Introducing OneNote for Mac

http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/17/introducing-onenote-for-mac/

by footpath • 12 years ago

319 173 12 years ago

blogs.office.com

If this is a preview of the new Office for Mac, I'm totally excited. Office 2011 for Mac really didn't implement the Ribbon well, and this looks like it's an amazing experience.

goshx• 12 years ago

Finally! IMO OneNote was the best software in the MS Office pack. It was tough to transition to other apps when I moved to Mac.

drone• 12 years ago

Agreed, OneNote was my favorite Office app, and was my go-to note-taking app until I switched to a macbook. It made keeping notes in meeting much easier with recording and syncing.

latraveler2• 12 years ago

Yep. OneNote might have been the single hardest app to give up when I made the switch to Mac back in '08.

robinhoodexe• 12 years ago

Still no support for LaTeX... Nice for non-scientific classes tough.

Eyas• 12 years ago

The latest version of Microsoft's Equation Editor (and since ~07 imo) is quite good. Still a shame one needs to relearn certain symbols.

tanzam75• 12 years ago

The latest version of Microsoft's Equation Editor (and since ~07 imo) is quite good. Still a shame one needs to relearn certain symbols.

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.

serge2k• 12 years ago

I used onenote + my lenovo x201t for all my upper level math courses. It was great.

bskap• 12 years ago

The equation editor in Office uses the LaTeX escapes for the symbols, which makes it work reasonably well for the scientific classes.

petercooper• 12 years ago

Free, good looking, fast (so far).. color me impressed. And I access my notes on iOS, Mac, Windows, Windows Phone and Android?

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.

neves• 12 years ago

Can I access through a web browser? And from my Linux desktop?

awa• 12 years ago

You can access it via Office Online... go to onenote.com

kalleboo2• 12 years ago

Yeah, full editing through the browser, with semi-live sync to the client (I'm seeing a maybe 20 second lag?)

Karunamon2• 12 years ago

I would love to see this happen. Right now though, the sheer amount of fighting I do with the Office suite on Mac..

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!

FeloniousHam• 12 years ago

Re: Outlook search

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.

acdha• 12 years ago

This is basically the same as on the PC – Microsoft has shown a few signs of changing their internal culture but for a long time they apparently prioritized new features over improvements to existing features, which meant that most of the bugs / UI mistakes I remembered from Office 2000 (or even 97!) are still present in the current version. Something like switching to asynchronous networking would make daily life better for millions of customers but no PM wants to lead a release with “UI freezes less frequently”

stcredzero• 12 years ago

Microsoft would benefit from a separate division of small groups making stuff that's simple and "just works," then expand the company into the new products, as Macintosh grew from Apple. Right now, Apple is vulnerable in this regard.

toddmorey• 12 years ago

Love to see this out there, but it seems to suffer from the same visual clutter that I believe Evernote does. I love the OCR technology of Evernote, but I have the hardest time with it as a writing environment. Does anyone know of a nice, clean note taking environment for Mac that still supports links between notes and the occasional image?

FreezerburnV3• 12 years ago

There are a couple that I can think of that are in the same kind of vein as OneNote:

- 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.

simplify• 12 years ago

You're looking for Notational Velocity. It's free, open source, minimalistic, keyboard-centric, and extremely fast. I use it all day, every day. http://notational.net/screenshots.html

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...

otterpro2• 12 years ago

My life depends on Notational Velocity. It's the fastest note taking system I've ever used. The killer feature is the ability to go from search to edit instantly. It's so good, that I'd consider buying a Mac only because of it. I recommend NValt, a more updated fork.

auxbuss• 12 years ago

Thanks for this. I'm only a few weeks in on OSX and nvALT is just what I was looking for. I also hooked it up with iA Writer, which is only $5 at the moment.

