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Microsoft Releases Free Edition of OneNote
yakatz writes "Microsoft announced that OneNote, including the full desktop program, will be free for anyone who wants to use the program. A version of the program for Mac also appeared in the app store yesterday. This means that a native edition of OneNote is available for most platforms (including iPad, iPhone and Android, but not Linux or Blackberry). Microsoft will continue to offer a paid version of OneNote with 'business-oriented' features (including SharePoint support, version history and Outlook integration). The partial rebranding of OneNote also includes some new tools like a program specifically designed to make it easier to take a picture of a whiteboard.
Is this a signal that Microsoft decided that they need to compete with Apple by making their productivity applications free?" (Over at WineHQ, they're looking for a maintainer for their page on OneNote. Anyone running it on a Free operating system? What are your favorite alternatives that are "libre" free, rather than only gratis?)
Is this a signal that Microsoft decided that they need to compete with Apple by making their productivity applications free?" (Over at WineHQ, they're looking for a maintainer for their page on OneNote. Anyone running it on a Free operating system? What are your favorite alternatives that are "libre" free, rather than only gratis?)
Jeez, basic tools to use a computer coming with the operating system? Do they have any other genius ideas?
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OneNote is kind of like a heavy-duty yellow sticky program, where you can link everything together incredibly easily. It's one of the best organizational programs out there, for people like writers, etc. I honestly think it's one of the best products MS owns.
Its stored on OneDrive.
It has the ability for both. You don't have to use the cloud support if you do not want to, it can save your notebooks where ever you want. It has built in support for Microsoft OneDrive, or you can just have it save your notebooks in your copy.com drobox etc folder.
I know with OneNote 2013 for Windows, it stores the "master" copy of your data wherever you configure it to go. It could be on a local drive, a network share, or the cloud (if you default it to SkyDrive or DropBox or Google Drive or whatever).
Then, it always keeps a cached copy on your C: drive in a big cache file for improved performance. (For Windows users, it's found under C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneNote\15.0)
AppData is a hidden directory, BTW.
It can be stored on OneDrive and doing so allows you to access your information from almost anyhwere using almost any device. But it can be stored locally as well (or on a network share), without any cloud servers.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
OneNote is one of the most innovative software programs of the last decade and one that I have found particularly useful, as I have been using Windows tablets since 2005. While there have been imitators, none have been able to match it feature-for-feature.
I am unsure of the business logic behind the decision, but this is a big win for consumers, especially since Microsoft is now offering it on third party OS's, although in a much-reduced form.
Microsoft has had some really good ideas since Gates left, like OneNote and the Tablet PC. Their problem has been implementation. Companies like Apple have taken their ideas (like touchscreen smartphones and tablet PCs), repackaged them in a form attractive to the average consumer, and made billions. The fact that MS has so many innovative products that do not sell well speaks to some kind of serious problem within the upper levels of their corporate campus.
Yeah, if they're going after anyone, it's Evernote. And I'm thankful as can be about that; maybe it'll get the Evernote folks to actually focus on FUNCTIONALITY rather than just completely re-designing the app's interface once a year (in ever more convoluted ways). I stuck with Evernote through two or three obnoxious interface changes and I still have trouble getting text (particularly lists) to format sensibly.
On Windows, OneNote data is stored where you specify. You can save directly to your skydrive, to your library on your hard drive, to an individual folder on your harddrive, or to an enterprise network location.
If you're looking for libre notebook/organization software, I've never found anything better than Org-Mode. It runs across all major desktop operating systems (via Emacs), and is included with the default distribution of Emacs. I don't think OneNote even comes close to Org's feature set.
The Windows version of OneNote is the most powerful note taking program ever produced. It was also one of the first programs of its type, and offers excellent integration with other Office applications.
If you are using a Windows computer with stylus input and the MS Office suite, using OneNote is a no brainer. The handwriting recognition is pretty good. The Math equation recognition needs some work but is passable if you are a very neat writer.
If Evernote is already fulfilling your needs and you are not using a Windows tablet with a stylus, you might want to give it a look, but there is probably no reason to switch. If you do have a Windows tablet though, I think it is a no brainer. It was one of the first programs of its type and it is hands-down the most full featured.
It's easily one of the most flexible and IMO best products MS has ever produced. The problem is with the amount the charged for it it becomes almost worthless and it received almost no traction because MS didn't give a rats ass about it. Think evernote without the ever portion but far more flexible and with an office type interface. It's been around for more than a decade, had MS been innovative they would have been evernote, except probably far larger more widespread and in nearly every single enterprise. Instead the product was a redheaded stepchild inside MS.
But it's always been handicapped by MS's policies of not supporting non-windows and all the typical lockout and other games they've played their entire existence. It's because of this, onenote outside small niche's has seen very little uptake and almost no one knows about it.
