Microsoft OneNote

OneNote: a great foundation for collaboration

Comments: OneNote has become central to our documentation at our organization. Especially after the integration between OneNote and Office 365 Groups and then Teams, the addition of the Collaboration Space and Documentation Library has helped us create central repositories that can be worked on simultaneously and frequently. Administration can collaborate and share materials and use the private spaces for groups members to take their own notes or have individual content distributed to them to work on or reflect upon.
I love this product and since growing with it in my career have also expanded to use it in my personal life for notetaking, organization, and planning.

Pros:

The notebook structure was very appealing to me when I first started using OneNote. Once I unbound myself from the concept of creating everything to translate to a printed letter size piece of paper it really took off. You can create your notebook and its contents to directly translate to what if it had to be printed. But you can also transform it to a fully interactive collection. With links to various other locations in the same notebook, other locations and materials on the internet, and even embedding videos and other documents directly in the pages of the notebook you can make the reach of the content presented to extend beyond the boundries of the document itself.

Cons:

The different versions - When OneNote transitioned to the web, it was during the focus on the Metro UI in Windows 8 and it suffered for it. The simplicity of what the web version could do was crippled by the ability of the internet browsers at the time. Over time it has increased in parity between the desktop version and the web, however - the Metro UI designed app has lingered and its design has stayed truer to the web version than the original desktop version. It is getting harder to find the desktop version that has content central and navigation to the left, top, and right sides. The web, mobile app, and "for windows 10" versions make navigation subjectively more complex when you have extensively robust notebooks.

Experience in using OneNote for over 3 years daily

Pros:

OneNote is an easy to use app for notes taking and sharing. One of the advantages is that it is integrated with Outlook that you can create tasks on OneNote, and it will be created the same task in Outlook automatically. Another advantage is that you don't have to save the information you input into OneNote manually, the app will save all the changes you made and sync them with the folder in your harddiske or OneDrive. With this function, you don't need to concern of any unsaved information .

Cons:

When the notebook you created in OneNote gets bigger in size, it happens all the time that the app will not be responding, and it seems like that there is no solution for it. I really hope that MIcrosoft will fix this problem soon. It's been always a nightmare when the app isn't responding while i'm heavily relied on this app for recording all my tasks and activities with customers.

Always weak on version history and restoration, now it's abysmal. Go at your own risk!

Comments: Onenote promises to be a great collaboration tool, especially integrated into Teams, but unfortunately, falls short of the mark in the most sensitive of areas, synchronization, back up, version history and restore across multiple users and platforms. On more than one occasion Onenote has lost whole sections of pages in the synch process across platforms and users. Sections that simply disappeared even from the restore and deleted pages sections. That's weeks of labor with clients who are no longer available for that portion of the project work.

Pros:

Interface is fantastic. Collaboration across users was great. But with Android, Teams, Desktop and Web versions, significant behind-the-scenes back up, synchronization, and restoration have all been dangerously degraded.

Cons:

Back up, restore and version history features, including sharing pages, have all been degraded functions making Onenote extremely vulnerable to crashes and data loss. Now, the tools only work reliably for the single user on a single machine.

Microsoft OneNote - Handy note-taking tool for personal and professional use

Comments: Overall, I love Microsoft OneNote to keep track of important things to note throughout the day, everyday--whether personal or professional. It is also a good way to keep study notes for topics that are interesting where you don't necessarily to access the information from a website.

Pros:

I like that I can copy and paste from websites and it can keep the same format as the website. Sometimes it doesn't copy it the same and it doesn't look that great. It is around 95% accurate in my experience in keeping the same format.

Cons:

Even with many sections, I have too many pages. The search feature does help and alphabetizing the page names does help. It seems alphabetizing works on the desktop but not mobile.

Digital notebook

Comments: It is good. When you have a product that does what promise to do, you cannot be unhappy. The product is also flexible. Different from other products, it enables efficient collaboration: you can easily share notes to your colleagues and maintain always the historical data.

Pros:

The facility to take notes and share with other people is the selling point of the product. If you need a tool for doing that, OneNote is the right one. You can also organize simply your notes, write documents and add pictures/external content (the possibility to add media is another important feature to consider in the product). You can divide your notes/documents in sections/pages, this helps on searching for what you need. For example, you can have an entire section dedicated to a specific customer, in this section having the notes organized by date.

Cons:

There are no particular pain points. I heard some complaints about the navigation but it follows the standard of other Microsoft products. I would only improve the search feature, in particular from a look and feel perspective.