I received my Office 2003 beta kit today, incl

[gsnethen]

I received my Office 2003 beta kit today, including OneNote 2003.

The basic design of OneNote seems good. However, it appears to me that some of the intended features either aren't working or are disabled and that this may be resulting in many of the complaints I've read about -- including "all the damn boxes."

When I draw a picture in OneNote, it identifies it as a drawing and places a gray box around it. As soon as I click somewhere else, this box vanishes, leaving a very clean drawing behind.

OneNote also draws a gray box around text, but the box doesn't vanish when I click elsewhere, which results in unattractively shaded handwritten text all over the page. I don't think this is intended behavior for the final product.

Based on the rest of the interface, I think the gray text box is supposed to vanish (as it does for drawings) and only reappear when that block of text is selected. This would make pages of notes *much* cleaner looking, although the boxes are still annoying (IMO) while actually writing text. I'd personally prefer it if the boxes only appeared when I selected the text to manipulate it.

If I'm wrong, and this isn't the intended design, I would probably never use OneNote. However, assuming I'm right, it may prove to be a nice product, although I still need to see how it handles large volumes of data.

I think that the engineers at Microsoft should look more closely at traditional paint programs for inspiration on digital inking tools. For example, it seems odd to me that Microsoft chose to use these ugly pen icons with colored lines beneath them when the traditional PhotoShop-style brush icons (that show the shape of the brush tip) are so much more intuitive.

---Gary

[markpayton]

I suspect that they are still trying to get the paradigm shift right in their own heads and what you are writing is INK hence a PEN!

<mindless technical ramble>I've noticed with students and our headmaster who've been testing out the tablets we have that this is really a significant paradigm shift. I'm betting that for most people learning to fully utilize a tablet as tablet is as disruptive as going to a computer in the first place is. So many computer skills to unlearn. (I liken it to snowboarding, where a rank beginner actually has a less challenging learning curve than an experience skier who has to unlearn all of his skiing behaviors.) The same could be true for the developers. </mindless technical ramble>

Mark

[markpayton]

I suspect that they are still trying to get the paradigm shift right in their own heads and what you are writing is INK hence a PEN!

<mindless technical ramble>I've noticed with students and our headmaster who've been testing out the tablets we have that this is really a significant paradigm shift. I'm betting that for most people learning to fully utilize a tablet as tablet is as disruptive as going to a computer in the first place is. So many computer skills to unlearn. (I liken it to snowboarding, where a rank beginner actually has a less challenging learning curve than an experience skier who has to unlearn all of his skiing behaviors.) The same could be true for the developers. </mindless technical ramble>

Mark

[yvilla]

I think you're on to something there, markpayton.

[yvilla]

I think you're on to something there, markpayton.

[gsnethen]

After watching a couple demo reels of OneNote "in action" and playing with OneNote (beta 2), I'm left feeling hungry for a more usable version.

I suspect that Microsoft intentionally made the background of all text/handwriting gray as a debugging aid. The presence of the gray boxes make it painfully obvious that OneNote does not yet properly handle automatic merging of hand-written text boxes.

On many occasions, I've been writing text, and OneNote will get confused and start a new text box. Once this occurs, it is more likely to happen with each additional character I write. Often, this cascades into a dozen or more gray boxes all partially overlapping each other.

Does anyone know if Microsoft is planning to release another beta of OneNote before it goes public?

---Gary

[gsnethen]

After watching a couple demo reels of OneNote "in action" and playing with OneNote (beta 2), I'm left feeling hungry for a more usable version.

I suspect that Microsoft intentionally made the background of all text/handwriting gray as a debugging aid. The presence of the gray boxes make it painfully obvious that OneNote does not yet properly handle automatic merging of hand-written text boxes.

On many occasions, I've been writing text, and OneNote will get confused and start a new text box. Once this occurs, it is more likely to happen with each additional character I write. Often, this cascades into a dozen or more gray boxes all partially overlapping each other.

