Tips to Unlock the Potential of Microsoft OneNote (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Tips to Unlock the Potential of Microsoft OneNote (2014)

onthehub.com

92 pointsTomte88 comments

(Sorry, this turned into a little bit of a rant)

I love OneNote. Big problem though is the organization. Once you get more than, say, 8 tabs (more like 2-3 on mobile) it's a pain in the ass to find the others. Sure you can organize them so maybe nest them but eventually you're either going to run into having too many tabs in one place or too many pages in another (on my computer's resolution having about 20 pages under a tab and now I have to scroll which is a huge pain in the ass). Tags are half assed because you can't organize around them only search.

Honestly I tried making Evernote, OneNote and Google Drive my go-to places for notes. But I keep running into two issues:

1. I want my notes and documents to be in the same place. In fact many notes turn into documents and sometimes vice versa. The definition of either one is so blurred to me right now that I end up not doing anything because I can't decide if something is a note or document.

2. Organization is really freaking important. Google Drive can work well for this (to a degree; it takes forever to open something nested though because the UI is far slower than anything native) but OneNote just isn't good enough. Evernote is okay as I would tag everything but even sub tags are wonky; at least last time I used it I couldn't search for a parent tag and get the children. Plus I've lost data with Evernote before so I can't go back to that.

I started picking up writing a little side project and decided to use GitLab + Markdown for this. So far it's actually not that bad but I miss spell checking and easy mobile access. Sure I found an app that let's me edit the markdown on my phone but it's a pain in the ass. Worst I can't embed multimedia and it's not easy to use in this regard anyway.

I need something that's going to be reliable and around for along time too so I usually steer clear of the very new start-ups; I don't want to invest putting my hundreds of notes and documents into the thing only to have them go bankrupt or pivot months later. I'm thinking about trying Microsoft Office 365 next using it in much the same way as Google Drive but this time I can open stuff in the native apps.

I've got multiple notebooks, each with a few tabs (each tab has several pages). I'm not sure if that organizational structure will work for you.

I've done it but as time goes on too many tabs or the list of pages (which are in the wrong order, in my opinion since they show oldest first) just end up being hard to navigate and I have to figure out a way to reorganize or just deal with it. On mobile, even on my iPhone 6+ more than just a couple of tabs is just annoying to deal with.

All in my opinion of course. It's a solid product I just can't organize it well I guess.

I just got a laptop that is about 2 years old and upgraded it to windows 10. I primarily use mac, and windows 8 is shit.

Windows 10 looks awesome and I am excited to try one note. I didn't even delete internet explorer. Microsoft is competing and the effort shows.

Mostly, i have heard awesome stuff about onenote, and notes are the shittiest part of my workflow. Markdown support sounds awesome as a default feature, i hatenot having this in notes.app.

Excited

I really like OneNote and use it as professionally but I wish the Mac/iOS-Versions wouldn't be that slimmed down featurewise..The MS Original is so powerfull, it's a pitty we Mac users are kept out.

Put your documents in the notes, use the search function and order your tabs and pages.

But I apreciate the solid sync that much I trust MS with my files unlike evernote

I got around the tab issue by knowing Chinese. My longest tab name length is 3. Everything else is 2. Doesn't help you much I'm sure (although you could try things like TD for To Do) but I'm quite pleased with the solution!

計畫, 家服, etc.

That's quite clever! Yeah doesn't directly help me but I'll think about the abbreviations as that's not a bad idea.

Hi, we are building an application that do exactly what you said: Writing notes and later turn into documents. It works like Workflowy plus you can write long documents with code and Markdown format. You can share and edit these documents in realtime with others. It also has desktop and mobile apps for offline access.

I recently released an open source note taking application called gthnk (http://gthnk.com). It's based around markdown-formatted text files, in part because I do not want to commit my thoughts to a proprietary format that may not be readable in a decade or a century.

How do you handle Screenshots?

