A recap of some of my feedback from my first week on the OneNote team
Way back when I came to the OneNote team in November 2006, I wrote a short list of comments and complaints I had with OneNote 2007. We use this type of feedback, along with suggestions from users and others, to help decide where to invest in future versions of OneNote. I just found this old list and thought it may be interesting to visit some of my comments now that OneNote 2010 is available.
Here's the first and the last of my comments:
- What is the reason for having the "Send to OneNote" printer?
- The notebook colors aren't differentiable enough on LCD screens
When I came to the team, the printer was still new to me and I did not understand its purpose. The way I had been using OneNote was to track small to do lists, personal information and a few other things. For some large documents (books from www.ProjectGutenberg.org, for instance) I would select all the text and copy and paste into OneNote. This worked well for me, but does not work if you have some other format of information you want to get into OneNote, being able to print it may be the best way to preserve the visual representation of it. I'm thinking of lab software here that is designed to show data and not necessarily support a rich copy and paste experience.
Anyway, the printer lets me print any documents to OneNote. One of the limitations of the printer for OneNote 2007 was that it only worked on 32 bit operating systems. We knew this would need to be fixed since once the 64 bit CPUs took over, 32 bit would rapidly fall off the radar. (I have no idea what the current market numbers are). So we ported it over to 64 bit and now it works on all supported platforms for Office 2010.
The differentiable colors of sections is out of my control. We have a team that does all our graphics for us, and they gave me the tip about a nicely adjusted monitor making a huge difference (it really does). But I still wished I could choose my own colors, and after only three years I decided to write a little powertoy to change the colors for me. I need to update it for OneNote 2010 and I can call this good.
Most of my other comments related to Mobile OneNote. It is its own new client and I'm waiting to get a phone with it once it comes out. I also had some comments about grouping pages and moving them around as a group, and we fixed that as well.
My last comment was about my manager sending me 15 notebook with who-knows-how-many sections all at once on my first day on OneNote. Simple information overload! I haven't figured out how to fix my manager…
Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John