Introducing OneNote for Mac
blogs.office.com
blogs.office.com
Maybe I'm being idealistic but I'd love to see Microsoft become a truly cross-platform "enterprise-quality" software house. There's tons of great software out there, but rather little that works seamlessly (or even well) across iOS, Android, Windows and the Mac.. and with its resources, inhouse expertise, and no truly successful mobile platform to evangelize, Microsoft seems well placed to take on such a role.
Rant mode on:
Remember how people used to feel about accidentally clicking on PDFs before Adobe cleaned their act up and the better third party readers came along? I'm that way right now with Word and Excel. It takes a full 30-60 seconds to spin up and actually render the damn paperwork, sometimes it's not that big a deal if I can make it to the dock and hit force quit before too much time has passed.
Outlook is downright execerable. The search feature simply does not work the majority of the time. I can be looking at a subject line, key that subject into the field, and the messages don't appear.
I have to do a monthly-ish database rebuild or else I get non-stop "failed to save" error messages regarding appointments.
Mail.app might be pretty spartan and have it's rough edges, but dammit, the basic functionality works without being babysat!
I have to search multiple times to get any results, with the bonus that a single MOC conversation will show up as multiple, separate entries for every time it was saved.
It scares me the way this seems to be a statement on the future of Microsoft office. The windows 8.1 styled version of onenote functions the same way. It is also crippled so that you can't lock sections the way that you could in onenote for desktop.
Of all the things I would not want spooks snooping, my meeting scrapbook is pretty low on the list.
Not sure how well the merges work in practice, though.
> Not sure how well the merges work in practice, though.
Disclosure: I'm the one building it =].
> The future is in the cloud though, and OneNote has always
> (for the ~3 years I've been using it) worked this way.
A rather common OneNote usage scenario I see is a OneNote notebook on a company file share, or a shared Dropbox folder. OneNote supports multiple concurrent edits of a single notebook.
Not everyone wants everything in the cloud.
NO WAY.
A lot of businesses don't allow sharing work-related information with other businesses.
Microsoft: supporting BYOD as long as you're bringing Windows.
On a positive note, it's nice to see Microsoft being a good ecosystem citizen and using the Mac App Store. OneNote is visually pleasant, at the same time familiar to Windows users but not foreign to those accustomed to Mac OS.
I've been an Evernote user for years, but now that it's available on all my platforms, I'll at least give OneNote a test drive.
Disclosure: I built it.
I'm always open to suggestions though. If there was a viable way to charge for Turtl while also making it easier for people to adopt, I'm all ears =]. I think it would be hard to charge a one-time download fee for an open-source app though (and open source is essential for anything dealing with crypto).
Does that ever work? I couldn't tell you.
One Note will, however, appeal to people who prefer 'structuring' over 'tagging'. In fact, if you prefer tagging, look elsewhere. The tagging support here is abysmal. There are tags, but they are canned and the user can't add their own tags. So you have 'Definition' and 'Idea' (which thankfully is not "Idea!") and 'To do priority 2'. And only the ones that the people at MS thought you might think were important. Even more bizarre, they seem to be only visual labels. You don't appear to be able to search for items matching a given tag. Wtf. Am I using a computer or not?
I will say that they seem to have nailed all the account management, in particular two-factor auth, for the 'microsoft accounts'. But they did this largely by copying google's two-factor auth stuff. Which, to be honest, is what I would have done too since it's pretty good. Anyway, they don't appear to have screwed that up. That's a plus and not super-easy. Separate from One Note though.
The tagging fiasco and lack of export are both unconscionable though and embarrassing, imo. They are not an early entrant here; they need to do better than the competition, not notably worse. Plus this is an old product for them, just new to the mac. Bill, where are you? Surely this is easier than Malaria.
Also, if you think Microsoft's account management stuff is well put together, you... clearly haven't tried to manage a bunch of windows 8, XBox, skype and live accounts for an entire family over the past couple of years. It's a mess, and the only answer MS ever has for issues with an account is "make a new one".
In case you are wondering I switched my household, parents and several friends to apple products since 2002 because it was easier to provide help.
I sometimes wish there was a magic button I could push to merge everything into a unified single sign on for <insert company name here>'s products. It took a while but Google did it in a weird way that didn't make me very happy either.
The UI looks great though - if only office for mac proper could follow with the same quality, it would be great.
However, I can't figure out how to retrieve a .one file from the Mac Client to check for the format - anybody knows where it stores its file locally ?
[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd924743(v=office.12...
Any sandboxed app has its data under ~/Library/Containers/<app>, then from that usually under the Data/Library folder, which is a kind of mirror of your user library folder, just holding that stuff the sandboxed app is allowed to see.
I am disappointed at the missing "Print" functionality as well as the broken "Email Page as PDF".
For this reason alone, I'm still using a Windows VM simply for the "real" Outlook for work purposes.