I never thought it was important. Now I'm screenshotting a lot.

my workflow is like this on OS X:

1. use hotkey to capture screen or portion of screen

2. screenshot is automatically stored as PNG on Desktop

3. click-drag PNG onto gthnk attachments target

4. done. now it is stored with that day's entries

Updated to add: the PNG itself is stored in a SQLite3 database. However, each night gthnk exports the database to the filesystem because, for future retrieval purposes, I think it will be easier to retrieve items from a filesystem than an obscure database format.

> each night gthnk exports the database to the filesystem because, for future retrieval purposes, I think it will be easier to retrieve items from a filesystem than an obscure database format.

In 20 years, how do I know which binary blob goes with which text file, and also with what point in each text file?

I want add: It's so wonderful to hear a developer concerned with these issues. Almost always, future-proofed data is an accident or afterthought, which means I can't depend on it being implemented well or being supported in the long term. It puts gthnk on my shortlist.

I will need to document this, but it's an important question.

- All attachments are named using the datestamp, so the first attachment today would be called 2016-01-19-0.pdf or whatever.

- The entries are also named using the datestamp, so we end up with a text file like 2016-01-19.md.

- The markdown itself contains an explicit link to the attachment; it is automatically inserted during export.

- However, datestamp acts as a primary key so that entries and attachments can be paired using another technique.

Finally, attachments are linked to days. It is not currently supported to associate an attachment with a specific entry on any given day.

   """handwritten notes
   
  Bridge the physical divide.
  With gthnk, your timeline 
  can directly import 
  handwritten notes, 
  whiteboard sketchers, and 
  other physical media."""

Not a direct answer but it seems to accept images.

Yep. It imports anything imagemagick can handle.

OneNote's format is an open specification, under Microsoft's open specifications promise for Office:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd924743(v=office.1...

I appreciate that Microsoft has taken to publishing their file format specifications, but what do you make of the changelog? It indicates to me that the format itself is volatile, potentially changing multiple times per year. Further, the changelog highlights the proprietary nature of the format; Microsoft owns it and may change it at will.

We have also been down this road before. Projects like LibreOffice/OpenOffice and pandoc have tried in earnest to match the specifications published by Microsoft, but it is always an imperfect implementation of either the reader or the writer.

Because it seems to be virtually impossible, in practice, to implement Microsoft's document format specifications, I do not think the publication of the specifications alone makes a file format suitable for archival purposes.

I think the issue here is orthogonal end goals:

1. An organic/"rapidly" changing format does indeed make it harder to "keep up" if you are building a contemporary "competitor" application.

2. However, for archival purposes it shouldn't matter how rapidly/organically the specification changed in the lifetime of the document, so long as you have an adequate specification snapshot from somewhere around the last modified state of the document. (Or presuming, as you should be able to even with Microsoft's standards, a standard that maintains a heavy bias towards backwards compatibility in document reading, only the final specification.)

Admittedly, we can't entirely anticipate the headaches of future cryptarchs, but an open specification I do feel is sufficient for archival purposes.

> we can't entirely anticipate the headaches of future cryptarchs

First off, I love the term "cryptarch". :) That's basically the user we're talking about here.

My concern is that archival media may become skewed from the media reader such that the media cannot be rendered with high fidelity (i.e. lossless).

> so long as you have an adequate specification snapshot

If the reader implementation itself has been lost to the ages, or perhaps the implementation is not runnable on contemporary hardware, then I worry that the specs alone may not be sufficient to reimplement the reader.

> a standard that maintains a heavy bias towards backwards compatibility

On the topic of archival, I'm concerned that ASCII will be a readable data format in 50 years. With that perspective, I am pretty skeptical that a spec as complex as the OneNote spec will maintain backward-compatible coherence across the same time span.

«If the reader implementation itself has been lost to the ages, or perhaps the implementation is not runnable on contemporary hardware, then I worry that the specs alone may not be sufficient to reimplement the reader.»

For archival on an apocalyptic scale, I don't expect future readers to read nor care at a high fidelity/"lossless" form of some of my documents. Certainly for my own notes to myself, I hope it is sufficient that future readers may get the gist of my scribblings from what they can scrounge out of a document based on specification snapshots (or even just scrounging for readable strings that seem vaguely Unicode like). I suppose there's an off chance I might do or say something that makes me a remarkable specimen to future histories and they may be interested in a deeper study of my works to the point of attempting high fidelity recreations, but I am alright with leaving that as an exercise to them. (Why spoil all their fun? :)

«I'm concerned that ASCII will be a readable data format in 50 years.»

