e., the UWP version] is moving to the foreground and will become the primary version of OneNote. The existing desktop application, OneNote 2016, will continue to be supported in maintenance mode, receiving bug fixes through October 2020 and security fixes until October 2025. But new features are going to be reserved for UWP version. . . . Clean installations of Office 2019 won't include OneNote 2016 by default, but if it's already there, it won't be harmed by upgrading."

This is a shame. For all that I could never quite get OneNote to work for me, it was a great and very useful product.

NickG wrote:

This is a shame. For all that I could never quite get OneNote to work for me, it was a great and very useful product.

Same here. Must be me the problem, but I can not see OneNote, as anything more than a paper notebook on steroids...

Pierre

Pierre Paul Landry wrote:

NickG wrote:

This is a shame. For all that I could never quite get OneNote to work
for me, it was a great and very useful product.

And still is. It's not going anywhere.

Same here. Must be me the problem, but I can not see OneNote, as
anything more than a paper notebook on steroids...

Among its many other virtues, OneNote is a very intuitive product, easy to use, and has nothing on its bones but the meat necessary to function. A good model for others to emulate.

PS. And it's free.

Here's a link to yesterday's official announcement from Microsoft, with a few more details:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Blog/The-best-version-of-OneNote-on-Windows/ba-p/183974

Pierre Paul Landry wrote:

... Must be me the problem, but I can not see OneNote, as
anything more than a paper notebook on steroids...

__________________________________________________

No, no. You're not the problem at all. As a longtime user of OneNote - my 8+ years long "experimental trial" - I would have to say that your description of OneNote is pretty much exactly right! It's a very apt description.
It hasn't entirely made my paper notebooks obsolete, but it has enabled me to go paper-less (reduced my use of and reliance on all kinds of paper-based information) and it has enabled indexing/search of two or three new data types - audio/audio-video and images/OCR. Couldn't really do that with paper...
Coincidentally, I had recently commenced planning a strategic migration path from OneNote to (probably) IQ...

I tried using OneNote when I was furniture shopping - importing room/wall dimensions, pics, screenshots.

God, was it dog slow!

It synced to iOS and the mobile app was acceptable but nothing more.

I want to like it, but cannot imagine using it the way it's intended.

(Oh, I was using the Mac app for input.)

IMHO OneNote is an example of a program that got locked into a series of design decisions too early and just never was allowed to develop to its full potential. It works reasonably well as a kind of digital notepad if you have a pen-enabled device, but even then, I find the ability to scroll horizontally incredibly awkward for general notetaking.

Every other feature is just odd in some way or doesn't quite work right. Why do you have to "print out" digital documents in order to embed them on a page if you want them to be searchable? Why don't pen annotations "stick to" the printouts? If something gets moved, all your highlighting gets messed up. If you embed/attach documents on OneNote pages without printing them out, there's literally no way to export those attachments other than laboriously going through every page of every notebook and saving every attachment individually. The Outlook task integration is so unreliable as to be useless. Why can you only search but not filter? The ability to search by tag and then copy all tagged items to a new page seems like a lazy way of kind-of-sort-of implementing something like filtering. Multiple-user editing on network shares works if you have less than a dozen people on your team, or more if you have Sharepoint, but using it with Sharepoint brings in a whole slew of other bugs (random page creation, tabs that get renamed and then revert to their old names, etc.).

The ability to record while notetaking and link recordings to portions of your notes was nice, but now that virtually every pen-enabled app supports that feature, it's no longer particularly innovative.

The whole app just seems like a lost opportunity. I look at what teams like Notion.so have done in a short time to reinvent collaborative notetaking and just see so much missed potential with OneNote.

On Office Pro Plus (2016 or O365), OneNote's integration with Outlook and other Office applications is really very useful. It passes muster of corporate and government security assessments, and it works well with groups. That's where I use it mainly, and I think the business environment is a good target environment. Otherwise, even though I use OneNote professionally I would never consider it helpful for personal use or research.

I never really stuck with Onenote. I used to love it when I used windows but It is slow and buggy on the Mac. Sync is really slow.

Lost opportunity is the best summary of OneNote (and I used it for over 10 years). Time to move on.

Slartibartfarst wrote:

Coincidentally, I had recently commenced planning a strategic migration path from OneNote to (probably) IQ...

