Windows 10 OneNote app sucks.

I added a comment to that article at the same time I replied to you earlier.

So this guy is a young turk who (probably) has not worked for any other company. He's a smartphone addict rather than a PC user, which is why he favored the UWP version, even if it was massively worse than the desktop version.  Shame.

I still think that blog was written for him by marketing. It just has too many happy words.

That's a really good point about his background. People like that don't grasp that you can't just make everything universal simply because they're fine with how they use it. Their needs are totally different. A great example is that I'm very happy with the OneNote app on my iPhone and iPad -- but I never create content on it (it's all created from the desktop and I use it for reference when needed). It's not often -- but it's nice to have. But I can't operate within an environment like that -- MOBILE SHOULD STAY IN MOBILE!

As you no doubt know -- that's where the fiasco of removing the Start button came from. What I also find maddening is that they chose OneNote to do this. What do you think would have happened had they pulled this stunt with the rest of Office?

Oh yeah -- OUTRAGE that would far surpass the Start button. The only reason there's not more outrage over OneNote is because it never caught on like the rest of Office. I partially blame Microsoft for terrible marking on that -- because a lot of people just didn't get it. But I also blame users for being stuck in their ways.

Case in point: When I saw a colleague using OneNote, in a split-second it was self-evident that OneNote was a mighty powerful tool with all kinds of possibilities. Mountains of material in over 40 notebooks later -- I could hardly function without it. As I've written before -- i'd love to see these apologists try to navigate through that amount of material on their piece of junk.

You could very well be right about that piece as marketing material. ;o) "happy words" is right on the money (which is what this is all about in the first place).

I added a comment to that article at the same time I replied to you earlier.

So this guy is a young turk who (probably) has not worked for any other company. He's a smartphone addict rather than a PC user, which is why he favored the UWP version, even if it was massively worse than the desktop version.  Shame.

I still think that blog was written for him by marketing. It just has too many happy words.

I'm old school, I never found a feature in OneNote that was awesome enough to move me from note keeping in Word. But I do understand that many people do find OneNote works perfectly for them. Great. I've got 50+ docs with many MB of notes and data.

My great fear is that this is the thin edge of the wedge.  They start with OneNote, then (dis)"improve" the rest of Office later. They'll claim that they have stats the "prove" people like the new OneNote better than the old one.

Oh my goodness, I've been pulling my hair out with this damn app all night. I'm a teacher. I've been using the class notebooks function in the REAL program for years. I'm the expert on OneNote on my campus and have been championing it's use as an interactive notebook for all students in all classes. After trying to use this damn app tonight I'm now horrified and have no idea what I'm going to do for my class this year. This app is an atrocity. I have every assignment and activity my students do for the entire year arranged in folders and subfolders that I can distribute out to every student notebook in my class and the only setup I have to do is at the start of the year, I copy the original folders from my previous years notebook in to the new years notebook. In what world is it appropriate to make me scroll through EVERY FOLDER AND SUBFOLDER IN EVERY STUDENT NOTEBOOK I'M CONNECTED TO IN ORDER TO FIND THE ONE I'M TRYING TO COPY TO?!

And then I discover that when I want to distribute a new folder out to all my student notebooks, there's no way to choose where it goes?! It just gets dropped at the top of their notebook? What? That's not where I want it to go, I want it to go to a specific place, because the folders should be organized by semester and unit of study, but I can't do that? Why?! Now I have 129 student folders distributed to the wrong damn place!

And then I find out that it no longer integrates with excel. Well there goes all the data tracking and graphing I used to have my students do in their notebooks. I did a whole professional development last year to show other teachers how they could use the excel integration, but I guess all that just went right out the damn window.

Microsoft DID market OneNote to teachers. They designed it so it integrates with our LMS systems. The student pages show date and time stamps for all their answers so I know if they actually did their work on time or not, and that they can't just cut and paste answers, or even better, they can't just change the name and submit the same file as another student. I can use it for coloring, labeling, graphing, sorting and drag/drop activities so it's not all just worksheets and answers. And when it's time to grade I can lock their pages, and then pull all 129 assignments at the same time and just comment directly on the page, and sync the grade directly to my gradebook. The program was absolutely phenomenal as an interactive notebook program, but they've ruined it for my classroom with this app. I'm completely at a loss. I'm looking at having to completely redesign my classroom because of how terrible the functionality for the app is.

I feel your pain -- as there is no measure for my disgust in this toddler-level toy that shamelessly takes the name of "OneNote" -- an app that butchers the brilliance of the ONE AND ONLY OneNote.

But fear not, for you can still get the REAL DEAL:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/install-or-reinstall-onenote-2016-for-windows-c08068d8-b517-4464-9ff2-132cb9c45c08

As they are trying to steer people to their abomination of software design, Microsoft does not advertise that you can still get OneNote 2016 (for free). It's confusing to a lot of people (and purposely so) -- because they make people think that they have no other choice (because they removed it from Office 365 and Office 2019).

Anyway, lemme know if you have any questions. Great post, by the way. I totally understand, as my world revolves around OneNote, both personally and professionally.

Note: I borrowed "toddler-level" from another poster -- but "toy" is mine. ;o)

Oh my goodness, I've been pulling my hair out with this damn app all night. I'm a teacher. I've been using the class notebooks function in the REAL program for years. I'm the expert on OneNote on my campus and have been championing it's use as an interactive notebook for all students in all classes. After trying to use this damn app tonight I'm now horrified and have no idea what I'm going to do for my class this year. This app is an atrocity. I have every assignment and activity my students do for the entire year arranged in folders and subfolders that I can distribute out to every student notebook in my class and the only setup I have to do is at the start of the year, I copy the original folders from my previous years notebook in to the new years notebook. In what world is it appropriate to make me scroll through EVERY FOLDER AND SUBFOLDER IN EVERY STUDENT NOTEBOOK I'M CONNECTED TO IN ORDER TO FIND THE ONE I'M TRYING TO COPY TO?!

And then I discover that when I want to distribute a new folder out to all my student notebooks, there's no way to choose where it goes?! It just gets dropped at the top of their notebook? What? That's not where I want it to go, I want it to go to a specific place, because the folders should be organized by semester and unit of study, but I can't do that? Why?! Now I have 129 student folders distributed to the wrong damn place!

And then I find out that it no longer integrates with excel. Well there goes all the data tracking and graphing I used to have my students do in their notebooks. I did a whole professional development last year to show other teachers how they could use the excel integration, but I guess all that just went right out the damn window.

Microsoft DID market OneNote to teachers. They designed it so it integrates with our LMS systems. The student pages show date and time stamps for all their answers so I know if they actually did their work on time or not, and that they can't just cut and paste answers, or even better, they can't just change the name and submit the same file as another student. I can use it for coloring, labeling, graphing, sorting and drag/drop activities so it's not all just worksheets and answers. And when it's time to grade I can lock their pages, and then pull all 129 assignments at the same time and just comment directly on the page, and sync the grade directly to my gradebook. The program was absolutely phenomenal as an interactive notebook program, but they've ruined it for my classroom with this app. I'm completely at a loss. I'm looking at having to completely redesign my classroom because of how terrible the functionality for the app is.