A) I am amused and also not entirely surprised at such a pessimistic timescale. I'm not quite that pessimistic most days, but I can certainly see that perspective.

B) I'd certainly like to hope that the efforts we've paid into Unicode will prevent future string data encoding wars and that ASCII will be seen as the degenerate form of Unicode that it is these days. I would hope that specification snapshots of Unicode should be sufficient to future programmers for millennia to come.

C) In the event of such an apocalypse that even decoding ASCII (much less Unicode) is a huge endeavor, I fear that most hope is already lost, regardless of file format or media type...

«First off, I love the term "cryptarch".»

Indeed. One of the few things the videogame Destiny has managed to beneficially provide to our society is this little bit of useful jargon.

ASCII is simple enough to decode even without a computer, though.

I like open source software, but OpenOffice file formats were based on serving Sun's business interests in the same way that OpenDocument was based on serving Microsoft's. Microsoft developed OpenDocument because Sun's proposed standard did not support all the existing features in Microsoft's Office suite. Microsoft was faced with degrading features in an existing product or developing their own open standard or staying proprietary. As we've seen since Sun sold itself to Oracle, OpenOffice was a strategic move in the same way that Google's Docs were...the land of fat desktop apps just wasn't where the puck was going.

I'm the same way. I can read my ascii files from the early 90's. Old msworks, corel, etc files... not so much. Maybe you'll be able to read your OneNote files created today in a decade or two, I don't know.

I've actually been shifting personal files (less Excel if I can, as an example) to more text-based, or at least much simpler file formats when I can because I worry about this sort of thing. I'm a little different that way, perhaps I shouldn't be, and I should be fine not being able to read a file I created over a decade ago.

Perhaps the newer cloud-based apps will always "auto-upgrade" your files/documents for you now (MS Office is pretty good at backwards-compatible files, and reading older versions, but Microsoft seems an outlier in this regard, to me anyway)? I guess we'll find out.

Bit rot, in one form or another, has been causing trouble since we started doing this computer thing. I have nightmares about my thoughts being stored on a punchcard but having no punchcard readers to read my own thoughts.

my thoughts being stored on a punchcard but having no punchcard readers to read my own thoughts

A single punched card?[1] That's only 80 chars, very low density, not much room for any nuance in any given thought.

As to information retrieval, punched cards are very easily decoded by hand, without a reader. I used punched cards IRL as a student, and I had to decode occasionally when there was a problem with the printing on the card. Not a big deal.

The real "nightmares" came about when you punched a program, trudged down to the computer center, read it in, and then waited anywhere between 5 minutes and 24 hours before the computer operator took a bunch of output from the line printer, separated the individual jobs, and placed the output in racks for you to retrieve. And then you found out you had a syntax error.

One plus side was that, since this took so much time, you learned to take a little care in writing your program and in checking it for typos before submitting it. That sort of discipline turns out to be quite useful in many activities in later life.

On another plus side, the cards were made of relatively thick paper, and there was only printing on one side. So the flip side of an unpunched card was absolutely great for writing little notes.

Those, sadly, are just about the only "plus sides" I can think of for punched cards. Fortunately I've never ever had any nightmares about those days. :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card

Some screenshots of gthnk on the project page would be helpful.

Thanks! I added one just now, but I'll do a better job of explaining the features with screenshots in the near future.

Kudos to you! Would be great if you could add some video recorded workflow, now it is a bit tricky to understand what a tool does.

Also not mocking or anything, but how 'gthnk' should be pronounced?

Thanks! A video is in the works, but it will be a few weeks due to schoolwork.

I say it like "G. Think". gthnk is shortened from "greenthink," which was a computer system in Vernor Vinge's "Marooned in Realtime" that acted like a personal archive/assistant.

'gee-think' maybe? (soft g)

This looks VERY interesting.

Thanks!