If you drag one or more e-mail message out of Outlook for Mac, it creates .eml files. These are just RFC2822 MIME source with a file extension—almost any mail client out there can read them. If you drag an entire folder out, it creates a .mbox file. This is also a standard that many mail clients can read/import (Mail.app included).
Just wondering why the hell isn't this part of the export menu... great feature, undiscoverable as hell.
For better or worse, there were a lot of edges we didn't get a chance to smooth out by the ship date though I believe we made reasonably solid trade-off calls based on the team and deadlines we had. Updating the Export feature was one of those trade-offs (it's just not a super frequent user activity); that part of Outlook leveraged code from the much-despised Microsoft Entourage. The app was far from as full-featured as some users wanted (especially Win Outlook switchers) BUT did make enough progress to avoid the backlash of other "rewrites" out there (e.g. Apple Final Cut Pro X).
Little insider history: we did a lot to try and make sure data didn't get locked-in... we really wanted a place where, even if your app crashed, you could always get the data out of the app. During development, we even had builds where the entire underlying database was exposed as XML docs (one per item in your db). We couldn't get the perf we wanted out of that system. We ended-up with Outlook 2011's database which still bites folks from time to time but has a lot more "recoverability" than previous products such as Entourage (where it users often cited being locked-out of their database).
When we got to building Outlook, we decided to look forward—Cocoa and EWS only, building a strong base so that future releases could be far more capable. When I started on Entourage, the team was executing on a strategy to shove Exchange capability into a consumer-oriented app. It was shaky from the start, there were so many problems and customer complaints. I gradually learned as a PM that often a more impactful but riskier product strategy is to go big—instead of fixing 50 small issues a week at a time, fix 1 big issue that takes a year but renders the 50 irrelevant.
The only problem I know of with this approach, when coming from Outlook, are the Winmail.dat files that Outlook (or MS Exchange?) creates "to preserve text formatting".
Not Bill himself, but the OneNote engineering team are doing an AMA on Reddit on Wednesday at midday.
Nothing to link to yet but it's in the "upcoming" sidebar section http://www.reddit.com/r/iama
Now that a lot of the OneNote team seems to be around here I'd like to mention two issues with OneNote:
* Metro/modern/app-version doesn't support password protected notebooks. Client side encryption should be nice as well.
* Sane (>2005) tagging. Why oh why do you have to use the mouse (or several key combos + arrows in a row) to choose one of a list of predefined tags? (The checkbox feature is nice though.)That being said the current state of Office for Mac is horrible, my outlook and lync crash every time I plug in an external monitor, awake from sleep, and sometimes when I switch desktops. They also have weird window behavior and the windows get stuck halfway above the menu bar.
Please fix the problems with Office for Mac before you add new products.
Honest question: what does Word offer the novelist that a plain text (or rich text) editor would not?
I've known others who have worked on a novel in Word, but I just can't imagine a workflow where binary Word documents would be better than plain text.
It handles large documents efficiently, renders them nicely, and has a ton of features for working with large prose documents.
Plain text has no value to most users since they use no other tools that work with raw text. If you don't use git, grep, cat, find, diff, etc. there's no effective difference between binary in text: in both cases they are just a blob of bits you load into a program.
Spell check maybe is a reason, no writer wants to admit they can't spell "Hemingway", maybe word/page count abilities, but large documents isn't a reason to forgo the benefits of plain text.
I suspect a large part of the reason she sticks with it though is threefold: familiarity, volume of content in the Word format, and working with agents/publishers. (like another commenter mentioned) She's already familiar and comfortable with using Word, and so she can be productive and just get things done by sticking to what she knows. (she has expressed displeasure with the idea of upgrading due to possible UI changes) She has a /HUGE/ amount of stuff already written using Word, and moving that to anything else would be a herculean undertaking which is, honestly, not worth her time. And using an automated tool to attempt to do so could lose information, which she is already extremely protective of. Lastly, because she needs to work with other people, and might submit documents to those other people in a digital format, it basically needs to be in Word, otherwise that person is unlikely to ever even touch her stuff. Having to deal with agents as a writer is harsh, as they won't even tell you if you did anything wrong. They'll just ignore you. Submitting an unknown, uncomfortable format to those people will just cause them to ignore her anytime she tries to submit anything.
While you might consider plain text to be the ultimate format which is compatible and usable everywhere, people who are not tech people (my wife is not very "techy") just want to get things done with tools that are highly supported, comfortable for them, and widely recognized and used by the people they need to interact with. While you might consider VIM/Emacs/Sublime Text/<insert plain text editor here> to be the ultimate editing environment, anybody in the world my wife deals with will just give you a blank stare the moment you try to deal with those people using those tools.
The layout is great and it looks and feels like a slick application. If you are doing notes via typing and don't have to insert many images then this will be a great application for you. It beats Circus Ponies in look and feel and is much more intuitive than Circus Ponies. But it is missing two great features and as such I'll be sticking with Circus Ponies.
I think I'll stick with the somewhat mediocre Notes.app that are included with OS X for the moment. If we take away all the gloss, and the fact that you can't have multiple Notebooks, and sharing, and .. and .. then we are left with basically the same. :) Another objection is the max password length of sixteen, that may be long enough but...
