6 ms·

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.

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.

jameshart 13y 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 13y 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.
  - jameshart 13y ago
    Oh yes, Apple is a serial offender too - my iPhone is stuck in a world where the iTunes store account and iCloud account are on separate apple IDs, and I've got no idea how they relate to the email addresses I can be reached on facetime through. Neither of them are associated with my apple developer account, either. I'm sure this identity stuff shouldn't be so hard.
HarshaThota 13y ago
I think these may just be the limitations of it being a 1.0 release. The Windows version has all of these features.
- motdiem 13y 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.
  - cobalt 13y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_OneNote#File_format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_OneNote#File_format
  - motdiem 13y ago
    Thanks cobalt for the link - since 2010 it has migrated to an XML format [1] - which is documented albeit not really human readable. 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).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd924743(v=office.12...
    - scrumper 13y ago
      Have a look in ~Library/Containers/com.microsoft.onenote.mac/Data/Library/Application Support/Microsoft User Data/OneNote/15.0/OneNoteOfflineCache_Files 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.
    - dunham 13y ago
      All I see locally is a ".onecache" file - a binary file that appears to contain the notes themselves, and a directory named "OneNoteOfflineCache_Files" of attachments (embedded images, etc.) I don't recognize the header on the onecache file, so I'm guessing it's proprietary.
CGamesPlay 13y 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".
otterpro 13y 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.
- ericcumbee 13y ago
  except for the fact that you can print and export in other versions of onenote. and this is a 1.0
  - r00fus 13y ago
    Well I think otterpro's comment still stands. When OneNote for Mac grows up, it might require another look.
  - dippyskoodlez 13y ago
    That's exactly the problem. I would expect these essential missing features from a beta, not a release.
    - ericcumbee 13y ago
      how is it essential? I've gotten plenty of work done using onenote on my surface pro and it's been months since I've needed to open a onenote file from the filesystem.
    - ericcumbee 13y ago
      and the last time i printed something from onenote was in college.
      - Karunamon 13y ago
        the "print" option often serves as a gateway into various things.. PDF and other format converters.
- Angostura 13y ago
gum_ina_package 13y 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 13y 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.
r00fus 13y 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.
- ruff 13y 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).
  - r00fus 13y ago
    Huge thanks on that, ruff. This definitely thrills me :) Just wondering why the hell isn't this part of the export menu... great feature, undiscoverable as hell.
    - ruff 13y ago
      I was the PM who led Outlook for Mac 2011; so I know many, many of those tricks. We rebuilt the thing in Cocoa with an entirely new Exchange client codebase—it was a beast of a project done in a fairly short period of time. 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).
unsignedint 13y 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 13y 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 http://www.reddit.com/r/iama
eitland 13y 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.)

jameshart 13y 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 13y 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.
- jameshart 13y ago
  Oh yes, Apple is a serial offender too - my iPhone is stuck in a world where the iTunes store account and iCloud account are on separate apple IDs, and I've got no idea how they relate to the email addresses I can be reached on facetime through. Neither of them are associated with my apple developer account, either. I'm sure this identity stuff shouldn't be so hard.

HarshaThota 13y ago

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

motdiem 13y 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.
- cobalt 13y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_OneNote#File_format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_OneNote#File_format
- motdiem 13y ago
  Thanks cobalt for the link - since 2010 it has migrated to an XML format [1] - which is documented albeit not really human readable. 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).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd924743(v=office.12...
  - scrumper 13y ago
    Have a look in ~Library/Containers/com.microsoft.onenote.mac/Data/Library/Application Support/Microsoft User Data/OneNote/15.0/OneNoteOfflineCache_Files 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.
  - dunham 13y ago
    All I see locally is a ".onecache" file - a binary file that appears to contain the notes themselves, and a directory named "OneNoteOfflineCache_Files" of attachments (embedded images, etc.) I don't recognize the header on the onecache file, so I'm guessing it's proprietary.

CGamesPlay 13y 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".

otterpro 13y 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.

ericcumbee 13y ago
except for the fact that you can print and export in other versions of onenote. and this is a 1.0
- r00fus 13y ago
  Well I think otterpro's comment still stands. When OneNote for Mac grows up, it might require another look.
- dippyskoodlez 13y ago
  That's exactly the problem. I would expect these essential missing features from a beta, not a release.
  - ericcumbee 13y ago
    how is it essential? I've gotten plenty of work done using onenote on my surface pro and it's been months since I've needed to open a onenote file from the filesystem.
  - ericcumbee 13y ago
    and the last time i printed something from onenote was in college.
    - Karunamon 13y ago
      the "print" option often serves as a gateway into various things.. PDF and other format converters.
Angostura 13y ago

gum_ina_package 13y 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 13y 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.

r00fus 13y 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.

ruff 13y 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).
- r00fus 13y ago
  Huge thanks on that, ruff. This definitely thrills me :) Just wondering why the hell isn't this part of the export menu... great feature, undiscoverable as hell.
  - ruff 13y ago
    I was the PM who led Outlook for Mac 2011; so I know many, many of those tricks. We rebuilt the thing in Cocoa with an entirely new Exchange client codebase—it was a beast of a project done in a fairly short period of time. 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).

unsignedint 13y 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 13y 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 http://www.reddit.com/r/iama

eitland 13y 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.)