No. I have been burned couple of times and since then I refuse to store my digital notes in anything else than a bunch of minimally-formatted (think Markdown or potentially org-mode) files.

OneNote binary blob format, while nominally open, is supported on a limited number of platforms by a single company.

That's great in theory, but utterly impracticable on the phone etc.

And the "limited number of platforms" includes everything 98% of people are using.

I do sympathize with your views, but I value convenience more, in this case.

On the specific point of mobile note capture, I believe I have solved this problem in my own text file-based system.

I use dropbox to sync a text file from my phone and a separate file from my tablet. These text files are managed by gthnk (http://gthnk.com), which combines all of these files overnight. By the next morning, all of my notes are together no matter where I originally wrote the note.

With most current note-taking systems, the sync is near-real-time - which, is super handy when moving from the conference room or on-the-go on your phone to your desk/laptop during the day - an overnight sync in that scenario doesn't meet requirements.

I'd imagine it wouldn't be too far fetched to utilize a sync service like your current solution for flat files in a more real-time manner...

That's an excellent point about real-time sync. There is a button in gthnk that will grab any notes from mobile devices on-demand. I think this would permit somebody to move from a conference to their desk. However, I can also see how/why that might be tiresome for somebody who frequently transitions devices multiple times per day.

Also, you're right; there's no deep architectural reason why you couldn't sync more frequently than once per day.

Yep, convenience is a great way to happily lock-in consumers. I'm a fan of how iCloud syncs my photos to all of my Apple devices, for example.

Of course, we are making it more difficult for other products to gain traction. Say, for instance, a start-up wants to offer a solution with extreme privacy without the drawbacks of an Microsoft or Apple.

There's a decent OneNote application for Android.

How are minimally formatted text files impractical on a mobile device?

Surely you're aware of the myriad of applications out there that will synchronize these things without issue.

Assume one is not, what would the top three solutions be?

Org-mode is plain text, so it's pretty much available everywhere to a reasonable degree. Since Emacs can run in a terminal, full org-mode functionality can be accessed in the cloud with a network connection...with a native VT100 interface no less.

Anyway, it's just one set of tradeoffs over another. In this case volatility and buttons for finicking and platform independence.

I find the Office-style complexity of OneNote off-putting. Every note-taking app competes directly with the physical notebook in my pocket, which is a pretty straightforward product UX-wise, while OneNote doesn't even try to imitate a sense of simplicity.

I used to think exactly that!

After getting used to the general structure (Books, Pages, sections), and ignoring most tools, it grew on me.

Try the OneNote from the Windows App Store. Far more simple then the full office version. I prefer to use the App Store Version.

> Try the OneNote from the Windows App Store

Which, like the OneNote version in Office on OS X, can only sync to a Microsoft account through OneDrive and can not even create local notebooks.

That may be a show stopper.

ON can sync off of a regular old file share. I've been using it for years. A copy on our server and one on each of my computers (desktop, laptop, Mac) and they all happily sync up. Granted, the iPhone app works best with OneDrive. I'm not a fan of OneDrive and use DropBox instead for a smaller ON notebook that I share with my wife for things like handy pictures of our insurance cards, grocery lists, travel information, etc. Works great for us at work (documentation and pictures) and at home.

Microsoft documents that on OS X OneNote can not. OneNote (Metro) on Windows 10 also can not.

Now on OS X it will go into offline mode and save to an ever growing local temporary file, but you can't choose to create a local notebook.

I had to use the full version of 2016 that I could get with Office 365 on my Surface to save to a local directory.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Frequently-Asked-Qu...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/insider_wi...

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/03/new-free-onenote-for-os...

iOS/OS X Notes is pretty good when you add the Apple Pencil. For some reason OneNote on the iPad Pro isn't as responsive with the Pencil.

A good example of what could be a subtle change making a big difference is both creating new note & deleting an existing note happens instantly now, past versions there was some a brief lag. This is part of the reason why even a little bloat can really suck in anything you use multiple times a day.

Agreed, for quick notes it's awesome especially with it's newer multimedia features. Opening ON on your phone and all that is kind of a pain.

Since I also use Windows the problem I have is getting to those notes on my Windows 10 boxes. The only fast way I've found is to log into iCloud.com. Not perfect but good enough.

