Microsoft Is Looking for OneNote Beta Testers

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
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Microsoft is looking for Beta testers to give OneNote for Android a test drive around the block a few times. Information on the beta test is little to none, but then again, that is basically what a beta test is for. :D

If you want to participate, you can head to the source link below to sign-up and interestingly, it requires you to join the company's Google+ page.
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It's such a shame. Most paper notebooks have at least 60 pages for more than just one note. I think Microsoft really needs to work on extending the capabilities and renaming the program before porting it to a Linux platform. Have them call me when this thing is at least at FourNote, but FiveNote would be better so I can keep track of my cat's needs too.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
It's such a shame. Most paper notebooks have at least 60 pages for more than just one note. I think Microsoft really needs to work on extending the capabilities and renaming the program before porting it to a Linux platform. Have them call me when this thing is at least at FourNote, but FiveNote would be better so I can keep track of my cat's needs too.
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I'm going to need at least SixNote to keep track of my comets too. Fantails are such high maintenance you'll probably need Eight or NineNote.
 
Tudz said:
I'm going to need at least SixNote to keep track of my comets too. Fantails are such high maintenance you'll probably need Eight or NineNote.
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Noooo, I only need FiveNote since fantails can take care of themselves because they're so awesome.
 
I'm confused, I have OneNote on my android already... Is this a new version or what?
 
I guess I'm just old fashioned. I prefer writing things on paper. I am actually very good at keeping up with my paper notes. Oh well, to each his own. :)
 
DustMite said:
I guess I'm just old fashioned. I prefer writing things on paper. I am actually very good at keeping up with my paper notes. Oh well, to each his own. :)
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There's a great deal more to OneNote than writing. It's an excellent free form database. I use it to keep up with all kinds of information. Parts I've had to pick up for the car, around the house, paint colors I've used around the house, etc. Store web content that you might to refer to, take an picture of something on a tablet then mark it up with a pen. Plus the hand writing is searchable like text, something that's not possible with pen and paper directly. And of course you get all the ink colors and stroke types you want with a single pen. It is one of the best client applications out there and pretty much anyone can find it useful.
 
Using a software to jot down notes might be fine for some, but I do not own, nor carry, a smartphone or even a cell phone. I am not always at my desktop or notebook computers so writing notes to myself on those would be a waste of time.
My life is not internet centric, meaning that I do not feel the need to stay 'plugged in' 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If I feel the overwhelming desire to get fancy with different ink colors or play with "stroke types" I have a large assortment of fountain pens at my disposal. I have a rainbow of different inks and an assortment of nibs to write in any style I wish, from fine point to calligraphy and broad italic nibs.

How exactly is this software supposed to be useful for someone like me; someone who does not have to be connected and plugged every second of every day?
If you like it fine, but not everybody is a fanboy with a devotion for anything made by one company or another. I think I'll stick with my tried and true pens and paper. To each his own. ;)
 
DustMite said:
Using a software to jot down notes might be fine for some, but I do not own, nor carry, a smartphone or even a cell phone. I am not always at my desktop or notebook computers so writing notes to myself on those would be a waste of time.
My life is not internet centric, meaning that I do not feel the need to stay 'plugged in' 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If I feel the overwhelming desire to get fancy with different ink colors or play with "stroke types" I have a large assortment of fountain pens at my disposal. I have a rainbow of different inks and an assortment of nibs to write in any style I wish, from fine point to calligraphy and broad italic nibs.

How exactly is this software supposed to be useful for someone like me; someone who does not have to be connected and plugged every second of every day?
If you like it fine, but not everybody is a fanboy with a devotion for anything made by one company or another. I think I'll stick with my tried and true pens and paper. To each his own. ;)
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OneNote isn't about being connected 24/7, it's about having a record of important information during that time. Again, it's more of a personal database than anything else to me, that can store any kind of information and being able to retrieve it across multiple devices at any time. If you can remember the color code of the paint that you painted your livening room 10 years ago, more power to you.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Noooo, I only need FiveNote since fantails can take care of themselves because they're so awesome.
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Not a chance, you must just be neglecting your fantails, everyone knows they take several Notes on maintenance. If you aren't using at LEAST ThreeNote to take care of them then they just aren't living up to their potential. Though even running at capacity, they're still vastly inferior to comets running on a SingleNote.
 
