OneNote and Version 1

re: OneNote and Version 1

Omar Shahine — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 07:29:00 GMT

Software is of course, just a snap shot in time.

re: OneNote and Version 1

fred — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 10:29:00 GMT

Hi Chris. Thanks for your blog and laying out the background of OneNote. I used EccoPro for almost ten years and never thot I'd find another program that used the outlining design that matched the way my mind organizes information. OneNOte is getting there.

I appreciate the "meta-story" of this software and look forward to ongoing tales as OneNote matures and "new rooms" are added.

re: OneNote and Version 1

Bruce Williams [MSFT] — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 16:45:00 GMT

I'm also really enjoying these stories about the history of OneNote - keep it coming!

re: OneNote and Version 1

Brandon — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 17:59:00 GMT

OneNote is, I would dare to say, the most useful application we've used to manage ourselves and especially our "where's the any key" kind of clients. Looking forward to more, thanks for the blog!

re: OneNote and Version 1

Nic Wise — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 18:35:00 GMT

Omar: I'd say that you are right - just the snap in time is usually 3-12 months BEFORE release :)

Chris: Really enjoying the OneNote stuff - keep it coming :) . Its a product I didn't know I needed until I tried it. With a tablet, I'd use it LITERALLY all the time - I have a laptop, and I'm not comfortable using it in a meeting (yet), but I generally put my scribbles into it once the meeting is done. Way better than the 5 or so note books I used to have.

As for additional features? Well, its most likely there (I just need to find it) but a "paranoid backup" would be good - eg, export ALL pages, folders etc to a single file, and be able to re-import them. Keeps the paranoid in me happy :) Other than that, I love it.

Nic

re: OneNote and Version 1

Chris_Pratley — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 08:17:00 GMT

Nic, The built-in backup actually does backup all your files and you can restore from it too (Try help/Open backup). You can also tell OneNote to keep multiple backups, and keep them in any location (such as on a share on another machine's HD).

re: OneNote and Version 1

Christopher Coulter — Sat, 14 Feb 2004 05:27:00 GMT

Good post. But at the risk of beating an example to death...instead of a Chatlet with things “thrown in” why not a starter burby home with all the basic fixings? “Hallways to nowhere”, happen in Chalets, but not in starter homes. Chalets are for vacations, for mountain-view ski resorts, for special use functions, you don’t live in them year-round. A starter house, would still allow for remodeling, for adding-on, material for the eventual makeup of a mansion, but with a solid core from which to develop. If the 1.0 is so problematic, the market won’t trust a 2.0 or 3.0, let alone an ‘8 year dream plan’. You really have to hit the ground running, as good product feeds itself.

In terms of OneNote, it is a solid product, but the dual metaphors results in interoperability mismatches. OneNote is halfway there, but the Inking leaves much to be desired; looks good on paper, not quite there in real-world use, And its odd hierarchical tabbed-approach gets in the way of free-forming note-taking. And it needs better support of OLE objects, Ink functionality, Indexing, Document Security features, Drawing tools, API and etc. Welcome to the Chatlet, I guess those are the next extensions. Don’t get me wrong, OneNote is such a great tool, but I guess I was thinking in terms of all the extended Ink hooks and interoperability. But I am in the minority…as more laptop users. :)

re: OneNote and Version 1

Chris_Pratley — Sat, 14 Feb 2004 22:13:00 GMT

Christopher, I guess the point of my post was to show that because this product has to be designed for millions of users who have different needs, we won't be able to completely please everyone in the first release. That doesn't mean we please no one - far from it. In order to produce a product in a reasonable amount of time, we have to pick a set of functionality that solves a useful set of problems for a large enough set of people to make the product viable. I think OneNote 2003 does that, or we would not have shipped it. Does it have everything we could imagine? No. Does it have everything any specific user wants? Hardly. Does everyone find it useful yet? No. But, does it solve a large enough set of of problems for a large enough set of people to be broadly adopted in its first release? Yes.

Next time we will be more complete, and more people will say the product is valuable for them, and the current users will say it is even more valuable.

OneNote *is* a "starter burby with all the basic fixings" - to many people. Other people will require a spare bedroom - or a jacuzzi - and be astonished that we didn't include it since it seems so basic to their requirements. Can't be helped.

But hundreds of thousands of people already think it is pretty useful in its current incarnation...and I'm Ok with that :-)

re: OneNote and Version 1

Christopher Coulter — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 11:27:00 GMT

Oh I agree. And its extremely useful in its present incarnation, solving quite the range of problems and I am among those hundreds of thousands. I use it without fail. I'm a true believer.

However "Ink as Ink", I view as more than a "spare bedroom" or a "jacuzzi". However, the law of numbers is not on my side. But once Tablets become more pervasive, a dream at least.

Same letdown per Office 2003, in which tons of Ink functionality was supposed to be present. Tablet Office XP Pack was clunky and quite buggy, but everything was supposed to be fixed in Office 2003; Outlook tasks, contacts in Ink, work in Ink total. Ack, not there yet. Likewise with OneNote (as it is alone in its handling of Ink) but with Lonestar and Longhorn, all a moving target. But I have faith, OneNote will get there. I just want Ink as Ink, not having to follow differing conventions per each application. :)

re: OneNote and Version 1

Chris_Pratley — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 02:27:00 GMT

Christopher,
We also viewed "ink as ink" as critical to version 1. That's why we did a lot of work to get it to ship quality. As I described in my other posts on handwriting, we can do much better, but I am satisfied that we did what we needed to claim that we do ink as ink. You can handwrite and draw anywhere, you can search ink, you can switch pen colors, you can use a highlighter of your choice, you can use note flags on ink, you can re-order inked items in a list, etc. We can and will do more, but ink is in "the chalet" of v.1.0.

