Free, good looking, fast (so far).. color me impressed. And I access my notes on iOS, Mac, Windows, Windows Phone <i>and</i> Android?<p>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.
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.
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).<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>Please fix the problems with Office for Mac before you add new products.
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.<p>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.
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 - <a href="http://www.onenote.com/Download" rel="nofollow">http://www.onenote.com/Download</a><p>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.
I wish it felt like it was made for the Mac -- hopefully they'll work on it more.<p>- Standard Mac keyboard shortcuts don't work (ie. ctrl-a & ctrl-e to move to beginning and end of lines)<p>- Can't drag a picture from the Finder into the OneNote
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.
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.
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: <a href="https://zapier.com/zapbook/onenote/" rel="nofollow">https://zapier.com/zapbook/onenote/</a><p>[0] <a href="https://zapier.com/developer/" rel="nofollow">https://zapier.com/developer/</a>
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.
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.
Even if you don't use OneNote for Mac, hopefully this gives Evernote the competition they need to move faster.<p>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.
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.<p>OneNote will even search handwritten notes and audio.<p>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
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.
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!
Also new, Livescribe integration: <a href="http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/landingpage/ls3_onenote" rel="nofollow">http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/landingpage/ls3_onenote</a>. Apparently MS has been working with hardware partners to build more compatible apps and devices: <a href="http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/17/onenote-now-on-mac-free-everywhere-and-service-powered" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/17/onenote-now-on-mac-free-e...</a>.
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?
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.
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: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/HhA2YaB.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/HhA2YaB.png</a><p>(This may have existed for a while, but I just discovered it today.)<p>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.
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.<p>I compare immediately with Evernote, a daily tool in my case. I like the idea of concurrents for Evernote.
OneNote 235MB, Simplenote 1.2MB<p>I know there's no comparison in functionality, but if words are all you need then that's 233.8MB less bloat!<p>(If benhuberman's listening - please give us font options!)
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.
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.