DustMite said:
I guess I'm just old fashioned. I prefer writing things on paper. I am actually very good at keeping up with my paper notes. Oh well, to each his own. :)
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Let me know when you can keep all your written notes in your pocket. And that time I will present you with my entire vinyl record collection in my pocket. Its not about being old fashioned its about gaining tremendous power. I didn't take many notes before now that I have one note I actually do, you know why? Because notes become useless if you don't know where they are or you don't have them with you. With onenote you can have your notes with you almost all the time and you can find or access them almost anywhere. One note and the mobile phone is exactly what we all needed. for some of us this is bigger than the MP3 revolution was to the music industry. It's a complete paradigm shift of the note taking process that is superior in so many ways the paper way immediately becomes as obsolete as paper accounting ledgers, or physical media for music movies and games.

DustMite said:
Using a software to jot down notes might be fine for some, but I do not own, nor carry, a smartphone or even a cell phone. I am not always at my desktop or notebook computers so writing notes to myself on those would be a waste of time.
My life is not internet centric, meaning that I do not feel the need to stay 'plugged in' 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If I feel the overwhelming desire to get fancy with different ink colors or play with "stroke types" I have a large assortment of fountain pens at my disposal. I have a rainbow of different inks and an assortment of nibs to write in any style I wish, from fine point to calligraphy and broad italic nibs.

How exactly is this software supposed to be useful for someone like me; someone who does not have to be connected and plugged every second of every day?
If you like it fine, but not everybody is a fanboy with a devotion for anything made by one company or another. I think I'll stick with my tried and true pens and paper. To each his own. ;)
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The answer is it is not useful to you because you lack a key part of what makes one note great, a cell phone with a data plan. But posting this is as silly as someone who says I prefer to playing cards to playing video games. Its just not relevant. The technology is not there to solve the problems of luddites. It is there to help make people more efficient. Imagine if someone came up to you and said I don't ever have paper to write notes on so what good are notes to me? Does that make note taking not useful? Of course not it just means that person will handicap themselves for the rest of their life only being able to do that which they are capable of committing to memory. If you give them a small note book with a hundred pages or so suddenly they have an order of magnitude more efficiency. Well electronic note taking does the same thing. It makes the pen and paper obsolete.


I would love to participate but unfortunately I don't really want to risk it. If their beta causes problems with my existing notes it would take too much time to correct the problems. Onenote is one of the most important and under rated programs in all of computing. It is incredibly powerful it literally took me 5 years to get some people at work to try it, once they gave it a serious try they were completely hooked and they have pretty much abandoned paper. Some people are even hilarious hypocrites who say its not that good but use it anyway for something's but out of shear stubbornness hold on to some things the wont use it for.

Onenote has several critical advantages over paper that cannot be understated.
Speed, simple most people can type way faster than they ever have any hope of writing. If you cannot do that, well that's your problem because you are holding yourself back.
Efficiency, being able to search all your notes for a term to find something is wonderful. And it sure beats watching the woman dig through hundreds of papers trying to find that note she took.
Dynamic, how many times do people take a note then have to move to a new piece of paper, computers eliminate that. Instead of thinking of notes as something that happens on a specific page and creating a stupid index you have to manually keep updated yourself you can think of notes ANY way you please. In my case I think of processes or ideas and all the notes in that idea become one long page or perhaps have a few sub pages.

And that is just starting. When you add in onedrive and the cloud suddenly your notes can sync between multiple computers and you can access them from any web enabled computers. Then you throw in collaboration, try this really simple one, make a note for a grocery list and share it with everyone in the family. Now every single member of the family has the list. Finally bring in cell phones and data plans and all that power you had now is attached to you giving you 24/7 access. If you don't like to be connected so what turn it off for your 1 hour or whatever.

