Why I came back to using EN for work

[gatorbrit 70]

I've been an EN user since 2008.  But about a year ago, after getting a nice shiny Surface 3 tablet, I thought I'd give onenote a shot.   I was still using EN for all my personal stuff - capturing receipts etc, but thought it might be nice to use ON for work.   The trouble is, I actually do most of my work on my mac.  This is where I started to quickly realize the folly of moving from EN to ON, particular in the case of a mac user, but many of these frustrations are also on the Windows version of ON.

So for those thinking about switching from EN to OneNote, here are some of the issues you might deal with.

In Onenote:

1. You can't sort pages automatically.   In EN you can sort to your heart's content on date, size, created, name...

2. In the Mac version of Onenote, you can't create tags.  You can use pre-made tags.

3. In the windows version, as far as I can tell you can't create tags on the fly - like when you create a note.  You have to make them and assign an icon to them.  It's about 20 steps.

4. Searching for tags is not intuitive.  While EN has a single search bar, ON has different places for searching.

5. You can make a note a subpage in ON, but when you move the parent page, the subpage doesn't move with it.   Put another way in ON subpage means "indent".

6. You can't customize the layout very much.

7. You can now use the pen on EN to "ink" notes.   Even for Surface 3 models.

8. I don't think you can merge notes in ON.

9. The apps for ON are, for want of a better word "chunky".  There seems to be a lot of real estate wasted.

10. You can change the width of the various page elements in ON for mac.  So if you have long note names, you won't be able to see the whole name.

 

And here's where ON wins:

You can customize the heck out of your note - fonts, colors, layout etc - it works very nicely with other MS office products.   If you like making nice looking notes, then ON is much better than ENs more rudimentary functions.

Thankfully, EN for windows has a very nice and easy to use import function to import ON notes.   No such function exists on the Mac version though.

 

I am not an obsessive EN user, but I've learned the hard way that it's the little details that I missed.   Just my 2 cents...