I was looking for a personal wiki-type thing on OSX, but this is a fantastic set-up for me.

latraveler2• 12 years ago

Notational is so badass. I'm going to give OneNote a hard look when I have some time but I'm so used to Notational that I might just stick with it. I would like to see some additional formatting options in NV but the speed and UX are unbeatable.

vijucat• 12 years ago

Try View --> Full Page View. That hides the Notebooks, Sections and Pages and shows only the current page.

arikrak2• 12 years ago

When I switched to a Mac, I had to switch from OneNote to Evernote. I missed the various levels of structure OneNote provides, and also found Evernote occasionally glitchy. So it's nice to see Microsoft finally come out with this.

arikrak2• 12 years ago

Anyone know a good way to import notes from Evernote?

radicalbyte• 12 years ago

Awesome.

Poor Outline (http://outline.ws/mac) :(

jser• 12 years ago

I never knew this existed. With OneNote for Mac not supporting local or encrypted notebooks, I'll be trying out Outline.

davidcollantes• 12 years ago

There is no trying out on Outline. You must buy is ($40). Outline is relatively new, editing was recently added. As such, it is limited, and somehow buggy.

Hopefully the release of OneNote free of charge will not stop Outline on its tracks.

Walkman• 12 years ago

It cannot even handle tables yet...

thearn4• 12 years ago

Very nice, OneNote is a pretty fantastic program that I never really found a good replacement for. I used it mostly for college course lecturing, and it was great. Although I don't teach anymore, it would still be really handy for workshops and things like that.

vittore• 12 years ago

Have you tried Evernote at all? what does it miss compared to onenote?

rrreese• 12 years ago

I used Evernote fairly extensively a couple of years ago. It had a long way to go back then.

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.

rayiner• 12 years ago

Also new, Livescribe integration: http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/landingpage/ls3_onenote. Apparently MS has been working with hardware partners to build more compatible apps and devices: http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/17/onenote-now-on-mac-free-e....

jezfromfuture• 12 years ago

Pile of shit , can't believe Microsoft do this to us mac owners. It doesn't actually open windows one note created files so pointless.

weslly• 12 years ago

Looks and works surprisingly good for a MS app outside Windows. I hope someday Microsoft will also release a Linux version.

Haul4ss2• 12 years ago

They've gotten better in recent years, at least supporting OS X, iOS, and Android. I've used Office 2011 for Mac for a couple years now, and OneDrive works every bit as well as Dropbox or other cross-platform cloud document programs.

dpatriarche3• 12 years ago

I've been looking forward to OneNote on the Mac for years. I installed it and found out there is no option for offline notebooks; all notebooks appear to be synced through the OneDrive cloud. WTF? There's not even the option to encrypt notebooks in the cloud. I'm just not going to share all my personal thoughts and notes with the NSA. I'm disappointed.

batoure• 12 years ago

I installed it and found out there is no option for offline notebooks;

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.

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

What, are you afraid the NSA is going to steal your business ideas?

Of all the things I would not want spooks snooping, my meeting scrapbook is pretty low on the list.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

Don't be silly, local notebooks are a really useful thing when flying and when out of range of cell service (like camping, which is a great time for continual thinking without distraction). Without a capability for offline notes it will be less useful than if it had that capability.

dpatriarche3• 12 years ago

I guess it depends on what you keep in your notebooks. Business notes in the cloud, fine. Personal stuff I keep notes on -- medical history, financial info, etc. -- all in the cloud, possibly encrypted with some key owned by MS also in their cloud, living forever? Nope.

gum_ina_package3• 12 years ago

The future is in the cloud though, and OneNote has always (for the ~3 years I've been using it) worked this way. Everything is synced with the cloud.

dpatriarche3• 12 years ago

Which is great! My business is based on cloud computing. I totally see the value of syncing my business notes through the cloud to my other devices. But I need the option of flagging certain notebooks as private and not to be synced. So I guess I'll stick with Yojimbo for personal notes.

runjake• 12 years ago

  > The future is in the cloud though, and OneNote has always
  > (for the ~3 years I've been using it) worked this way.