Very good news ! Different concept altogether, though Ink is also supported, as a document type in the HTML pane.

v108, to be released in a few days, brings up quite a few usability improvements, so outliners will feel more at home. Details to come

Pierre Paul Landry
IQ Designer
http://www.infoqube.biz

I hate to be unduly cynical, but I think that the only stable providers of this kind of software are those who either (1) charge enough for it (e.g., Evernote), or (2) can monetize it by targeting adds based on your content (e.g., Google). Microsoft didn't seem to be either -- maybe it was a defensive offering to try and keep people from adopting Google for more products? I guess Apple Notes could fit into that lane too, although it has users essentially captive in other ways.

Microsoft's revenue from Office commercial and consumer unit licenses and subscriptions in fiscal 2017 was $23 billion USD, with a 58% operating margin (EDITDA). I think they probably have enough money to make whatever they feel like making.

exatty95 wrote:

I hate to be unduly cynical, but I think that the only stable providers
of this kind of software are those who either (1) charge enough for it
(e.g., Evernote), or (2) can monetize it by targeting adds based on your
content (e.g., Google). Microsoft didn't seem to be either -- maybe it
was a defensive offering to try and keep people from adopting Google for
more products? I guess Apple Notes could fit into that lane too,
although it has users essentially captive in other ways.

exatty95 wrote:

I hate to be unduly cynical, but I think that the only stable providers
of this kind of software are those who either (1) charge enough for it
(e.g., Evernote), or (2) can monetize it by targeting adds based on your
content (e.g., Google). Microsoft didn't seem to be either -- maybe it
was a defensive offering to try and keep people from adopting Google for
more products? I guess Apple Notes could fit into that lane too,
although it has users essentially captive in other ways.

Originally it was an attempt to mimic Circus Ponies Notebook/Aquaminds Notetaker (both were offspring of a Next app whose name I can't remember). I don't see that Google has anything like this that MS would have had to respond to. I just think that MS is pushing people into the online space as hard as it can

Evernote operates on an "everything in a notebook" model, while Google utilizes Drive and Keep and Docs to provide a more traditional files/folders framework. Google changed its priorities from pushing out apps or competing in the app space when they want people instead to use their services. In the last two years they've made this more explicit, killing off Chrome-browser apps and Picasa amongst other things. I'm amazed Google Earth is still around.

OneNote and Microsoft To-Do are the alternative lock-in attempt by Microsoft, more emulating Apple's ecosystem approach, while Google goes its own way.

satis wrote:

Evernote operates on an "everything in a notebook" model, while Google
utilizes Drive and Keep and Docs to provide a more traditional
files/folders framework. Google changed its priorities from pushing out
apps or competing in the app space when they want people instead to use
their services. In the last two years they've made this more explicit,
killing off Chrome-browser apps and Picasa amongst other things. I'm
amazed Google Earth is still around.

OneNote and Microsoft To-Do are the alternative lock-in attempt by
Microsoft, more emulating Apple's ecosystem approach, while Google goes
its own way.

The way I see it, Google is challenging Apple and MS at nearly every level, though not always in the most visible or apparent way.

Chrome OS, the operating system is at the heart of this, with Chromebooks replacing PCs and iPads in the education system, with the G Suite challenging MS Office and 365, and with the integration/merger of Chrome OS with Android (and possibly Fuschia replacing either or both), also challenging iOS and Windows.

I think Google is more interested in providing the OS than specific apps (other than the crucial parts of the G Suite). So in the note-taking world it's more likely that independent app developers will be coming up with the more interesting solutions, often integrated with the aforementioned education market (which is a huge wave of users moving through the US education system right now, just arriving at university and wondering why on earth their profs are asking them to submit MS Word documents).

Examples of these are Kami, the PDF reader and annotator, or Squid, the Android app, which convertible Chromebook users are adopting for taking notes with a stylus.

This Chromebook user base is going to be so huge (given the size of the US education system), that app developers sooner or later are going to start paying more attention to Chromebook-compatible web apps and Android apps.

There are already signs that businesses are starting to get on the G Suite band wagon (and all we need to wait is for another 4-5 years when the current US university students will enter the business world), so that could be the next wave of adoption.

I'm not really seeing anything from Apple or MS to indicate that they are ready for this new world. It seems that they're still focused on milking their cash cows than adjusting to this new reality.

I would agree with that with regard to Apple, but not Microsoft. Microsoft's play is the corporate enterprise, as is Google's, with software-as-a-service (the O365 constellation which is far broader than the Office apps consumers think of), and infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service built on Azure. The combo of all these things make transition away from the Microsoft family a very expensive proposition. Same for the similar offerings from Google. So enterprises that align on G-suite don't want to migrate toward MS.