Does anyone know if Microsoft is planning to release another beta of OneNote before it goes public?

---Gary

[andriesse]

I just read that OneNote will not be a part of Office 2003.

It will be released as a separate product around the same time as Office 2003 (Summer 2003)

Regards

Nick

[andriesse]

I just read that OneNote will not be a part of Office 2003.

It will be released as a separate product around the same time as Office 2003 (Summer 2003)

Regards

Nick

[Fenster]

Is Beta 2 a usable version ?

or should I wait for a full release- I am axcited about the application idea !

David

[gsnethen]

I would not consider beta 2 to be a usable version.

You can get a sense of the features, but the gray boxes make the product unusable in practice.

You can dim the color of the boxes by going to tools->options->handwriting and setting the writing guides to the lightest possible color. However, you can not turn them off... which is odd, because there is a View->Writing Guides menu item that looks like it should do just that. But it doesn't work.

---Gary

[Fenster]

I have tried onenote and don't see what the big deal is - how is it really different to journal ?

Have I missed something ?

David

[akelley]

The one thing that I find about OneNote is that it seems to be processor intensive. I find that on my Motion M1200 if the processor isn't at full power (933MHz) I get delays in writing as OneNote is trying to determine if I'm "writing" or "drawing". This is annoying. I also don't like those stupid text boxes that stay even after you're done writing. They're great as intended "writing guides" while you're actually writing, but should go completely away when you're done.

Of course, I haven't said anything anyone else has already said, so I won't go on.

All in all, it's a neat program, and hopefully the final version will be much improved.

[Big Lar]

akelley,

Betas freqency include debugging code. Perhaps this is the cause of the processor overhead. Or, it could be the typical office "bloat" that seems to happen with each new release. Funny how my old version of Word 6.0 running on my old 486DX2 running Windows 3.1 feels faster than Word XP running on my PIII desktop machine running XP. :)

--Lar

[akelley]

Lar,

Yeah, hopefully it's only beta "debug code overhead" that's causing this slow down. But it's amazing how code has become so bloated in general as system resources increase. I remember when programmers were taught to conserve every bit of memory, code efficiently, and the challenge was to do more with less. Of course, those were the days before the fancy GUIs and multimedia this and that...

[Big Lar]

Yea, and also before the days of hundreds of megabytes of memory in client computers! Being a software designer myself, I find it easier and easier to say, "Well, what the hell. They have a ton of RAM." It is so easy to fall into that trap. But, in MS' case, I think it is more deliberate. It keeps people upgrading to the latest hardware and keeps their hardware partner happy. They don't call it Win-Tel for nothing. :)

--Lar

[Dennis Rice]

I honestly have been trying to use OneNote for a while now, but keep going back to Journal. I like the better organization of Onenote, but get annoyed at little boxes being put around what I do when I don't want to! Journal to me is a much more stable app, just needed a few new features like tabs, etc. added to be a great app. However, having said that, I still like Microsoft's effort at getting a new app out there that takes advantage of the Tablet PC OS! Give it a version or two, it'll get better. In the meantime, communicate to Microsoft on your issues so they can attack common ones!

[tlaffont]

I have been using a Fujitsu Tablet PC since its introduction last year. While I love many of its features and its portability, I have been anxiously awaiting a "killer app" and I hoped, perhaps wrongly, that OneNote would be it.

I love the journal interface but am never sure what to do with my notes once I have written them. There isn't an easy to save, search, and access multiple pages.

The concept of OneNote is great but its execution is terrible. I have finally given up after two weeks and reverted back to journal. I simply can't use OneNote to take notes in meetings. It is impossible to write correctly using the pen. I often find myself so frustrated with it that I simply stop using it and often lose most of the text that I have written in trying to get rid of "those damn boxes."

I really hope that Microsoft is putting a lot of work into debugging OneNote as I simply don't think it is a usable product at the moment.