No, it has not always "worked this way" and it still doesn't across the board. I've been using OneNote for ~13 years (since the 2000 version). And in fact, the Windows versions continue to support offline notebooks despite Microsoft's attempts to shoehorn people onto the cloud.

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.

lispm• 12 years ago

So I share my ideas with Microsoft and the NSA?

NO WAY.

tass• 12 years ago

This is going to mean I can't use it, unfortunately. At least not at work.

A lot of businesses don't allow sharing work-related information with other businesses.

clauretano• 12 years ago

and no OneDrive for Business support still. Really tough to sell any company on using that service unless they're a homogenous Windows environment. "It's kinda like DropBox except you have to always use Windows".

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.

Haul4ss2• 12 years ago

That's odd, because I have the OneDrive client for Mac and iPad. But I'm using the consumer version tied to my outlook.com account.

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.

orthecreedence4• 12 years ago

It's early stage, but try https://turtl.it. Works on mac. Encrypts everything. Offline mode is in the works.

Disclosure: I built it.

SquareWheel2• 12 years ago

I like how you can run your own server. Have you considered integration with services like Dropbox? That's my go-to for syncing data between systems. I understand that would make monetizing the product more difficult though.

rrtwo• 12 years ago

Same issue, installed and remove right after.

caiob2• 12 years ago

How exactly is this better than Evernote?

thecolorblue• 12 years ago

Its pretty equal. There is more microsoft integration (obviously), and its setup more like a notebook rather than evernote which feels more like digital post-it notes. Not sure how sharing/colaboration compares.

eropple• 12 years ago

OneNote's digital whiteboard stuff is amazing for collaboration. It's really slick and actually pretty fun to use.

caiob2• 12 years ago

`There is more microsoft integration (obviously)`

I'll take Evernote any day.

maaaats• 12 years ago

OneNote feels more like a piece of paper, where I can jot down exactly what I want where I want. To me, Evernote feels more like a collection of post-its. And this may have changed, but at least taking notes for math etc. worked much better in OneNote.

Edit: Heh, the other commenter thought of Evernote as post-its as well. :p

DCKing• 12 years ago

Evernote appears to me as a thoughts organizer - its focus is heavy on managing notes, and its note editing features are pretty sparse. For my use case, Evernote seems horribly over engineered, as it is my note taking that is complex, but the management of my notes is rather simple. For simple notes and reminders, Google Keep has replaced it completely (and I was a Pro user for a while).

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.

suyash6• 12 years ago

I've never felt safe with my data with Evernote. They have been hacked quite a few times and sent me password change email requests as well numerous times.

Plus, I've lost post due to sync error on Evernote between devices often, mobile app is pretty poor - crashes often :(

josephpmay2• 12 years ago

I really wish they included inking support on the iPad app. I loved OneNote on my Tablet PC I had five years ago, and I'd love to use it today, but I handwrite all my notes on my iPad.

parm289• 12 years ago

Me too. I think there could be a sizable market for a tablet or app that does notetaking and handwriting really well. The iPad seems limited by its touchscreen tech/software, which seems to be optimized for fingers and not fine-tipped digital pens.

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.

josephpmay2• 12 years ago

I use Notability for my daily note taking but also find Note Taker HD to be excellent. I sometimes use Penultimate (an Evernote product) as somewhat of a whiteboard, but I find its palm-rejection technology has gotten poorer with recent releases.

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)

bobbles• 12 years ago

uPad has been great for me for a couple of years worth of note taking.

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.

mcweaksauce• 12 years ago

Does this support drawing? If it doesn't, that's not very useful

suyash6• 12 years ago

It does, also LiveScribe integration, so if you have that pen, you can draw or write etc anything.

wil421• 12 years ago

Its been a long time Microsoft has done something that makes me happy but this is one of those times. People in my office use OneNote a lot, I use Evernote but I have seen others use OneNote and it looks more powerful.

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.