I used to think pivot tables were the most under appreciated function in computing. Seriously tons of people could make big use of them. But eventually onenote supplanted them for the simple reason it has even wider appeal and we had moved to an age when almost everyone has a data plan. There are some people who never do enough math to use a spread sheet or pivot tables. But there is no one that cannot make use of note taking.

Using one note, is like learning about the copy,cut, paste functions. For some people they can operate with out them and never know about them. But once you do know them you can never go back because you realize how damn much time you are wasting retyping shit. Onenote is just as powerful. Complete game changer. And we don't need to worry just like spread sheets did to paper ledgers and MP3s did to physical media sooner or later people who don't make use of onenote or one of its competitors such as Evernote are just going to be the slow employees who are holding the team back.
 
Tudz said:
Not a chance, you must just be neglecting your fantails, everyone knows they take several Notes on maintenance. If you aren't using at LEAST ThreeNote to take care of them then they just aren't living up to their potential. Though even running at capacity, they're still vastly inferior to comets running on a SingleNote.
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Fantails are totally automated and perform self-care. I've seen my fantails leave the tank, walk to the bathroom to do their thing, come back via the kitchen to grab a snackies and something to drink, then get back in their tank so they can finish reading War and Peace all by themselves. To top it all off, they're even nice enough to remember to put the toilet seat down when they're done. I don't think I've ever met a comet that can do that and the fact that you even need SingleNote to take care of them just shows how mindless they can be when you let them do whatever they want.

rudy said:
....
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Call me back when your OneNote device can work forever without needing electrical power, survive being hit by a car or left out in the rain, still be useful after bent and folded into a square small enough to fit in your pocket, and costs less than a dollar to purchase. Until then, it's just an overpriced techie-enthralled person's attempt to excuse using a computing device that does it poorly and at a much higher cost.

For the price of your phone plan and all your fragile devices, I can buy thousands of spiral ring notebooks and pens or pencils and use them in places and in ways that make them far more flexible. I can also still afford to pay for all my car's fuel expenses every year.
 
rudy said:
Onenote has several critical advantages over paper that cannot be understated.
Speed, simple most people can type way faster than they ever have any hope of writing. If you cannot do that, well that's your problem because you are holding yourself back.
Efficiency, being able to search all your notes for a term to find something is wonderful. And it sure beats watching the woman dig through hundreds of papers trying to find that note she took.
Dynamic, how many times do people take a note then have to move to a new piece of paper, computers eliminate that. Instead of thinking of notes as something that happens on a specific page and creating a stupid index you have to manually keep updated yourself you can think of notes ANY way you please. In my case I think of processes or ideas and all the notes in that idea become one long page or perhaps have a few sub pages.
Click to expand...

I always find if interesting that in a place that you'd expect everyone be open to the use of technology like here, you find so many people reticent to something they've obviously never tried. That becomes apparent when you here some talk about using pen and paper or spiral notebooks. Because you can type in OneNote, and that's actually how most people I know use it. The digital ink is a bonus.

And this notion that somehow OneNote is pointless because it requires a computing device that requires power or can be damaged? If that's such a big issue then why use ANY productivity software? Why use a word processor or spreadsheet or presentation app? Let's just do all of our work with pen and paper, perhaps a typewriter, but it had better be a manual typewriter because you know, things that don't use electrical power are so much better. And if we need to make a copy of that information, can't use a photocopier, that uses power, well just have to make the copies by hand. And email is out of the question too, better load up on stamps and envelopes to mail those copies.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Call me back when your OneNote device can work forever without needing electrical power, survive being hit by a car or left out in the rain, still be useful after bent and folded into a square small enough to fit in your pocket, and costs less than a dollar to purchase. Until then, it's just an overpriced techie-enthralled person's attempt to excuse using a computing device that does it poorly and at a much higher cost.

