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Microsoft OneNote - some experiential Tips & Tricks
superboyac:
Boy Iain, sometimes you blow me away. I have always avoiding committing to Onenote, but you make some strong points...with many years experience with it.
Right now, i've settled on a lot of random pieces of software to do everything, but I am interested in some of your suite integration techniques that you value. I probably use up to 5 notetakers and outliners on a regular basis right now.
IainB:
He has a reply to this post: http://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2015/12/is-onenote-your-21st-century.html
-wraith808 (December 05, 2015, 06:58 AM)
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Actually, that's not quite correct. I have had Taking Note in my Bazqux feed reader/aggregator for some time, under the category of "PIM-related". My feed-reader showed that "MK" had made a post on that blog: Taking note: My Zettelkasten
I thought it was a very interesting post, and that it covered the subject rather well, but on reading it I realised that the author (MK) had started to come to some of the same/similar conclusions that I had started to come to 7 or so years ago and which I used as a basis for my experiment. Yet here he was, apparently still seeking. So I thought it might be useful if I described the crucial aspects of my ongoing experiment. Because I had been solely focused on my own PIM requirements, up until then it hadn't really occurred to me that other people might be looking for something similar and might be able to learn from my experiment with building a Zettelkasten PIM using OneNote - an experiment that I sort of blundered into.
So I put some effort into writing and posting a comment, along the lines of the tip above, and was interested to see in my feed=reader the next day a new post in Taking Note entitled: Taking note: What I don't Like about OneNote
It seemed to be a somewhat irrational rant against OneNote, and it looked as though it might have been triggered in part/whole by my comment. I went to look at my comment to see what I had written that could have so upset the author, only to find that my comment had been deleted after I posted it - I know I had posted it, because I had to make it twice - once using a Wordpress signon (which didn't work) and once more using a Google signon (which did work) and I checked that it had "stuck" after writing it that 2nd time.
I figured that my comment must have been simply unwanted for some reason and thus was deleted - it clearly did not seem to have aligned with the blog owner's views at any rate. I don't mind if people delete my unwanted comments from their blogs - why shouldn't they if they want? So, I mentally dismissed the matter and, rather than waste the effort, I thought I would re-use the content of my comment and post it as a useful tip in this discussion thread, and that is what I did (I hope it proves useful anyway). I did not refer to any posts on Taking Note, or mine being deleted, since that was not relevant to what I had to say.
Now I see to my utter astonishment that MK has written a further post apparently referring to and countering my post in this DC forum, entitled Taking note: Is OneNote Your 21st-Century Zettelkasten Pim?
I don't understand it. Maybe the objective is to get clicks or something.
IainB:
Boy Iain, sometimes you blow me away. I have always avoiding committing to Onenote, but you make some strong points...with many years experience with it.
Right now, i've settled on a lot of random pieces of software to do everything, but I am interested in some of your suite integration techniques that you value. I probably use up to 5 notetakers and outliners on a regular basis right now.
-superboyac (December 06, 2015, 03:15 AM)
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I had avoided committing to OneNote as well, and I didn't like it - I was resistant to change - but, after forcing myself to adapt to it and make optimum use of the functionality that it offers and doing a thorough suck-it-and see job, I have been grudgingly very impressed.
One of the things I look for in software (an unwritten mandatory requirement) is stability.
My primary PIM was InfoSelect v8, and was always rock solid - still is. This has now become my secondary PIM.
In OneNote 2007, the application was stable most of the time, but would sometimes crash for no apparent reason, though seemed to recover with no problems. Over the years I have had some interesting problems which I learned from and have noted some of these in this discussion thread, but overall the application has been progressively improved and is rock solid. It has now become my primary PIM.
In OneNote 2016, I can still sometimes make it crash or go into a suspended ("not responding") state by overloading it it with a task queue, but it always recovers or restarts just fine.
I had one crash at the migration point between OneNote v2013 and v2016 and that left me with a permanent "cannot sync" (to the Cloud) for one Notebook. Only last night did I track this down to a single corrupted record - which was the only thing that was not syncing . The rest of the database was intact, and the corrupted record was intact and uncorrupted in the Cloud-based primary Notebook (so it was only the local offline cache that held the bad record). I need to write up the fix to this problem, in this thread, when I have figured out the simplest way.
