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Last post Author Topic: OneNote now on Mac as well, +FREE everywhere, + Cloud service powered.  (Read 41022 times)

IainB

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Looks like Microsoft are about to change/disrupt the whole game for PIMs + Cloud services:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
OneNote now on Mac, free everywhere, and service powered | Office Blogs
March 17, 2014

When we started OneNote we set out to revolutionize the way people capture, annotate, and recall all the ideas, thoughts, snippets and plans in their life. As many of you have attested, OneNote is the ultimate extension for your brain, but it’s not complete if it’s not instantly available everywhere. We’ve already made a lot of progress in that direction with our mobile, tablet and online web experiences. But there was still a gap. People frequently asked us for OneNote on Mac, and for more ways to capture content.

Today we’re excited to complete that story with three major developments:
  • 1. OneNote for Mac is available for the first time and for free. With this, OneNote is now available on all the platforms you care about: PC, Mac, Windows tablets, Windows Phone, iPad, iPhone, Android and the Web. And they’re always in sync.

  • 2. OneNote is now free everywhere including the Windows PC desktop and Mac version because we want everyone to be able to use it. Premium features are available to paid customers.

  • The OneNote service now provides a cloud API enabling any application to connect to it. This makes it easier than ever to capture ideas, information and inspirations from more applications and more places straight into OneNote, including:
    • OneNote Clipper for saving web pages to OneNote
    • [email protected] for emailing notes to OneNote
    • Office Lens for capturing documents and whiteboards with your Windows Phone
    • Sending blog and news articles to OneNote from Feedly, News360 and Weave
    • Easy document scanning to OneNote with Brother, Doxie Go, Epson, and Neat
    • Writing notes with pen and paper and sending them to OneNote with Livescribe
    • Mobile document scanning to OneNote with Genius Scan and JotNot
    • Having your physical notebooks scanned into OneNote with Mod Notebooks
    • Connecting your world to OneNote with IFTTT

Go to www.onenote.com to get OneNote for free for your Mac, PC or other devices, and try out the new OneNote service connected experiences.
... (Read the rest at the link.)

This also would seem to be relevant to the DC Forum discussion threads:

CAUTION: Note the use of the cliché "...we're excited...". Google worked that one to death - e.g., especially with WAVE (remember that?).

4wd

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https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=37538.0

Better late than never I guess  :)

IainB

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^^ Well, I've been spending some time setting this up in my OneDrive/OneNote.com account, and I have to say that I did not initially appreciate the implications/significance of what was listed for the details and especially of the OneNote Cloud API (see list in OP).
Very impressive indeed.

(And no, I did a search but did not see/register that earlier post by @mwb1100.)

It's not just free, it also seems to have disrupted and transformed the existing marketplace (Google Drive, EverNote, etc.).
I also checked the date in case it was April 1st.
« Last Edit: March 18, 2014, 09:58 AM by IainB »

IainB

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For example (comment at OutlinerSoftware.com):
OneNote for Mac on the horizon...
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Mar 18, 2014 at 01:35 PM

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>However, it causes me to worry that
>innovative apps like Outline and MagicalPad are just going to die out
>because they can’t compete with Microsoft—especially if OneNote is
>free everywhere.

I agree, this is called unfair competition in my book.

40hz

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@IainB - Let's rephrase that quote you posted a tiny bit to make it more accurate:

When we started OneNote we (i.e. Microsoft) set out to revolutionize the way Microsoft can capture, annotate, and recall all the ideas, thoughts, snippets and plans in your life. As many of you have attested, OneNote is the ultimate extension for your brain, but it’s not complete if it’s not instantly available everywhere to Microsoft and its 'good friends' in government and business. We’ve already made a lot of progress in that direction with our mobile, tablet and online web experiences. But there was still a gap. People frequently asked us for OneNote on Mac, and Microsoft needed more ways to capture and analyse your content and share it with government entities and corporations to aid in their never-ending 'fishing expeditions' to idenntify potential dissidents and IP license violators - along with all the other businesses who pay us well for "targeted marketing data" which we mine from your information stores.

"If you ain't the customer - you're the product."

Macintosh users welcome! ;D

phitsc

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Exactly what I thought 40hz when I read the news.

wraith808

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For example (comment at OutlinerSoftware.com):
OneNote for Mac on the horizon...
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Mar 18, 2014 at 01:35 PM

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>However, it causes me to worry that
>innovative apps like Outline and MagicalPad are just going to die out
>because they can’t compete with Microsoft—especially if OneNote is
>free everywhere.

I agree, this is called unfair competition in my book.

The funny thing about this comment is that Outline uses OneNote- it was just to get an editing platform on iOS.

rjbull

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I've been spending some time setting this up in my OneDrive/OneNote.com account
You're a long-time user of OneNote, presumably the existing payware version.  Have you installed OneNote Cloud/free separately, or, how do the old payware and new free versions play together, please?