I like OneNote because of the whiteboarding features, multi-user editing, and the click-anywhere/write-anywhere type functionality. I feel that the search functionality leaves a LOT to be desired, but IMHO it's more functional than Evernote.
Maybe they're making it free, to get some recognition?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The current Mac OS X similar product is Growly Notes, written by a former Microsoft Word developer who now develops Mac OS X Apps. I use Growly Notes extensively for home and work stuff. I put my status information for my projects, record what I do daily and copy in Specs, emails, pictures, PDFs, etc. You can drag in videos, audio files and documents. The program will sync to other computers running the same software as well. I put my tax information in there which makes it easier to do my taxes. I have college stuff for the kids, hobby project ideas, directions for how to do things, etc. You can encrypt at the notebook or page level and you can do various searches. I've heard from others that One-Note does a lot more. One-Note can sync to the cloud but we don't put work-stuff on the cloud. I don't put a lot of personal and family stuff on the cloud either. You could drag all of your utility bills into One-Note so that you can retrieve them if and when you need them. One Note also has Outlook integration and I think that you can drag in stuff from Microsoft Office documents for live update. At any rate, I'm going to move over to One Note from Growly Notes as I want a product with support from a team and I like that I can put it on Windows and Mac OS X. It will be somewhat of a pain in the neck to migrate my stuff over. BTW, this is a big deal. One-Note was originally designed as a planning and notebook tool for college students. Microsoft bought it and a lot of people found out how useful it is for the workplace.
I liked what I saw co-workers able to do with it and saw potential once I got it figured out so I kept at it. It took me a few weeks to get used to it but once I did, I loved it.
I was part of dozens (20-40) of projects at a time and it was great for keeping all of my notes about each project organized as I went from meeting to meeting. After I left that job (too many meetings) I didn't have a paid version of office. I've been more than happy with substitutes for everything else but have missed OneNote.
No, the free version is cloud-only.
Go on, try creating a local notebook -- you can't do it with the free version.
I uninstalled it after I discovered that.
No, if you try creating a local notebook with the free version, you're greeted with a friendly message that says that you can only create the notebook in onedrive.
Lol, you guys in your little bubbles crack me up... You remind me of "No TV" guy, always butting in to any conversation involving someone famous with "Kim Kardashian, who's that, I don't have a TV!".
[microsoft account] is required...
It's also required for every other comparable note app, too. Evernote pricing may have changed, but when I first tried it most of the features I wanted required the "premium" edition - which requires $5 every month as long as you want access to your data. That's for 1GB of storage. That microsoft account will give you 7GB for free.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I'm an evernote user (because originally the android app for OneNote sucked ass...though I just peeked at it and it looks somewhat better now), but used to use OneNote...
and while a lot of the Microsoft flame is often justified, not in this case. Get out of your bubble. OneNote is the one thing Microsoft got right, and its used by a _LOT_ of people. Even working for unix based companies, people with windows lap-top use it all the time, and those who couldn't run it before were drooling over it. Its fairly well known.
If anyone else has practical experience with why you would use OneNote over Evernote, I'd love to hear it...
I have actually used it, although only on my corporate computer that has the required Microsoft office suite anyway. It really is pretty handy, my use is limited because of the way it stores data (all one big data blob). Evernote stores everything the same way, though, so that's not different. Now that OneNote is free for lots of platforms I'll probably start using it a lot more.
I tried Evernote a while back when looking for a note-taking app for my tablet, and didn't like it. I don't know if things have changed, but at the time the features I really wanted the note app for were only available for Evernote's Premium version. $5 every month, forever, was just too much commitment to ask of me (didn't they once require premium for the PC version?)
OneNote, IMHO, does a better job organizing things. You can have multiple notebooks, each with multiple sections, and each section can have multiple pages. Navigating through these is simple and intuitive. Storage options for each notebook can be configured separately, which is handy for sharing a notebook - you just store it on a network file share (I guess you could do it with a shared cloud storage, too, but I haven't tried).
If I want to use cloud storage, I can use a Microsoft account, which has 7 GB of storage for free.
If you're already using Evernote and like it, I can't think of any reason to switch.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Whether OneNote is wonderfully organized or a big disorganized mess is not a property of OneNote. :)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm sure that you can keep a porn diary in OneNote. Approach your habit as you would an academic discipline, and take notes on videos. Annotate your dickpics. Keep a running bibliography of interesting urls.
And upload the whole bit to microsoft servers so that you can enjoy a seamless experience on phone, tablet, tv, and laptop.
Check out KDE's BasKet.
The problem isn't needing a microsoft account (i.e live account to sync settings), the problem is that the program won't install if you are using a non-microsoft account in windows 8, which practically means you can't use this on business machines.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Absolutely!! - Mod one this up; the most insightful comment until here, AFAICS!
