It used to be the Greatest advancement in Microsoft’s purchased software ever! Plus teams…
Now I got One Note which should be renamed “Several Notes”
There’s the one from the browser, the one from One Note student version, the pro version, the purple tab version, the gray tab version etc. and you can make any of them look different. You can have vertical tabs or horizontal tabs. It’s like Linux except there’s no actual functionality difference, it’s just so different that you can’t fucking follow what anyone else did on the same exact page. In the browser it might be highlighted with Roman Times font, yours might look like Arial font with no highlight but the background is light blue.
Anyway the app is a total trainwreck. It’s still very useful but it’s less effective if the thing looks and behaves so different that I don’t understand where we’re at on the page each time a member of my team presents it via teams…
and thanks Microsoft for not having a simple button to maximize the page being presented. 5 minutes off every meeting is spent figuring out how to maximize the God damn content followed by or preceding a good 10 minutes of figuring out which is the mic or sound card or monitor you’re supposed to be presenting on, followed by …can you see it yet? Can you hear me? Can I hear them, I’ll just rejoin, can you make it bigger? You can make it bigger if you remove the waste of space that is the big ass blocks with everyone’s name on them! Ok how? Click here! No, go to view. I swear I’ve noticed it under preferences! No this is the browser version! Why can’t It just install it on everyone’s computer and all presentation rooms? Blah blah…ok we’re ready to present but we’re 5 minutes over. Thanks everyone who came!
Thanks bye!..bye!, bye! Bye guys!.. Hold on. A sec I didn’t even come! What kind of company is this? The slide wasn’t even that sort of material that makes me come. Well fine bye! I’ll just come later to the Sears catalog…who was that guy? It will check!
All joiners leave the meeting, the stage closes it’s curtains abruptly…a woman still crying in the back corner…mhaaa! It’s so good because it’s true!.
The END
Yea… Microsoft has a history of doing this a lot… their “concession” to being a large software developer is that each version of an app seems to have an entirely different team that develops independently from the other platform versions (the best you can say is that they occasionally borrow good features from one another).
I recently got forcefully switched to “New Teams” at work which is a strict downgrade and doesn’t support half the shit the browser app (which, as a reminder, is a weird Frankenstein of calendar and email) supports. It also absolutely bombards users with unnecessary notifications that need to be individually muted.
Never have I appreciated Google more than when I was forced from GSuite to SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, Visio, etc…
I love how new Teams doesn’t even have a contacts list for chat anymore, it’s just your most recent chats. And if you search for someone, any recent group chats with that person show up first so you may still have to scroll to find that person’s chat. Oh, and we store documents on Teams so if I want to switch between looking through the document repository and chat I still have to do a whole bunch of clicks between the two.
I don’t fault them for when my project manager tags @everyone on the group chat with an important message saying “good morning and happy Monday” though. I wish I were kidding.
I like how the teams team wasted hours making a new notification popup system instead of using the default system on the user’s os. They wasted time to just make a worse thing that’s also buggy. If users send too many messages at once, you end up having notification popups stacking on top of each other until it completely fills your screen.
Software teams solved this a fucking eternity ago through shared component and design libraries. Meanwhile, all of these FAANG companies are out here pushing surveillance tools that are all clearly built by siloed teams with zero collaboration.
Even Microsoft did. Their Office Application libraries are phenomenal.
Scriptable object based libraries that work and do so cross platform. It’s a thing of beauty and I’ve never seen MS ever do anything even remotely like it again.
Asp MVC. Nope, different.
Windows code API’s. Nope, different.
But office… Excel.Sheets etc. [chef’s kiss]
I think it’s just part of this “move fast” mentality. We’re at a point where we’re forced to move so quickly that things get thrown out the window just to meet a deadline.
I think we’re discovering where “move fast” plus “personal information” results in a penalty.
Unfortunately, the current penalties are insufficient.
Microsoft doesn’t know how to make/manage/deploy software at all. They are clueless to their own products and the problems THEY cause, and their information the public is ALWAYS outdated and a convoluted mess of bullshit…but it’s somehow out fault for not knowing
They’ll do an outlook: cut features from the desktop version until it’s exactly the same as the web version, because every interface needs to be a facsimile of the web, right?
but they will still push the desktop version hard in the most annoying way possible on the web version.
because reasons.
It’s a lot faster to stick an existing web ui into an electron app than make a true native app.
I remember liking it 10 years ago. Now, it’s not only way worse: it simply got surpassed by all the markdown note-taking apps (Joplin, Logseq, …) and xournalpp (or even rnote).
Moral of the story: try rnote. It’s good.
Rnote Looks really interesting. Was searching for that. Thanks.
I feel ya. It feels like software designed by people who have never used OneNote.
What did you expect? Its Microsoft…
It seems that they intend Microsoft Loop to be the collaborative notes app now.
It’s replaced OneNote as the meeting notes app and it has more flexible access control.
Currently they also only have one version as it’s a progressive web app (that might change with time though).
I might be using it wrong, but One Note was king in college and still is for my D&D session notes now too. I never present them to anyone though.
I’ve been using it for forever and also used it for DnD, based off of…what’s his name, one of the bigger DM guys on YT. It works great.
I’m using Obsidian for work since cloud note apps are blocked and I don’t like it as much. It works, but I’m not as wild about it.
One issue I recently had with one note is that I wanted to export a section to share on the web and wasn’t able to do it and the web interface doesn’t really let me do the management that I need. My work machine is my main one right now, so I’m stuck with what I’ve got. That all being said, aside from privacy, there isn’t really a direct reason to change.
But I’m not super wild that MS is reading my notes since I’ve also used it as a diary at points. I’ll have to figure that bit out later.
Microsoft Loop is the way to go nowadays.
I lost a bunch of journals somehow when they made one of the bigger changes to One Note. I have no idea what happened and maybe it was my fault for not backup my data better, but I lost years of journals that I couldn’t recover (i wasted weeks trying).
e13n
Notesnook ftw
That comment… Oh my, I want to joke and talk someone like you! Now!
Microsoft products are always so hit or miss. I find Outlook to be a lot better than Gmail, but at the same time it lacks in so many places.