Jibz

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Looks like it takes up over 1 GB installed, that's impressive.

Oh, and also worth noting, it seems it installs the OneDrive app.
« Last Edit: March 18, 2014, 04:29 PM by Jibz »

rgdot

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^ Installed this 'new' free OneNote on Win7 computer that had no Office/OneDrive (it had trial version of Office when computer was bought but that was uninstalled)
Just its Program Files folder:

Screenshot - 18_03_2014 , 7_00_59 PM.png

4wd

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^^ Well, I've been spending some time setting this up in my OneDrive/OneNote.com account, ...

I know what you mean, I thought I'd install it to see what it's like ... it took longer than installing Windows from scratch ... twice.

Over two hours, due to the 1GB+ of download they don't mention, as @rgdot mentions above, and even though I selected, (at their recommendation), the x86 version I find that the x64 version is installed instead.

So, now to remove this bloated piece of ...

IainB

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@IainB - Let's rephrase that quote you posted a tiny bit to make it more accurate:
When we started OneNote we (i.e. Microsoft) set out to revolutionize the way Microsoft can capture, annotate, and recall all the ideas, thoughts, snippets and plans in your life. As many of you have attested, OneNote is the ultimate extension for your brain, but it’s not complete if it’s not instantly available everywhere to Microsoft and its 'good friends' in government and business. We’ve already made a lot of progress in that direction with our mobile, tablet and online web experiences. But there was still a gap. People frequently asked us for OneNote on Mac, and Microsoft needed more ways to capture and analyse your content and share it with government entities and corporations to aid in their never-ending 'fishing expeditions' to idenntify potential dissidents and IP license violators - along with all the other businesses who pay us well for "targeted marketing data" which we mine from your information stores.
"If you ain't the customer - you're the product."
Macintosh users welcome! ;D
____________________________________

Exactly what I thought 40hz when I read the news.
____________________________________

^^ Yes, eggsaggerly so. Me too. I have no illusions about MS' motivation. I can only recall a few instances instance of MS having really done anything for "FREE". There's arguably "No such thing as free lunch" with MS. Hooks all over the place. In marketing they are very often at best the iron fist in a velvet glove, but at worst they sometimes seem to omit even the glove.

Bit of a rant:--------------------------
Google arguably have already overtaken MS to be the most innovative, inventive and smart marketing IT operation, and in the process they have introduced a lot of technology that has been disruptive/transformational - most of it successful/useful, some of it written off as failed ß experiments.
However, MS has a history of releasing product to grow/secure/consolidate market share and obliterate the competition, where doing something refreshingly disruptive/transformational seems to have been almost accidental. I don't intend that to mean that their products are not good - they are usually very good - it just means that their products seem often to have been deliberately hamstrung to achieve just a marketing objective - e.g., lock-in - and not necessarily major additional benefits to users. Like Apple, I suppose.

A good example might be the belated introduction of Power Pivot into Excel. This tremendously powerful tool automates a large part of complex cross-tabbing and data analysis of your data, which becomes much like a set of relational database tables. It has potentially bitten off a H-U-G-E chunk of the BI (Business Intelligence) market - but MS could probably have implemented this ages ago, if they had wanted, instead of stopping at just the chronic vlookup and Pivot Tables for as long as they did.

Another example could be Sticky Sorter (an Affinity Modelling tool) from MS Labs, now pretty much buried without trace. It even integrated with Excel for goodness' sake.
END of rant.--------------------------

IainB

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I've been spending some time setting this up in my OneDrive/OneNote.com account
You're a long-time user of OneNote, presumably the existing payware version.  Have you installed OneNote Cloud/free separately, or, how do the old payware and new free versions play together, please?

Sorry, I can't answer that. I would have to do a lot of work to test the FREE only version, so I am not going to do that. My interest is mostly in using my v2013 with the API functions/apps.:
  • 1. OneNote Clipper for saving web pages to OneNote
  • 2. [email protected] for emailing notes to OneNote
  • 3. Office Lens for capturing documents and whiteboards with your Windows Phone
  • 4. Sending blog and news articles to OneNote from Feedly, News360 and Weave
  • 5. Easy document scanning to OneNote with Brother, Doxie Go, Epson, and Neat
  • 6. Writing notes with pen and paper and sending them to OneNote with Livescribe
  • 7. Mobile document scanning to OneNote with Genius Scan and JotNot
  • 8. Having your physical notebooks scanned into OneNote with Mod Notebooks
  • 9. Connecting your world to OneNote with IFTTT