FreezerburnV3• 12 years ago

A big update for Office for Mac is also supposed to be incoming soon. (as in, a major update like Office for Mac 2014 kind of major) I agree that the current stuff is kind of janky and it would be nice if it got fixed, though. My wife writes novels with it and tends to have 10+ documents open, which makes it freak out sometimes and totally stop working. Hopefully the new version will work a lot better, not be too expensive (hey, they released OneNote for free! you never know what's going to happen with them next), and not change the UI around too much.

jonhohle• 12 years ago

My wife writes novels with it…

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.

kyrra• 12 years ago

Outlook 2011 for the mac is the first true Outlook client for OSX. Previous we had MS Entourage which was a lot worse than the current Outlook client for Mac. I have high hopes for Office 2014, hopefully it will be better than the current product.

ams6110• 12 years ago

It's not compatible with older exchange servers though. If you're stuck with that at work you're forced into imap mode.

jops• 12 years ago

OneNote 235MB, Simplenote 1.2MB

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!)

epochwolf• 12 years ago

If we are going to be ignoring features, let's go with the two options built in to the OS: TextEdit and Notes. Take your pick which one better supports your workflow.

skyebook• 12 years ago

Since they released Notes with 10.8, its pretty much replaced Notational Velocity for me. Search isn't quite as fast but syncing via iCloud is awesome. Now with AirDrop its super nice, being able to quickly send a note to someone else and have it show up in the 'normal' notes format (trying to read it in a text message is goofy).

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)

hokkos• 12 years ago

It means they have ported the Ribbon UI to Mac OS exactly like in Windows. They previous version had a different categorization.

yequalsx• 12 years ago

It doesn't allow use of digital ink on Mac. I'm quite disappointed in this. In older versions on Windows one could drag and drop PDFs and images. You can't on the Mac version.

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.

McUsr• 12 years ago

At the moment you can't even drag and drop a url from the browser.

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...

richardlblair• 12 years ago

OneNote was everything to me when I was studying. I'm so fucking happy it's available for Mac now.

curiousDog• 12 years ago

Nice! This and Visual Studio are probably the pieces of software to have come out of msft.

nervousvarun• 12 years ago

seems like they did okay here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel

xbryanx• 12 years ago

Not on OS X. A laggy crashy hell.

suyash6• 12 years ago

The whole Office Suite was the best product for quite a while. I prefer OSX alternates though now. XCode for C/C++/ObjC and Keynote for PowerPoint etc.

eatsleepdrink• 12 years ago

I wish it felt like it was made for the Mac -- hopefully they'll work on it more.

- 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

nickbarnwell• 12 years ago

The lack of emacs keybinds is because they don't use standard Cocoa controls; unfortunately it's endemic to the entire Office suite on Mac.

CGamesPlay2• 12 years ago

Interestingly, ^A moves to the start of line but ^E does nothing. Strange oversight.

stevenbedrick• 12 years ago

Yeah, I just noticed the "can't drag pictures in" issue. If anybody from the OneNote team is reading these comments, this is a pretty big missing feature. Mac OS is all about drag-and-drop, and a well-behaved app (especially one that is supposed to be a notebook-type thing) should be pretty robust in its d&d support.

methehack• 12 years ago

Meh. Against my better judgment, I downloaded it and poked around. Predictably, it does not play well others. Most notable, there is no export functionality. There is a 'Share as PDF' which is (a) not the same, and (b) broken for me because 'my email program is not set up properly' which is false. Hard to trust. (Evernote has a fine export capability, fwiw).

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.

jameshart2• 12 years ago

tl;dr "It's not the same as evernote". I think that's a good thing; if two products are identical, it's hard to choose between them.

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".

hippee-lee• 12 years ago

To provide another opinion: Apple does this to, .mac, .me & icloud oh my don't forget about the iTunes account now.

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.

HarshaThota• 12 years ago

I think these may just be the limitations of it being a 1.0 release. The Windows version has all of these features.

motdiem2• 12 years ago

Agreed - However, I'm still weary of the internal OneNote Format - I haven't poked around, but last time I checked, it was a big binary undocumented blob basically - so the lack of a proper structured export is somewhat worrisome.

