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Comment by setquk | Hacker News Reader

Run away from OneNote quickly. Microsoft are not shipping OneNote desktop any more, preferring the horrid UWP app.

Another vote for paper or neutral formats here. They persist longer than vendor whims!

Case in point I wrote a lot of my work up on TechWriter on an Acorn RiscPC. Where are we now with that. Hmm...

Thanks for the tip. OneNote is one of a handful of things Microsoft has done that I like. Is it really not on Windows10? I haven't upgraded from 7 yet.

It does ship with windows 10 but it's a UWP app and it's rubbish. It's missing on Office 2019. See: https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/onenote-2016-is-mis...

This one totally caught me by surprise for ref when I upgraded, perhaps foolishly. I installed OneNote 2016 and am sticking my fingers in my ears until I have some time to deal with it.

That's awful. I probably have hundreds of pages of notes in this thing. Time to mass PDF export.

I have been using it for about 15 years so am in the same situation. I haven't found a suitable alternative yet.

Annoyingly they're going to EOL the cloud connectivity for it in 2023 and then the product in 2025. I've taken all my notebooks offline and will deal with it at some point, probably in 2025 :D

I've been waiting and looking for a replacement for a long time, but it doesn't seem like one will appear unless I make it myself.

Are you referring to EOL for desktop version or OneNote entirely?

EOL for old desktop version. There's a new terribly crippled UWP desktop version and the cloud based web app available going forwards. They are absolutely terrible bits of software compared to the old desktop version.

Do they not understand customers at all? Except for high performance simulations, I will never use the cloud. Maybe they realize that and want to force cloud adoption?

I think they understand that if you give customers no option they will be forced to comply with their wishes and act as a monthly revenue stream.

However they also misunderstand people's reluctance to put all your eggs in a large basket out of your control that disappears in a puff of smoke if you stop paying for it plus their ability to want to avoid paying a monthly fee.

At some point it'll backfire.

I think the moral of the story is, do not depend on proprietary software ;)

I totally agree. One reason I haven't moved yet is I haven't found something I would consider using that isn't proprietary.

I'm hopeful that the "new" OneNote will follow the same type of iterative dev/release scheme that VSCode has used so well, but for now it is pretty barebones and missing a lot of functionality from the Office app.

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