Great timing too as my Office 2013 1-month trial just ran out and OneNote was the only app I really needed! LibreOffice is good enough nowadays for the rest. Plus it runs great with a Wacom digitiser.
- Standard Mac keyboard shortcuts don't work (ie. ctrl-a & ctrl-e to move to beginning and end of lines)
- Can't drag a picture from the Finder into the OneNote
In OneNote if you want a table you can type something and hit tab. What you wrote will be in a cell, and you will be inserting in the next cell. Tab again for another cell. Cells created like this merge if placed together. Tables in general are leagues ahead in OneNote.
One note also acts like a note book. you can write anywhere on the page. Evernote acts like a traditional text application. There is a single text area. It's difficult to explain without demonstrating, but it feels more natural.
The hierarchical nature of Pages, Sections and Section Groups works better for me then Evernote.
Shared notebooks with live update are really awesome in OneNote as well.
Finally I had more merge conflicts with Evernote, and lost data, but yymv.
I, for one, have been looking for an Evernote replacement for quite some time. Evernote still has so many basic text and formatting bugs that it feels v1.0 quality.
Poor Outline (http://outline.ws/mac) :(
Hopefully the release of OneNote free of charge will not stop Outline on its tracks.
OneNote will even search handwritten notes and audio.
Study Guides = I would then click on my notes and OneNote would play the audio of the professor and I could relive the lectures that went with the study guide. Everyone loved it in my class. I would email them the audio files if they missed class. No one else ever would use it. I even had the college I worked for purchase OneNote for all students and no one ever connected a microphone and few used it. SAD
- Growly Notes, (free) which actually partly emulates how OneNote works: http://growlybird.com/notes/index.html
- Circus Ponies Notebook, (paid, $50) which is very different from OneNote but is a good note taking environment and is quite clean and has some good features
- And if you really need some insane power: Curio, (paid, $100) where the basic concept is to emulate the power of a whiteboard. It includes things like mindmaps, tables, linking between boards, etc. The features list is insane.
It doesn't quite do images, since it's text only. nvALT is a fork of the project with extra features. Its image support might fit your needs: http://brettterpstra.com/2012/09/27/quick-tip-images-in-nval...
I was looking for a personal wiki-type thing on OSX, but this is a fantastic set-up for me.
Which app and pen do you use for handwriting notes on your iPad? I've tried a few but I haven't liked any of the input interfaces. Writing in a small area of the screen is cramped, but when the whole screen is available to write (e.g. Paper, the drawing app) I find my arm constantly getting in the way.
I just use cheap styluses/ my finger for writing, as I find that tips wear our way too quickly to spend a lot of money on one. (although I would be open to the idea of a high-end stylus with a replaceable tip)
I use the adonit Jot Pro stylus, retina ipad mini and the adonit Tote case to keep the pen with the tablet all the time. ( http://www.adonit.net/ )
Not too worried about the bit of extra bulk as I can now chuck it into my consulting bag without worrying about scratching it up.
The reason i like uPad is that it presents a large space on the screen for you to write into, and then takes what you put in there and places it on the page. It means you get all the benefits of writing 'big' with palm rejection on the non-writing areas, but then all your notes go where you want by placing where the text will appear on the page.
(This may have existed for a while, but I just discovered it today.)
I don't have my MacBook with me, is this included in the new OneNote for Mac? Is it even possible? I confess I'm not very familiar with OS X or its capabilities.
I really wanted to try this out but I'm stuck on 10.8
I compare immediately with Evernote, a daily tool in my case. I like the idea of concurrents for Evernote.
Since 2011 on Mac. The new Equation Editor was not in Mac Office 2008.
This was particularly annoying because Mac Office 2008 could load and save DOCX files -- yet you couldn't take it for granted that the equations would carry through.
My understanding is that the Equation Editor relied on some Windows components, which made it difficult to port.
As for LaTeX \symbols, I haven't encountered a problem. But maybe my equations just aren't that complicated. It doesn't always interpret LaTeX equation structure correctly, but I haven't had any problem with \symbols.
I know there's no comparison in functionality, but if words are all you need then that's 233.8MB less bloat!
(If benhuberman's listening - please give us font options!)
I know its just outside of the scope of notes, but if there was some level of collaboration, Apple could seriously cut down on the number of couples arguing in supermarkets (and Ikea)
"Microsoft OneNote failed to download. Use the Purchases page to try again."
I'll take Evernote any day.
Edit: Heh, the other commenter thought of Evernote as post-its as well. :p
I've always envied OneNote on Windows (Phone), and will definitely try this. Its rich editing features appear to be much more suitable for better, you know, note taking.
Plus, I've lost post due to sync error on Evernote between devices often, mobile app is pretty poor - crashes often :(
But hey choice is good.
I don't have it installed on this machine currently, but doesn't Libre Office has a similar set of UI conventions as on other platforms, or is it "OSX-y"?