Just as in the old days of 1990 when companies aligned their enterprise solutions on IBM or Unisys and few others, today the play is cloud+software and both MS and Google are equally aggressive. The consumer market for them is gravy, but also costly to support on a per-customer basis so you're not going to see a lot of innovation in that domain.

Apple has nothing to offer for large commercial or government enterprises and is losing the small share it had with iOS to G-devices or M-devices. Apple has a lot of cash because it is motivated solely by economic rent-seeking -- so it demands higher prices. That's not a recipe for sustainable success. Consumers seem to be tiring of the same-old same-old devices. No doubt there will be disruption in the next five years or so that will make Apple consider sub-letting part of that nice spaceship headquarters it just built.

Dr Andus wrote:

I'm not really seeing anything from Apple or MS to indicate that they
are ready for this new world. It seems that they're still focused on
milking their cash cows than adjusting to this new reality.

From a device/network management point of view: if you're a teacher or administrator, then Chrome books are a godsend - if you're a student, not so much (they can't wait to get home to their iPad's).

Dr Andus wrote:

satis wrote:
Evernote operates on an "everything in a notebook" model, while Google
>utilizes Drive and Keep and Docs to provide a more traditional
>files/folders framework. Google changed its priorities from pushing out
>apps or competing in the app space when they want people instead to use
>their services. In the last two years they've made this more explicit,
>killing off Chrome-browser apps and Picasa amongst other things. I'm
>amazed Google Earth is still around.
>
>OneNote and Microsoft To-Do are the alternative lock-in attempt by
>Microsoft, more emulating Apple's ecosystem approach, while Google goes
>its own way.

The way I see it, Google is challenging Apple and MS at nearly every
level, though not always in the most visible or apparent way.

Chrome OS, the operating system is at the heart of this, with
Chromebooks replacing PCs and iPads in the education system, with the G
Suite challenging MS Office and 365, and with the integration/merger of
Chrome OS with Android (and possibly Fuschia replacing either or both),
also challenging iOS and Windows.

I think Google is more interested in providing the OS than specific apps
(other than the crucial parts of the G Suite). So in the note-taking
world it's more likely that independent app developers will be coming up
with the more interesting solutions, often integrated with the
aforementioned education market (which is a huge wave of users moving
through the US education system right now, just arriving at university
and wondering why on earth their profs are asking them to submit MS Word
documents).

Examples of these are Kami, the PDF reader and annotator, or Squid, the
Android app, which convertible Chromebook users are adopting for taking
notes with a stylus.

This Chromebook user base is going to be so huge (given the size of the
US education system), that app developers sooner or later are going to
start paying more attention to Chromebook-compatible web apps and
Android apps.

There are already signs that businesses are starting to get on the G
Suite band wagon (and all we need to wait is for another 4-5 years when
the current US university students will enter the business world), so
that could be the next wave of adoption.

I'm not really seeing anything from Apple or MS to indicate that they
are ready for this new world. It seems that they're still focused on
milking their cash cows than adjusting to this new reality.

Dr Andus wrote:

I think Google is more interested in providing the OS than specific apps

I think Google is solely interested in pushing any route that pulls you into its space. The purpose of the Chromebook is to pull you in.

I'm not judging good or bad, simply making an observation

bartb wrote:

(they can't wait to get home to their iPad's).

What's your evidence for that?

Google's products are too transient. They develop sth--few years--just drop it.

I don't really thrust them.

Apple is mean company. They are just to the money than developing a product that truly helps people. I hated that they are prosecuting small maintenance shops for using second hand iPhone spare parts.

Apple shows corporate GREED at its best

I don't be sad if Apple just disappears in a night.


I think Onenote is great. They are developing it good. it is one of the most powerful information management systems out there. it is free. it is rich. The sync is improving. The features are growing.
I am a Mac user for now. But, I always see my future with Onenote.

Dr. Andus: You're letting your own zeal for Chrome get in the way of common sense. Kids who live on their iPhones aren't going to take a big step back and embrace Chromebooks over iPads. Schools may be moving toward Chromebooks because of the cheaper cost, but I wouldn't read anything more into it than that. And OneNote is most definitely the de facto note-taking software in academia: it's free, it's easily available, and it's distributed by a "trusted" vendor - Microsoft.