
Introducing OneNote for Mac - footpath
http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/17/introducing-onenote-for-mac/
======
petercooper
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.

~~~
Karunamon
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
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.

~~~
theshrike79
Also the search starts from the oldest mail onwards, which is really handy
when I need to find something that was sent to me a month ago. And my mailbox
has over 4 years of mails in it...

------
dpatriarche
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.

~~~
gum_ina_package
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.

~~~
runjake

      > 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.

~~~
s3r3nity
"shared Dropbox folder" is still the cloud, just not Microsoft's.

------
methehack
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.

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

~~~
dippyskoodlez
That's exactly the problem. I would expect these essential missing features
from a beta, not a release.

~~~
ericcumbee
and the last time i printed something from onenote was in college.

~~~
Karunamon
the "print" option often serves as a gateway into various things.. PDF and
other format converters.

------
wil421
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.

~~~
FreezerburnV
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
> 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.

~~~
munificent
> what does Word offer the novelist that a plain text (or rich text) editor
> would not?

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.

~~~
hnriot
"It handles large documents efficiently" \- and plain text doesn't? That's
just an insanely bad reason to use word. Vim can open, edit and "handle" very
large documents with ease. A typical novel - even one by Thomas Pynchon is
trivially small for plain txt. At roughly 300k words for a long novel, 400k if
you're Tolstoy, that's tiny.

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.

~~~
npizzolato
Most of the world doesn't want to deal with Vim's normal vs insert modes. Nor
do they want to engage in a philosophical battle about proprietary formats vs
plain text. Most people just want to get stuff done, and in this case, send
their work to other writers in a recognizable form that they can easily read,
edit, make comments on, etc. Word and other programs offer that to them. Plain
text and Vim do not.

------
yequalsx
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
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...

------
mands
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](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.

------
eatsleepdrink
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
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.

------
kalleboo
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.

------
gum_ina_package
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.

------
bryanh
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/](https://zapier.com/zapbook/onenote/)

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

~~~
jameslau-msft
Would love to try this, but it says it's not yet available?

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

------
arikrak
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.

~~~
arikrak
Anyone know a good way to import notes from Evernote?

------
goshx
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
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.

------
thearn4
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
Have you tried Evernote at all? what does it miss compared to onenote?

~~~
rrreese
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.

~~~
kellyhclay
I was about to ask "what is the difference between OneNote and Evernote" since
I haven't used OneNote since 2006 and am obsessed with Evernote, and you just
nailed it. Thank you.

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

~~~
Haul4ss
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.

------
rwc
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.

------
radicalbyte
Awesome.

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

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

~~~
davidcollantes
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.

------
baldfat
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

~~~
ericcumbee
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.

------
moonlighter
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.

~~~
s3r3nity
To be fair, you get a lot more storage with OneDrive (I currently have 28 Gb.)

------
xixixao
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!

------
rayiner
Also new, Livescribe integration: [http://www.livescribe.com/en-
us/landingpage/ls3_onenote](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...](http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/17/onenote-now-on-mac-free-
everywhere-and-service-powered).

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

------
toddmorey
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?

~~~
simplify
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](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...](http://brettterpstra.com/2012/09/27/quick-tip-images-in-nvalt/)

~~~
otterpro
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.

------
josephpmay
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
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.

~~~
josephpmay
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)

------
SnowyThroat
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](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.

~~~
math0ne
Yea, I love this feature!

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

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

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

~~~
migrantgeek
Corporate policy :(

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

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

~~~
nervousvarun
seems like they did okay here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel)

~~~
xbryanx
Not on OS X. A laggy crashy hell.

------
patricksantana
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
Eyas
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
> _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.

------
jops
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
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
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)

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

------
mimikbos
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.

------
glennos
Anyone else receiving an error from the App Store?

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

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

------
caiob
How exactly is this better than Evernote?

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

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

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

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

------
att159
As a major OneNote fan, this is great news. Super fast import of existing
notebooks too.

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

------
nader
How do you like our lightweight alternative?
[https://thinkery.me](https://thinkery.me)

------
jmnicolas
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.

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

------
cyphunk
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.

------
jezfromfuture
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.

------
malandrew
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
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"?