I really liked one-note the last time I used it (> 5 years ago), but until they:

A) open-source it

B) allow me to host the data on my own server and syncing is automatic

C) Make it trivial to open/edit it in a terminal (inbefore "but you won't be able to do pictures!")

I won't be using it myself.

For B, OneNote notebooks are just files, so isn't this as easy as hosting any other file yourself? Just save everything in a folder that you synchronize with Dropbox or rysnc or whatever you want.

And obviously OneNote itself isn't open source, but the file format is, so it's not like your notes are locked into the Microsoft ecosystem.

The problem is integration; if you make offline edits in two places, you'd need to manually merge the files, which is a pain.

No, they sync if you set it up that way (DropBox, Google Sync, etc.) and you get revision history on ON including the name of the person that made the change.

I'm talking about conflicted copies[1]. Since Dropbox et all don't understand OneNote files, you'll have to merge the two copies manually.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/36

You are correct. In my head I had built a weird hosting relationship that doesn't really exist. I'm not proud of who I am before I have coffee.

I use Google Keep. There's no supported mechanism for exporting, as far as I know, but it's actually pretty easy to do (for a techie!), since they include every single note taken in the HTML of the website as a JSON document.

It's actually one of the few Google applications (as opposed to data services, like Search and Maps) I use, since I've never found a mobile client like it, with just the features I need and nothing else.

AFAIK everything in your Google account can be exported via Takeout[0]

[0] http://google.com/takeout

Oh, last time I checked it wasn't there, good for them! It's a shame it doesn't seem to include the reminders info.

Last year I started importing my firefox bookmarks into OneNote with OneNote Clipper. In theory this awesome:

+ Ability to organize bookmarks with searchable content.

+ No more dead bookmarks.

+ Boomark into a quick notes section and organize later.

Some drawbacks:

- Clipper does not work in article mode on some websites (github and reddit for example...)

- Syncing sometimes does not work and theres no way to see why. For example pages with lots of images.

- Clipper cannot create new sections.

I'm quite happy with the solution, but still sceptical, because if stuff does not work, I'm on my own.

Have you tried Zotero for this. Works brilliantly and it is relatively easy to export to a form of bibtex.

Thank you, I will definitely give it a try. Never heard of "reference management software" before, so I learned something today.

Over the past year, OneNote has become my go-to notetaking app and the app I use the most out of the office suite. Sharesheet integration with iOS makes it incredibly easy to save links from my phone, and it's whiteboard scanning tools are unmatched.

Some people are saying they don't want to use OneNote because they don't want to store their data in a binary, proprietary format that's not future-proof. I agree.

But I think we're not defining the problem well by focusing on the application: A failure of the tech community is that we never provided the equivalent of a plain text format for the multimedia age: An open, universal mixed-media file format.

With a standard format we'd have editors popping up that target it, the way we have such a great ecosystem of text editors. HTML does the job in a way, but it's not portable. One of the HTML archive formats might do the job, but none are widely supported (AFAIK).

Naive: what's wrong with xml? Way more self-describing than binary that's for sure.

XML is not so much a file format as it is a tool for creating file formats. Word and Excel both produce XML files, and technically you can edit those with a generic XML editor, but it's not the same experience.

How about MIME? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME

* ASCII encoded / support for other character sets

* Mixed media

* Standard

* Battle tested

several browsers and email programs support MIME incl IE9-11 (.mht), Opera (12?)

It's called MHTL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mht

You can also add MHTML support to Firefox and probably Chrome...

Good question. Can anyone say why it's not more widely used for this purpose?

Inefficiency and effort involved.

1. Encoding and decoding the data takes time and code.

2. The encoding expands binary by 4/3 (three bytes are encoded into four)

3. Duplication - e.g. if the same image is included in N places it will (likely) get encoded and stored N times, costing time (encode/decode) and space.

Like everything, it is a trade-off.

A few months ago I developed an intranet app for a team of consultants. The project manager asked if they could save it to their shared network drive. Naively I said yes of course just save a link. Later I found that he had just done "save as" from his web browser and created an offline version! It made me wonder if it is something that should be possible.