So far, I don't have much use for 4., 7., and 8., but these are of interest:
  • 1. OneNote Clipper looks rather nifty, but I am still trialling it. I am hoping it will make Scrapbook obsolete. Just what I was needing/wanting. We shall see.
  • 2. [email protected] for emailing notes to OneNote. Very handy. Just what I was needing/wanting. Works out well in testing.
  • 3. Office Lens for capturing documents and whiteboards with your Windows Phone. Amazing. Potentially very useful. Just what I was needing/wanting. Now all I need is a Windows phone, and this is a good reason for getting one (so I can test Office Lens).
  • 5. Easy document scanning to OneNote with Brother, Doxie Go, Epson, and Neat. Could be very handy for me, using the Brother and Epson apps. Needs testing.
  • 6. Writing notes with pen and paper and sending them to OneNote with Livescribe. Not sure about this yet, nor whether it duplicates the functionality of something else - e.g., (say) Office Lens.
  • 9. Connecting your world to OneNote with IFTTT. Not sure about this yet.

Other points:
  • I noted that OCR is built-in to the FREE package - which is just like v2007/v2013. I presume it does indexing/search of the OCRed content/images as do v2007/v2013.
  • I don't know whether the FREE version does indexing/search of audio files like v2007/v2013.

By the way, there's some useful discussion on this over at OutlinerSoftware.com, where they are trying to identify some of the differences between the FREE and PAID components. It seems a bit confusing.

IainB

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...So, now to remove this bloated piece of ...

Ruddy heck. Poor you.
I haven't installed the FREE version. I assumed it would not be problematic.
I am just looking at using my v2013 with the apps., as described above, and so do not need to install the FREE version. I already have MS Office Pro 2013 + OneDrive, on the client.

wraith808

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Given that evernote desktop is a fraction of that size, I'm not sure that I'm even going to try it on the computers that don't have it.  That's just way too much space for what it does.

4wd

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...So, now to remove this bloated piece of ...

Ruddy heck. Poor you.

Considering that Office 2013 Pro is only 1 CD, this should have been a 50MB installer download at the very most.

Inline with the Win8->8.1 update, yet another FU by Microsoft to anyone with a monthly data cap or a slow broadband connection.

IainB

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^^ Yes, if the software installation file size is a critical limit for software acceptance (maybe because of disk capacity constraint, or something), then it might be wise to avoid it.
I don't recall seeing how large all the installation files were that were downloaded for MS Office Pro 2013, but it didn't take all that long to download and install. If the installation file for the FREE version of just OneNote (including OneDrive) is over 1Gb, then it seems a tad excessive. By comparison, the Win8.iso install file was only 2.8Gb.

Some relevant posts worth reading on The Microsoft Office Blog

OneNote FREE - posts on Microsoft Office Blog 2014-03-18.jpgOneNote now on Mac as well, +FREE everywhere, + Cloud service powered.

Jibz

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So far, I don't have much use for 4., 7., and 8., but these are of interest:
  • 1. OneNote Clipper looks rather nifty, but I am still trialling it. I am hoping it will make Scrapbook obsolete. Just what I was needing/wanting. We shall see.
  • 2. [email protected] for emailing notes to OneNote. Very handy. Just what I was needing/wanting. Works out well in testing.
  • 3. Office Lens for capturing documents and whiteboards with your Windows Phone. Amazing. Potentially very useful. Just what I was needing/wanting. Now all I need is a Windows phone, and this is a good reason for getting one (so I can test Office Lens).
  • 5. Easy document scanning to OneNote with Brother, Doxie Go, Epson, and Neat. Could be very handy for me, using the Brother and Epson apps. Needs testing.
  • 6. Writing notes with pen and paper and sending them to OneNote with Livescribe. Not sure about this yet, nor whether it duplicates the functionality of something else - e.g., (say) Office Lens.
  • 9. Connecting your world to OneNote with IFTTT. Not sure about this yet.

I've spent the past half hour fighting with clipping to OneNote. I hope I am missing something, because it seem quite bad compared to Evernote.

The little clipper tool that sits in your tray has three options when you press Win-N:

  • Take a screenshot - this gives you a crosshair you can use to drag over the area of the screen you wish to copy, no option to take a screenshot of a window only like in Evernote
  • Send to OneNote - sounds great, but only works if you are clipping from IE or Office apps (and presumably whatever apps choose to support the OneNote clipping API), otherwise it's greyed out. By contrast, Evernote will clip from anything you can copy from, it happily clips from OneNote as well :P.
  • New quick note - opens a little window with a blank note

1) I was trying to clip a single post from this thread from Chrome (I chose one by wraith808 due to the little banner). I highlighted the post, and this is what Win-A produces in Evernote:

evernote.png

I installed the Clip to OneNote button in my toolbar, and pressed that, after logging in to Live, and waiting for the desktop app to sync the note after clipping it, the result was this:

onenote_clipbutton.png

I then tried copying the highlighted post and opened a new OneNote note and pasted it, resulting in this:

onenote_copypaste.png

Opening the page in IE and highlighting the post and using the Clipper tool to Send to OneNote produced a note with the entire thread in it instead of just the selected part.

