Microsoft Onenote - now free
Strange, but the news slipped by somehow past Habr.
Microsoft's amazing generosity - one of the best OneNote note taking software is now offered for free! Since March 17, the product itself is offered as part of MS Office, and separately and absolutely free of charge, on a specially created website . At the moment, versions are available for all more or less popular platforms - Windows (both on PC and for phones), Mac, Android, iphone, ipad. There is also a web version. Skydrive is used to synchronize notebooks.
')
My acquaintance with OneNote
My acquaintance with OneNote began with the fact that I was tired of storing recipes in hard copies - in the form of papers, notebooks, printouts and other tinsel. I didn’t want to build my own bike, and a quick search in e-culinary notebooks showed zero integer and horseradish tenth results, so the task was expanded to “what is there to do for conveniently keeping records in electronic form?”. At that time (2009), the choice turned out to be small - either Evernote (only then appeared), or OneNote from Microsoft. Evernote immediately dropped because for my work I required constant Internet access (it seems like it still requires it, and even in the premium version with off-line storage of notes), which absolutely did not suit me. As a result, there was an unknown beast OneNote, which was long ago installed along with other office applications, but it has never been launched before.
The first acquaintance plunged into a light shock - and this is exactly Microsoft? The product clearly fell out of the general paradigm of the Office, both in design and in the approach to the logic of work (for example, as you lack the Save button? Even if you kill the process through the Task Manager, OneNote did not lose anything and quietly restored its work from the interrupted place , unlike the same Word'a). Well, as far as possible, the product easily blocked all of my then-wanted projects — off-line storage and operation, web-clipper, local search (including searching text in pictures and photos!), Categories, tagging anywhere and more .
As a result, after a while I was really hooked on this product, and, besides the cookbook, I had other notebooks, on various topics - for work, hobby, learning, apartment renovation, ....
The first acquaintance plunged into a light shock - and this is exactly Microsoft? The product clearly fell out of the general paradigm of the Office, both in design and in the approach to the logic of work (for example, as you lack the Save button? Even if you kill the process through the Task Manager, OneNote did not lose anything and quietly restored its work from the interrupted place , unlike the same Word'a). Well, as far as possible, the product easily blocked all of my then-wanted projects — off-line storage and operation, web-clipper, local search (including searching text in pictures and photos!), Categories, tagging anywhere and more .
As a result, after a while I was really hooked on this product, and, besides the cookbook, I had other notebooks, on various topics - for work, hobby, learning, apartment renovation, ....
Dicklaimer regarding Evernote
- Everything written about Evernote is my opinion, perhaps not always correct, and based on several attempts to make friends with it (the last time was a couple of years ago). It may be that during this time something has changed, so if I am mistaken, correct it.
- I know about the existence of other web sweepers (such as the Springpad, for example), but historically it happened that I only got acquainted with Evernote, therefore I mention it only later.
The origin of both Evernote and OneNote has clearly left its mark on these products. Evernote was born in the era of the boom of web services and the beginning fashion for abandoning fat clients (on desktops in particular) and this resulted in a one-sided development of the solution with a bias towards mobility. Cool clients on mobile platforms, a good web-interface, integration with browsers - and absolutely no client on the PC, plus the inability to work without constant Internet access due to the monetization of the service (traffic limit - a strong incentive to switch to a paid subscription which will turn into nothing when offline storing notebooks).
On the other hand, OneNote is a classic PC program based on the principle “all I carry with me” - a great functionality that does not depend on any external resources or services, local storage of all data, plus tight integration with the most popular office suite. Its disadvantages at that time are a continuation of the advantages - the impossibility of teamwork, the lack of synchronization between different devices (except for devices based on Windows Mobile, but it was already clear that the “comrade is not a tenant”), again, the risk of data loss in the event of Nezhdanchik in the form of a deceased hard drive ... In principle, all these disadvantages were managed by one or another crutches - synchronization of notebooks via Dropbox, third-party clients for Android and IOS, backups to external storage. However, with the development of MS Office and the appearance of SkyDrive, the crutches fell off and died off, and at the moment OneNote is practically equal to Evernote in terms of its capabilities, and has surpassed it in some places.
What are the interesting features of Onenote, except for free, work with all types of information - texts in different forms (texts, tables, lists, scans, prints), pictures, audio and video, handwritten input, total search for all stored information, simultaneous the work of several users ...?
- Firstly, as mentioned earlier, this is integration (and two-way) with MS Office. For example, in the case of Outlook, you can either send emails to OneNote, or transfer tasks directly from a notebook to the Outlook calendar, and in the case of Word, link notes to documents.
- Secondly, there is an opportunity to send notes to me@onenote.com, and they will automatically be added to the notebook. Unfortunately, Microsoft here is a little too smart, because Letters are accepted only from the email address associated with the Microsoft Live account (i.e., addresses such as @ hotmail.com or @ outlook.com). You cannot link mail from another domain, unless you have an account from the time when you could specify any mailbox when registering.
- Thirdly, integration with various scanners, like “iron” ( Epson , for example), and “software” ( Genius Scan ), as well as very exotic, such as “smart” pens .
- Fourth, all sorts of small amenities, such as the possibility of printing in OneNote out of the box. After installing OneNote, a “Send to OneNote” printer appears in “Devices and Printers”, after which any application that can print can send information to the notebook.
- Fifth, ... yes a lot of them , do not list them all!
Total, in my opinion, now Microsoft has released a serious competitor to the market of electronic sweepers (for Evernote, in particular). At a minimum, the product will be able to make competitors nervous and “shake the rolls”, and, ideally, will win the deserved love of users and market share *, because competition is good :).
* Some sofa analytics
I think that the ball with a completely free version will last exactly until the moment when a sufficient proportion of users of web-browsers have been “overpowered”. After that, monetization will be introduced (or rather, resumed), which was used at the time of the release of the OneNote client for Android - the first XXX pages / records will be stored in SkyDrive (and, accordingly, available everywhere) for free, and then either a one-time payment or a monthly fee ( the second is more likely). As they say, wait and see!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/216417/
All Articles