Trouble is, being a 100% FOSS-person, there is no close replacement, sorry. Tomboy is comparatively tomfoolery.
Parent is also right about the prohibitive price. OneNote is the only software that I'd say is unavailable on *nix, that I'd really like to have.
My partner is an academician and for her, this software is a must.
Haha, the article says it will be available on *droid, so I'd have it!? Or the usual test or evaluation version? The article states 'free'; okay, we are in /., and in 2014, so the submitters (editors) are much too young to know what 'free' actually means; so it ought to read FOC instead.
I really hope for this to happen!
The problem isn't needing a microsoft account (i.e live account to sync settings), the problem is that the program won't install if you are using a non-microsoft account in windows 8, which practically means you can't use this on business machines.
Yes it will - I've done so (on Windows 8.1, anyway). You don't need a Microsoft account to use it at all, only if you want a "cloud-stored" notebook. You can store notebooks on local storage or network shares, too.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Microsoft account comes with NSA backdoor to your data
That's not a Microsoft account problem, though, that's a "you put some data on the Internet" problem.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Its a standalone program just like Word, with cloud hooks. You dont have to save to the cloud, you can save locally.
Good-bye
SFTP, lol. Yeah - that's totally popular outside the neckbeard population.
Umm... it's the internet standard protocol for exchanging files. Pretty much every server on the internet supports it. Along with FTP and SCP and stuff like that. If you have a web site, or a NAS, you can sync files using it. If a company makes a tool for sharing files, it should support internet standard protocols before they invent their own. The only reason to invent your own protocol to do something already ubiquitous is for lock-in.
If I wanted to store it in the cloud I would use something like Boxcryptor to encrypt it to a cloud drive.
What you describe is manually storing a file locally and coming up with your own way to sync it. That's not the same thing as what OneNote does. OneNote automatically syncs in the background, in realtime, which is what is so awesome about it. It's just a shame it only works with Microsoft protocols.
Outlook does allow you to store the data locally. If I wanted to store it in the cloud I would use something like Boxcryptor to encrypt it to a cloud drive.
Not sure what Outlook has to do with this.
This may actually be a good thing...and I can't believe I'm actually saying that about a Cloud Computing (tm) product...but roll with me for a minute; I think this may be a worthwhile system for them to be using...
1.) Onenote's first release was back in 2003. After over ten years of existence, plenty of people still don't know what it is. Onenote was originally intended to be the killer app for tablets (back when they all had pens and keyboards and were running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition...). Why not do whatever it takes to get it on Tablets?
2.) The Slashdot crowd cares a lot about privacy. Most computer users don't. Most computer users upload data to Dropbox and Google Drive without hesitation. The requirement of storing their data on Microsoft's mothership will likely be even less of a concern. If anything, users are more likely to be better served by a system that doesn't require them to be involved with file sync management hell, or worried about losing all their notes once "click of death" comes to a hard disk near them.
2b.) If privacy is of greater concern than one's money, it's possible to buy Office 2013 outright, or hit The Pirate Bay. The fact that there is a free cloud-only option, thankfully, did not preclude Microsoft from selling the locally saving flavor.
2c.) I haven't tested this, but I do wonder if it's possible to download one's OneNote notebook from the OneDrive once it's stored there...it seems logical for the two-step method to work...
3.) Onenote can really shine with the collaboration and seamless syncing. If Microsoft does it right, I think it will give them some good PR to have a Onenote notebook seamlessly work between a user's iPhone, Android tablet, Windows laptop, and web browser. I think that, if there were any particular program that lent itself to a cloud sync method of replication, it's OneNote - Unlike Word and Powerpoint, which use self contained document files, Onenote is more like Outlook in that notebooks are more database/PST-like single mammoth files. Sharing individual pages via The Cloud (tm) will be much easier than some sort of import/export version hell. All of this together, I think, makes Onenote more useful than just "a five subject notebook on a computer".
4.) Microsoft's other gain here is (potentially) an uptick in people actually using their whole Microsoft account - OneDrive, Outlook.com, and Office Web Apps. If Onenote is free in exchange for also using those other services, then I think that this method of "enticing users to get a Microsoft account" is less objectionable than their method of "enticing users to use the Metro UI". Even if a user never uses a single Microsoft property besides Onenote, they still get 7GB of storage...and a 7GB Onenote notebook is a rather large piece of data...
Bonus point: Google requires a Gmail account in order to use QuickOffice, even if you intend on storing a document locally. It's bad when they do it as well, I'm just saying that there's precedent for an application to still require login and that it wasn't Microsoft who started this trend.
All in all, as much as I hate storing things in The Cloud (tm), I think that the benefits for most people make it less objectionable for the masses than it is for us Slashdot folk.