Storing html files containing actual data on a drive is actually quite elegant:

* The user has an intuitive understanding of files and can manage them using existing tools.

* Easy to backup.

* User level security is as simple as setting file permissions.

* All computers have a web browser that can render the content.

Could raw html be used? I am not sure that a packaging format is even necessary when you can use a data URI for images.

The Mac App Store version of OneNote doesn't have the drawing tools. I could see things I written and drawn at work, using a Windows computer, but at home they were more like pictures than drawings.

Yep. Came here to say this. OneNote is still good on OSX, but the lack of drawing features is a bit painful

Also, lack of basic image editing tools.

I do lot of research and often store bunch of screenshots but inability to do basic image cropping really puts me off! For almost all the images I store I need to chop off non-relevant part, but have to do it outside OneNote. It gets tiresome very soon (take screenshot, paste in a image editor, crop it, save it and then insert it in OneNote).

One possible efficiency gain you might be able to use is the Snipping Tool if you're on windows (and I'd bet OSX has an equivalent). It lets you drag a box around a part of your screen, takes it as an image, which you can then copy to your clipboard with one click (or ctrl-c I believe)

For note taking during meetings where people draw a lot on whiteboards, I once tried to set up a workflow that would let me take a picture from my Android phone, in one click (with a link on the home screen), and would then automatically send that picture to my laptop and put it into OneNote. Preferably through bluetooth so that I don't need an internet connection. I couldn't even get the first part to work, despite spending half a day messing around with Tasker and Pushbullet. That would be a killer feature for me.

Have you tried Office Lens?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....

"Never miss notes on a whiteboard or blackboard, and never look for misplaced documents or business cards, missing receipts or stray sticky notes again! Office Lens makes your pictures magically readable and re-useable. Capture content right into OneNote with automatic trimming and clean up."

https://www.onenote.com/apps

Office Lens [1] is great for this. I use the Windows Phone version all the time. It does things like glare reduction on whiteboards and then Office Lens can save it straight into a new page in the OneNote notebook of your choice on that device. In my experience's OneNote's notebook synchronization is pretty reliable in partially connected scenarios (ie, working on one set of pages on my phone and another on a laptop and eventually seeing all the changes get merged as both connect back to the network).

[1] Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....

"Working on something kind of similar: - vector graphics/drawings created by freehand / writing http://write-live.com/d/dba21681-8d3f-4fbe-8b4b-e5c1983df934

http://write-live.com/d/8f9b7846-a7b9-4e5c-b704-dad9aa87d14e

- unlimited* levels of zoom http://docs.write-live.com/WriteliveServer/webview.html?d=34...

- draw on a tablet, view on tablet / web http://write-live.com/d/538254c5-7d31-41f2-83bb-bcd0a7cee7ab

A bit like if google docs had a baby with OneNote"

Why ideas why Microsoft doesn't officially support OneNote plugin development? I was trying to put something together the other day to bulk insert pages and it took hours just to piece together a working VS project that was compatible with OneNote 2013.

Aspose have a library to allow you to do manipulate OneNote files - I haven't used it but I've used their Excel equivalent which is superb:

http://www.aspose.com/.net/onenote-component.aspx

I have some experience with their powerpoint library, not bad for sure but I really wanted to make a ribbon plugin integrated into OneNote desktop.

Did you try the REST API? http://dev.onenote.com/docs#/reference/post-pages

I didn't, I was hoping to work on the desktop app with offline files.

"5. Use tags for better organization"

I'm still waiting for the Mac version to get custom Tags. They only give you a few canned options like Project A and Project B :/

If anyone's interested, I have been working on this template tool for OneNote: http://notegram.me

It's made with the OneNote cloud API, so you don't need to install anything, and can use it with iOS/Android/Mac/etc. versions.

One thing I missed while evaluating OneNote (and coming from Evernote) was reminders/alarms on notes.

I searched around for a solution, but it seems the only way to do it is by using Outlook, which I'm frankly never going to do.

Wow, HN has changed. Doesn't anybody else run linux on the desktop anymore?

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