Searching the web a bit, there seems to be some hacks involving a "Print to OneNote" printer driver that is also installed with OneNote, but that would send the entire page to OneNote again, so I gave up here.

Regarding 3) Office Lens, it looks really nice, shame that it's Windows Phone/Tablet only.

I think the big hurdle for Microsoft if they want to compete with Evernote is to get over themselves and stop making solutions that only work with other Microsoft products. Providing a clipping tool that only really works with IE and Office apps is just not good enough. Making a fancy document capture app, and then only making it available on Windows Phone is no good either.

Playing around with OneNote, I can see some advantages when collecting notes on a subject, it has better freeform editing, where Evernote feels much like a bunch of post-it notes. But Evernote excells at clipping random bits of information for later use.

IainB

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@Jibz: Was this experience (above) purely from using the FREE OneNote download/install? Was it the 32 or 64 bit version?

IainB

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Test of the OneNote Clipper bookmarklet "button" that you drag to Favorites:
My test results indicate that this takes an image of an entire web page (a scrolled-window image, much like Screenshot Captor, but without all the palaver associated with the latter), but:
(a) The image is of the entire web page, regardless of whether you have only selected/highlighted a part of the page.
(b) It doesn't seem to work in Firefox v28ß (could be my Firefox settings, I suppose).
(c) It works perfectly in IE11.

The way I work, my objective is usually to save selected parts, or all, of a web page in HTML format and often with attached/nested pages/files.
Thus I rarely take such images/screenshots, and the OneNote Clipper is not of much use to me.
However, when I want to capture an image of an entire scrolled web page, in future I shall consider using OneNote Clipper rather than SC (if I remember).
So, I shall continue to use Firefox with the Scrapbook extension for capturing part/all of a web page in HTML format (having come across nothing better with a non-proprietary format, or greater reliability so far).

Jibz

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@Jibz: Was this experience (above) purely from using the FREE OneNote download/install? Was it the 32 or 64 bit version?

It was using the free version, and I downloaded the 32-bit installer, but like 4wd mentioned, it appears to have installed the 64-bit version.

40hz

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@Jibz: Was this experience (above) purely from using the FREE OneNote download/install? Was it the 32 or 64 bit version?

It was using the free version, and I downloaded the 32-bit installer, but like 4wd mentioned, it appears to have installed the 64-bit version.

Apparently Microsoft knows better than you "where you want to go today."  ;D

Gotta loooove that cloud! :Thmbsup: ;)

Shades

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It also looks like some (unnecessary in my pov) services are installed. I gave the download up after a Microsoft message mentioning I'm on a slow connection and redirected. But to my surprise the service 'OfficeClickToRun' was already installed and wouldn't let me terminate it, even after a reboot. It was a very active service as well according to Process Hacker (open source alternative to Process Explorer) this service was doing lots of I/O and I had to use SysInternals to make it not start at boot time. I used Process Hacker, because it contains extra ways terminating unwilling services and software.

I'm a bit obsessive in that way, besides anti-virus/malware programs I find that there is hardly any software worth starting at boot time. This keeps my boot times fast and grants me a bit of control about which tasks I plan to do. The constant drain on boot times doesn't weigh up against me starting an application when I want it to. And yes, I turn PC's off after shutting them down, when I don't need them (power switch on the power supply!).

wraith808

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Oh... and thanks for the post from the outlinersoftware.com, IainB!  MagicalPad HD is pretty cool and I hadn't heard of it.  The one for the iPhone isn't on the app store, though...

wraith808

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Ah, I knew there had to be a catch. I’ve been using OneNote 2010 on my Windows PC, which I paid for. I just downloaded the free 2013 edition, which was working just fine until I tried to create a new page in one of the notebooks that I keep on my computer (instead of on SkyDrive), and got a messages saying “Subscribe to Office to continue using this notebook.” From the “Learn more” link:
Anyone can download and use the free version of OneNote. When you subscribe to Office 365 Home Premium for just $9.99 per month, you get the premium version of OneNote, which easily integrates with the other latest Office applications and comes with additional capabilities, including the ability to:
Create notebooks on your PC. Create notebooks saved to your hard drive (offline) in addition to being saved to your OneDrive. Being able to work with notebooks offline as well as online is great for anyone with a spotty network connection or those who are always on the go.
Support your business needs. Your notes are synced to your OneDrive for Business, so you and your teammates can collaborate easily. For added security, you can password-protect your notebooks. And with Office 365 you get the latest Office applications, which means you get a complete note-taking experience, with embedded Excel files and added Outlook tasks, meeting notes, and contacts.
Record your notes. Why just write or type your notes when you can video- or audio-record them at the same time? That way you’re sure not to miss any important information. Perfect for students and for those important meetings.