For the price of your phone plan and all your fragile devices, I can buy thousands of spiral ring notebooks and pens or pencils and use them in places and in ways that make them far more flexible. I can also still afford to pay for all my car's fuel expenses every year.
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The sad thing is that this fine troll is seriously what many people think and argue.
Many already have a phone and computers so it actually doesn't cost them any more device wise.
Many already need MS office and have it.
In fact where I work every single person who has resisted using one note, electronic calendars, and various other efficiency gains not only has them but often uses them sparingly for certain tasks already anyway.

heatlesssun said:
I always find if interesting that in a place that you'd expect everyone be open to the use of technology like here, you find so many people reticent to something they've obviously never tried. That becomes apparent when you here some talk about using pen and paper or spiral notebooks. Because you can type in OneNote, and that's actually how most people I know use it. The digital ink is a bonus.

And this notion that somehow OneNote is pointless because it requires a computing device that requires power or can be damaged? If that's such a big issue then why use ANY productivity software? Why use a word processor or spreadsheet or presentation app? Let's just do all of our work with pen and paper, perhaps a typewriter, but it had better be a manual typewriter because you know, things that don't use electrical power are so much better. And if we need to make a copy of that information, can't use a photocopier, that uses power, well just have to make the copies by hand. And email is out of the question too, better load up on stamps and envelopes to mail those copies.
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Yep its not just this place, I have found at the supposed pinnacle of state of the art in many industries you have the most conservative anti progress people you can imagine holding things back. A lot of people are just type S personalities and there is nothing that can be done to get them to change. They do things the way they learned way back when they were a kid and that's how they will keep doing it until their job is threatened.
 
DustMite said:
Using a software to jot down notes might be fine for some, but I do not own, nor carry, a smartphone or even a cell phone. I am not always at my desktop or notebook computers so writing notes to myself on those would be a waste of time.
My life is not internet centric, meaning that I do not feel the need to stay 'plugged in' 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If I feel the overwhelming desire to get fancy with different ink colors or play with "stroke types" I have a large assortment of fountain pens at my disposal. I have a rainbow of different inks and an assortment of nibs to write in any style I wish, from fine point to calligraphy and broad italic nibs.

How exactly is this software supposed to be useful for someone like me; someone who does not have to be connected and plugged every second of every day?
If you like it fine, but not everybody is a fanboy with a devotion for anything made by one company or another. I think I'll stick with my tried and true pens and paper. To each his own. ;)
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Holy Crap, another Fountain Pen User? Not many of us around
 
rudy said:
The sad thing is that this fine troll is seriously what many people think and argue.
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Exactly. It's usually best to leave this kind of hyper-trolling alone, but what's said here is utterly and completely wrong that it is kind of scary to think some might actually think it's true. Plus this idea that somehow there's this great cost in using OneNote over pen and paper is dumb. Most people already own devices and/or have data plans for their mobile devices. OneNote is just another application that works on the stuff you already bought.

rudy said:
Yep its not just this place, I have found at the supposed pinnacle of state of the art in many industries you have the most conservative anti progress people you can imagine holding things back. A lot of people are just type S personalities and there is nothing that can be done to get them to change. They do things the way they learned way back when they were a kid and that's how they will keep doing it until their job is threatened.
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True. However I think that as time has passed, OneNote has become a lot more popular, indeed digital note taking tools have become a lot more popular with the rise of tablets. People just need to be exposed to this tools for a bit as their usefulness tends to be self-evident. Unless you just like rolling in reams of paper, which isn't most people.
 
Nothing will ever match the combination of a windows tablet and onenote. I had a Asus ep121 windows 7 tablet and now a surface pro 3
 
heatlesssun said:
Exactly. It's usually best to leave this kind of hyper-trolling alone, but what's said here is utterly and completely wrong that it is kind of scary to think some might actually think it's true. Plus this idea that somehow there's this great cost in using OneNote over pen and paper is dumb. Most people already own devices and/or have data plans for their mobile devices.
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Oh look, someone who's still holding a grudge over being proven wrong over and over again is name calling in a forum with the only insult they know they can get away with using to feel better that they can't legitimately reason their way around how a cheap gadget they love isn't better than a piece of paper and a nice pen or pencil.

I applaud you for trying your best though to indirectly talk to me while trying your best not to respond to the reality of the situation. :D
 
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