OneNote is now free

[joby_toss]

When we started OneNote we set out to revolutionize the way people capture, annotate, and recall all the ideas, thoughts, snippets and plans in their life. ...

http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/17/onen ... e-powered/

http://www.onenote.com/

http://www.onenote.com/Download

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Microsof ... 2563.shtml

[webfork]

This is generally good news, but I haven't seen Microsoft do a very good job with maintaining it's freeware options. It seems to do a lot better with things that are actively making money. I hope they can maintain this and keep it something that I've heard a lot of good reviews about.

Some alternatives.

[webfork]

Evidently someone had really serious trouble with their OneNote install. The author goes on to essentially recommend dumping Office ... he doesn't recommend FreeOffice, but does make mention of the eM Client Outlook alternative. (eM Client softpedia link)

Also, brace yourself for a totally unrelated product plug at the end that makes me wonder if the whole article wasn't just a plug.

[avi-aryan]

I wish MS provide an offline alternative for OneNote install. I have not downloaded it yet because there was no sign of how much time will the "Initializing" thing take.

[webfork]

wish MS provide an offline alternative for OneNote install

Yeah the lack of an offline version basically means that I can't use it up at work.

[Midas]

OneNote 2013 v15.0 released (no changelog; free download from http://www.onenote.com/).

DotNET v3.5+ required.

Softpedia review is at http://www.softpedia.com/get/Office-too ... Note.shtml.

[Midas]

Users of OneNote might be interested in the free OneTastic extension (http://omeratay.com/onetastic/).

FYI, there's a Gizmo's Freeware mini-review at http://www.techsupportalert.com/content ... ee-add.htm...

[webfork]

Users of OneNote might be interested in the free OneTastic extension

That's an admittedly awesome tool but it highlights one of the weaknesses of Microsoft OneNote: the Windows version is significantly better. It's not just that OneTastic only runs on the Windows side, it's that the the Mac and Android OneNote clients are really not up to par with the Windows version:

* Android version "quite poor"
http://www.computerworld.com/article/24 ... tml?page=2

* Mac version only 3 of 5 stars on PCMag
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2455497,00.asp

This being a Windows-only site, that's probably not a problem but part of the idea behind a program like this was being able to take it anywhere.  If you want similar functionality on any device, Evernote (freemium) will probably work better, although obviously with a narrower feature set.

[webfork]

Due to a current workgroup situation, I have been using Onenote a lot and it's made me start looking into alternatives.

Reasons I'm trying to escape:

• Image addendum tools are junk (just press enter above any image and watch all your addendums slide away).
• Interoperability - Sucks at pasting anything but plain text into non-Microsoft programs (LibreOffice is still king with this).
• Interface - The ability to type just anywhere on the page is remarkably wonky and strange. Sometimes it pulls to a central window, sometimes it starts writing off in la-la land.
• Organization - I'm for some reason having trouble finding important data under tabs and sub-tabs. Not as a function of search but just things getting buried.

In fairness, there are some good things about it.

• Nested bullets and outline features are great (better than Word)
• Automatic OCR on any images you add is quite cool
• Sharing tools are very easy though I'm not 100% comfortable with how the program enables data redundancy, since it saves everything to (at this point I manually export data to a backup drive)
• Revision tracking is pretty sharp and you can hide/password protect a page or the entire notebook.
• Audio recording function is solid, but still records to the increasingly marginal WMA format (as to the audio transcription, I haven't been able to make that work). I spent some time trying to figure out how to push it to another format w/out success.

Alternatives

First and foremost is the screen OCR, which is already covered by Capture2text

Other sites out there have mentioned several tools out there, some of them already on the site:

• TomBoy has a rather long installation sequence but it's conceivable it could be portable.
• Tiddlywiki
• Cintanotes

The new guy "Google Keep" is extremely feature-limited, simple, and requires a net connection so it's not much of an alternative.

[Craunch]

I've been looking into note taking software myself recently, but from a linux, doesn't need to be portable viewpoint. That said, the following look promising for my purposes and look like they run on windows. I'll give links to their entries on the alternativeto.net site so you can see a brief summary of each before possibly visiting their own websites. None of them are saying "I'm the one" to me but all look usable at the moment. My favourite so far is CherryTree. Sorry, but I have no idea whether they are portable or not, or can be made portable - as I said that was not one of my concerns.

Turtl
Laverna
Quip
WizNote
CherryTree

[shnbwmn]

Turtl
Laverna
Quip
WizNote
CherryTree

Cherrytree = Portable and has been submitted/discussed @ http://www.portablefreeware.com/forums/ ... =4&t=13960. Still doesn't have a database entry

Laverna = Not Portable - it's an Electron app that writes to %AppData%\laverna, and stores notes in a .db file. Has an option to sync its database to Dropbox or RemoteStorage. Possible yaP-ing candidate

No idea about the others. I might test them out.

~ Edit ~

Quip = N/A

• Can't extract - needs installation.
• Running the setup installs program, without asking, to %LocalAppData%\Quip.
• I didn't test further.

WizNote = Not Portable

• Writes to Documents\My Knowledge
• %AppData%\Wiz
• %LocalAppData%\Temp\Wiz
• HKCU\Software\Wiz
• HKCU\Software\WizBrother
• Cool app though - has a floating toolbar, lots of options for information and sharing, nice interface. Check out the screenshots over @ Softpedia.

Turtl = Not Portable (Electron app)

• Writes to %LocalAppData%\Turtl
• HKCU\Software\Chromium

@Mod Really not up to creating separate posts for each at the moment. Feel free to split this into their relevant topics at some point.

[Craunch]

Thank you shnbwmn for those tests.

I don't have a windows machine here any more so I was hoping someone would check them out. Microsoft's shenanigans with the windows 10 upgrade drove me away from windows completely.

I've done a bit more playing around with them, and other linux only software, and so far CherryTree looks most promising for what I want.

[webfork]

Update on my use of OneNote:

As mentioned above, there are some nice things about this program. In lieu of alternatives and despite my hesitation, I tried to make a go of it up at work. Unfortunately for whatever reason adoption was almost nil so I had to give up and switch to Word files saved over SharePoint.

Unfortunately, converting several files with images and nested bullets/lists did not go well. The result was very poor with formatting going insane and image conversion throwing originals and addendum into different parts of the document.

If the reason Microsoft was giving away OneNote was as a gateway to other Microsoft products, they need to unclog the passage.

[bitcoin]

tried to add One Note for screenshot OCR and the installer downloaded and added the entire MS Office suite. Then to actually use the program i needed to sign up for a Microsoft email acct

now trying Capture2Text instead

[webfork]

tried to add One Note for screenshot OCR and the installer downloaded and added the entire MS Office suite. Then to actually use the program i needed to sign up for a Microsoft email acct

now trying Capture2Text instead

I'm not surprised by the MS email account requirement, but by "the entire MS Office suite," do you mean several hundred meg download for Word/Excel/etc?