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Introducing OneNote for Mac

blogs.office.com

31–40 of 181 posts

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#31

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.

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.

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.

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#32
post #19

How exactly is this better than Evernote?

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.

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

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#33
post #28

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 ha…

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.

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#34
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!)

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#35

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.

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.

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.

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#36

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?

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...

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#37
post #22
post #13

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.

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

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.

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#39
post #19

How exactly is this better than Evernote?

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.

Re: Introducing OneNote for Mac

#40
post #28

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 ha…

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.
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