The UI looks great though - if only office for mac proper could follow with the same quality, it would be great.

CGamesPlay2• 12 years ago

This is a surprisingly good offering from Microsoft. The quality of software here is much better than Office for Mac.

I am disappointed at the missing "Print" functionality as well as the broken "Email Page as PDF".

otterpro2• 12 years ago

No print and no export functionality are a deal breaker for me. I want to own my data, but unfortunately even my own data could only live inside Microsoft's domain. This is the vendor lock-in that I don't want to face.

ericcumbee5• 12 years ago

except for the fact that you can print and export in other versions of onenote. and this is a 1.0

Angostura• 12 years ago

No local storage rather did it for me. Everything has to be on MS Drive, as far as I can see.

gum_ina_package3• 12 years ago

Tagging is simply not how OneNote does things. If you're looking for that, use something else. Where OneNote excels is in giving you a tool to organize and manage your structured content. Personally, I prefer that paradigm since it gives you so much more control as well as allows you (in my opinion) to organize your thoughts and ideas better.

thomasahle• 12 years ago

Isn't folder structuring a subset of tagging? How can it 'give you so much more control'? Not saying that the extra freedom from tagging is only good, but it sure is more flexible than folders and tabs.

r00fus3• 12 years ago

I just want to chime in on how frustrating it is that you can't save Outlook emails in a standard non-mircorosft format that another mail client can understand (even Outlook on Windows) - apparently it saves it as ".olm" format (Outlook for Mac). Serious WTF here.

For this reason alone, I'm still using a Windows VM simply for the "real" Outlook for work purposes.

ruff3• 12 years ago

FYI

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).

Someone• 12 years ago

In my experience, moving mail messages between clients is best done via an IMAP server. Drag them to it in client #1, then out of it in client #2. That preserves folder structure and time stamps.

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".

unsignedint• 12 years ago

Tried it, and yeah, lack of export features is a deal breaker for me. I'm sticking with Org-mode. Well, I know this is a different animal, but then most I'd use something like this for structured outlines... (and I can export the contents to files that other people can use...)

jodrellblank• 12 years ago

Bill, where are you?

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

eitland2• 12 years ago

I use OneNote a lot as long as I'm on Windows or Android and for me it easily beats Evernote, mostly because of Evernotes buggyness.

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.)

herghost• 12 years ago

Looks pretty nice, but I can't find a way of getting embedded documents out of it yet.

mands• 12 years ago

Also worth noting that OneNote for Windows is also free from today (the desktop/Office 2013 version, not the existing Metro/Modern app). Downloadable from here - http://www.onenote.com/Download

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.

rwc• 12 years ago

Even if you don't use OneNote for Mac, hopefully this gives Evernote the competition they need to move faster.

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.

xixixao• 12 years ago

Finally! The OneNote client simply beats Evernote on Windows Phone (surprise surprise) and I finally don't have to use the online version that's even hard to log into, forget to use!

estebanrules• 12 years ago

This might have excited me four years ago, I've long since switched to Evernote + nvALT/taskpaper.

ericcumbee5• 12 years ago

The one big feature that is missing for me is the print to onenote printer driver.

baldfat• 12 years ago

Microphone! If you connected a microphone to OneNote it would sync the audio with your note taking (I had a Tablet which I used to hand write my note) Was the best thing EVER.