As for Office, we did a lot of ink work, although I do not recall promising "tons" - it wouldn't surprise me if some eager beaver did say that at some point. A subset of what Office2003 did was separately done as a preview that could be installed in OfficeXp, which probably made it look as though Office 2003 didn't do a lot that was new, but in fact we built all that ink functionality from scratch. "From zero to what you see" was a lot (e.g. writing on top of docs in Word, PPT, XL). And you will see more in the next go round. Again, it wasn't everything we could imagine, but writing on docs and replying to email with ink were our top two goals.

re: OneNote and Version 1

Christopher Coulter — Mon, 23 Feb 2004 19:41:00 GMT

Writing on top of docs, and replying to email? Rewritten for Office 2003, good (in fact great), but I recall doing such at Launch with the base Tablet PC OS. Hardly strikes me as that revolutionary in terms of functionality. To Microsoft's credit however, the Office 2003 Ink was MUCH more stable than Office Pack for XP. :) But yes, it did look (and feel) as tho Office 2003 didn't do anything new.

Writing on top of docs is just an overlay, how so very dull. How about interacting WITH? :) For example: Total page-layout with Publisher using Pen. Excel total Ink functionality; Excel symbol reco. Ink in Access, hello? Powerpoint control via Pen. Word copy-editing controls. Would be KILLER to have the copy-editing symbols (http://www.neu.edu/styleguide/appendix_b.html) avail. as a part of Office 2003 as Ink. And Outlook, hello? Tap tap. But the third-party, Tablet PC Enhancements for Outlook (http://www.einsteinware.com/Product.aspx?product_id=TEO10) helps out here, tho I want much more. Ink for Outlook Tasks, Contacts and Appointments got strategy taxed out? To me that would seem dead-central. The lack of such has moved lots of people away from Outlook (and Office) to Tablet Planner. And the Ink email is too static, zero interaction there too.

Granted Lonestar's new TIP moving along this path, but I am thinking more Grand Canyon expansive. :)

PS - Great blog. Don't mean to comment tit for tat; just expressing conceptual frameworks per se.

re: OneNote and Version 1

Chris_Pratley — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 03:07:00 GMT

Chris,
Again, it wasn't that Office couldn't think of those things, but we used up our whole budget implementing and stabilizing the coe functionality. Since the Tablet team had used a similar budget of developers of their own to implement a basic version of what we did in a throwaway add-in, the work we did seemed only incremental since we could not build on anything they did in the office pack. If you had never seen the officeXP add-in, you would have thought the work done in 2003 was substantial (since it was). We warned the tablet team that if they did a throwaway add-in it would make the office2003 work look lacklustre, but they needed something at Tablet launch. It doesn't always work out. Look for much more impressive stuff next time in Office.

re: OneNote and Version 1

kip — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 14:10:00 GMT

Thanks for blogging, keep it up. Because of this blog, though, I now think and refer to your product as "1.0 Note". hmmmmmm

re: OneNote and Version 1

Chris_Pratley — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 02:53:00 GMT

Well, I stand by the first release of OneNote as a full-featured application that is useful in many scenarios for many people. No application does everything you want it to, even those in their 10th version.

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re: OneNote and Version 1

Zaine Ridling — Tue, 11 May 2004 04:57:00 GMT

Uniquely, OneNote is one of the BEST first-version apps I've ever used, and it has been astoundingly useful to me. Like Nic Wise, I didn't realize I needed OneNote until I tried it. Ninety percent of the time, I use it for outlining papers, ideas, to-do lists, directions/instructions, and even books. What I didn't expect is its hybrid nature - OneNote is not a PIM, organizer, or such, but it can be made into one. Its lack of formal structure when first creating a note might be troublesome to some users, but after a short time, it turns into brilliance, when I realize that "I" get to organize and categorize my data, thoughts, and ideas, and I'm not forced into to pre-defined, separate structures or compartments inside a PIM, for example.

The one thing I'd want is a way to jump from one note to the next inside a tab. Perhaps there's a keyboard shortcut for it, which I'm studying now, but that's my first request for OneNote 2.0.

re: OneNote and Version 1

Chris Pratley — Tue, 11 May 2004 09:38:00 GMT

Zaine, if you need a shortcut to jump down the page list one at a time, then it is Ctrl-Page Down/Page Up.

To jump between notes on the same page, use Alt-Down Arrow

If you are looking for a way to hyperlink between two items on differnt pages, then you'll need to wait until next release...

re: OneNote and Version 1

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Good stuff in many blogs all around

Mike Fried's Blog — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 01:01:47 GMT

A collection of some good posts by other Microsoft bloggers to tell a tale about quality in software development.

Good stuff in many blogs all around

Mike Fried's Blog — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 02:19:31 GMT

A collection of some good posts by other Microsoft bloggers to tell a tale about quality in software development.

Chris Pratley's Office Labs and OneNote Blog : OneNote and Version 1

Relationship Compatibility — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 13:51:26 GMT

Let's say you manage a development team that has a few developers, a few testers, and a handful of Program Managers. You've already laid out a "vision" for a product you plan to build, and most everyone privy to the plan seems to think the idea