I have tried keeping Notebooks all in the Cloud or all on the Client, or split between the two. I have had lots of separate Notebooks and then merged several into one humungusly big one. Nothing like this seems to upset the application or its efficiency. This is working with Notebooks which have by now (since 2007) become gigabytes in size, singly and collectively.
Though Client-based Notebooks are preferable for me (I am paranoid), I have to say that Cloud-based Notebooks on OneDrive probably offer, in theory if not in practice, a better guarantee of backup/recovery and better peace-of-mind, but I am having difficulty accepting this. The clincher is seeing how the Cloud-based Notebooks are so reliable, easily accessible and can be shared via the web, though the web-based OneNote UI itself is rubbish and nothing like as good/flexible/functional as the Client-based application.
By the way, the "$FREE" OneNote web UI (discussed elsewhere in the DC forum) is a cynically minimally-functioning product and should be avoided IMO. I would recommend that the user goes for the Client application every time (which necessitates MS Office), or not at all.
One of the biggest gripes I have with OneNote is the reduced ergonomic efficiency of the UI between OneNote 2007 and 2016. The present washed-out glary Metro colour scheme is rubbish IMO, and this goes for the MS Office suite of products in general.
I keep tabs on the MS Office and MS OneNote user forums, and am appalled by the hundreds of daft user problems with OneNote. They seem mainly all due to user error or inadequate knowledge/training in the proper use of the OneNote product.
My conclusion from that is that OneNote should not be used by novices unless they undergo or subject themselves to some training. The product has a relatively steep learning curve and is sophisticated but somewhat unintuitive, and can do far more than the typical user is likely to appreciate at first. I am still learning about it, and at the same time it is undergoing significant change and improvement such that a problem that I might have figured out a fix for yesterday cannot necessarily be fixed the same way tomorrow after a product update.
So, a lot of caveats here then.
wraith808:
Now I see to my utter astonishment that MK has written a further post apparently referring to and countering my post in this DC forum, entitled Taking note: Is OneNote Your 21st-Century Zettelkasten Pim?
-IainB (December 06, 2015, 04:27 AM)
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I don't get it. First you say that's not quite it, and then you link the same post as a reply. Meh?
IainB:
Actually, that's not quite correct
-wraith808 (December 06, 2015, 11:23 AM)
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Now I see to my utter astonishment that MK has written a further post apparently referring to and countering my post in this DC forum, entitled Taking note: Is OneNote Your 21st-Century Zettelkasten Pim?
-IainB (December 06, 2015, 04:27 AM)
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I don't get it. First you say that's not quite it, and then you link the same post as a reply. Meh?
-wraith808 (December 06, 2015, 11:23 AM)
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I had been trying to put the matter into its correct context, which you would probably have been unaware of at the time.
Sorry if I did not communicate that terribly well. I shall try again with a sequential "timeline" (as best I can figure it out):
* MK made a very interesting post about Zettelkasten and Wikis on the Taking Note blog.
* I made a published and (as I had thought) helpful Zettelkasten PIM related comment on the Taking Note blog.
* MK's initial response was a blog post rant about his dislike of OneNote, apparently triggered by my previously published comment on his blog. MK made this initial response as a response to my published and (as I had thought) helpful comment. My comment was of essentially the same content as my initial Zettelkasten PIM tip subsequently posted to this thread.
* Then my published comment on Taking Note was deleted (and I presumed that was because it was unwanted).
* So as not to waste the knowledge-sharing I then posted my initial Zettelkasten PIM tip subsequently to this DCF thread. In that post, I made no reference to the Taking Note blog.
* MK then apparently posted a second response as a blog entry on Taking Note, linking to my initial Zettelkasten PIM tip on the DCF forum. It's rather like he might have been following me and needed to "put the matter straight", though I had no argument with him.
* You referred to that second response of MK's as a response to my initial Zettelkasten PIM tip posted on this DCF thread. However, that was not quite correct, as it was actually more of a compounded response to the foregoing events (QED), rather than being just a response to my initial Zettelkasten PIM tip on this DCF thread.
As I wrote:
...I don't understand it. Maybe the objective is to get clicks or something.
-IainB (December 06, 2015, 04:27 AM)
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So your statement now apparently makes two of us that don't understand it for some reason (or lack thereof). It's absurd.
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