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

ericcumbee5• 12 years ago

my guess is that it relied on a Windows API thats not available on mac. stuff like that might show up again at some point. i did love the audio recording function.

suyash6• 12 years ago

thanks for mentioning those two awesome features, I can see them being very useful, didn't knew they existed.

cyphunk• 12 years ago

markdown forever. ive seen institutions that use onenote for everything and i find it gives me a headache dealing with everyones own structuring model. it's like myspace all over again.

nader• 12 years ago

How do you like our lightweight alternative? https://thinkery.me

moonlighter• 12 years ago

I wish it would offer iCloud as an alternative to OneDrive (and remove the need for an Microsoft Account) but I can see that MS wants to use their own services and get you to use them in the process.

s3r3nity2• 12 years ago

To be fair, you get a lot more storage with OneDrive (I currently have 28 Gb.)

k_bx• 12 years ago

That non-scrollable top-bar on a website is so silly.

thinkling2• 12 years ago

FYI, Mac App Store told me OneNote runs on Mavericks (10.9) only.

Joeri• 12 years ago

Then again, why would you run anything less? Even my dated mac mini runs much better on mavericks than lion.

migrantgeek• 12 years ago

Corporate policy :(

I really wanted to try this out but I'm stuck on 10.8

suyash6• 12 years ago

Of course, another reason to upgrade to Mavericks if you haven't. After all both the software are free!

malandrew• 12 years ago

It's so incredibly "windows" in design. In a typical OS X app the toolbar at the top would be greatly simplified and a lot of lesser used functionality would be relegated to contextual inspectors.

bdcravens• 12 years ago

This is pretty comparable to their Office suite for OSX (which admittedly is 4 years old, but the supposed 2015 Office for Mac will probably continue with a similar UI). You find this to be true with a lot of cross-platform vendors and products: Adobe, for example.

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"?

SnowyThroat• 12 years ago

It looks like Microsoft has added a Windows 8.1-style window snapping to the Windows 7 version of OneNote, which (in my opinion) is one of the best features of Windows 8: http://i.imgur.com/HhA2YaB.png

(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.

math0ne2• 12 years ago

Yea, I love this feature!

kalleboo2• 12 years ago

This feels very much like a 1.0 (no drag and drop? no paint tool?), but what I'm most excited about is their sync looks really solid - I can edit the same list in two places at once and it Does The Right Thing. I absolutely despite my current note tools - Notes.app and Evernote, since they continually F-up the syncing. The UI is also way cleaner and easier to understand than Evernote, and I'm a big fan of the visual tags.

__matt• 12 years ago

looks like a cluttered windows program. Not going to use it.

patricksantana• 12 years ago

It is a good movement from Microsoft. For the last couple of year, they have partially ignored the mac environment. Eg: Office is not retina display yet.

I compare immediately with Evernote, a daily tool in my case. I like the idea of concurrents for Evernote.

jmnicolas• 12 years ago

Microsoft is a bit late : on the MAC there are already quite a few apps that do what OneNote does.

But hey choice is good.

bryanh2• 12 years ago

We also just added this to Zapier in about 40 minutes with our developer platform [0], so if you want to create notes automatically, check us out: https://zapier.com/zapbook/onenote/

[0] https://zapier.com/developer/

jameslau-msft• 12 years ago

Would love to try this, but it says it's not yet available?

bryanh2• 12 years ago

It should be back! We have an odd cache bug on those pages depending on traffic patterns!

lecha• 12 years ago

Installed on a fully-updated MacBook Pro Retina. Crashes on startup. Every. single. time.

jkahn• 12 years ago

Maybe there's something wrong with your MBP, because it works fine on mine.

glennos• 12 years ago

Anyone else receiving an error from the App Store?

"Microsoft OneNote failed to download. Use the Purchases page to try again."

suyash6• 12 years ago

Bye Bye Evernote, Hello OneNote, we meet again, this time on Mac!

att159• 12 years ago

As a major OneNote fan, this is great news. Super fast import of existing notebooks too.

mimikbos• 12 years ago

Does anyone know if there is a converter tool to go from Evernote to OneNote? I've seen a few for PC but none for Mac.

chj• 12 years ago

Free app from MS? I knew it is too good to be true. You can't even create a local notebook. Instantly uninstall.

mukundmr• 12 years ago

Good first step. The integration with rest of their suite like Sharepoint, Office 365 will make life easier in a future update.

Introducing OneNote for Mac

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