Christine Barry

 

Perhaps JMichael had a point about language - LOL. And maybe Christine was hoping for something more intricate or even useful to her, perhaps she found my use too simple, down to earth. But maybe she will explain that personally

 

Me thinks she was pulling your leg @dutch and giving you a compliment.  I hope anyway.

 

Haha just teasing you Dutch.    And loving your answer on accepting the limitations as they are.

@Christine: I use EN & 1N in parallel because in many ways they are complementary to each other. For example: tables in EN are pretty useless, whereas in 1N they are excellent. So if I don't want to use Excel to create a table I use 1N. That table can then either stay in 1N or be imported into EN, depending on the use.

OTOH tagging is far superior in EN than in 1N, so if I need a note to be tagged I will create it in EN. These are just 2 examples but there are many more situations like that.

The point that people need to bear in mind is that neither are perfect, in fact a perfect note-taking app does not exist in my modest opinion. Therefore it is pointless trying to make EN or 1N (or any other app for matter) do something it was not designed for in the 1st place. Many people go down that road & then get frustrated when it does not work out, blaming the app for its shortcomings. I just try to enjoy the best of both worlds, accepting that neither one nor the other will deliver all, but that between them they go a long way towards helping me achieve most, if not all, I need for my use case.

Sorry @dutchpete but that is way too much common sense & zen for my tastes.  

Do you also duplicate notes between the two apps as a matter of redundancy?

 

I find it endlessly fascinating that people can have such different experiences with the exact same software. It really makes it tricky to find the ideal solution, because one person's sync horror story could scare another away to a product that they might in turn have a sync horror story, which they might have avoided going with the original software presented. It makes my brain hurt!

 

I want to love OneNote sooo badly, but I've struggled with its slow sync, lack of feature support across platforms, and other glitches. For example, if you rename a Notebook in the Windows app, sometimes it does not rename it in OneDrive. I also am asked to sign in every time I open the Windows app if I want it to sync. Tags do not work on any platform except Windows. The web clipper deserves its own horror flick. Which SUCKS, because OneNote has SO much going for it and its note editor is by far the best in the game. I would marry the Windows software if I could! But my personal computer is a Mac and OneNote is very blah. As long as I have very little inside it and don't need multiple sorting/viewing options, it can work. I currently use it to brainstorm and plan design freelance projects. It's ideal for creating moodboards and other visual canvases. Outside of that... I'm struggling.

 

Hi, yes I suppose the user experience will depend on the use case.  I would have (likely) have never perceived a need to try ON if not for the sync disaster.  Once I lost confidence in EN as a daily workspace, I felt forced to find something new.  Once I had done that, ON won me over with a number of things, including the Microsoft ecosystem.  However, I do not rely heavily on Mac for anything, and I've been told by others at work that they do not like using it on Mac.  I do use the ON web version on my iMac and it works fine for me, but I use my PCs and desktop versions of ON more often than that.  I've never had any sync issues except for the one I mentioned before.  I do find that creating new notebooks in ON takes longer to sync than in EN, but it still works fine for me.

I would love to use EN exclusively, assuming the sync problems were fixed.  But I am not confident that the sync problems are and/or will stay fixed.  The biggest reason for that is that they were never able to solve the problem when I was using EN, and support just faded away on it.  Regardless, there are things that ON can do better than EN, and these things are tied directly to my work.  

Has anyone considered whether it makes sense to keep both systems and occasionally sync them, so that each one acts like a backup to the other?  It is possible to migrate notes from one system to the other, or to duplicate content using an integration through IFTTT or Zapier.  I've never given it much thought before, but I suppose it would be one way that you could enjoy the benefits of both while also creating some redundancy in your archives.  It might be worth doing, if you really depend on one of these apps.

....

 

Thanks for this report! Have you had any sync issues at all with ON? Also, I think you have posted before about your sync problems with Evernote, but could you put a link to those posts? This would help other users and Evernote developers to better understand what is happening.

Hi there, 

I think the only time I've mentioned the sync problem with EN is here - https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/73373-i-see-in-the-news-today-nov-4-2014-evernote-premium-price-may-change/page-4#entry351329

I could recover my lost work in the history of the note if I originally composed in the web version.  If I composed in the desktop version, the losses were not recoverable.  Some of the broken notes would end up in conflicting changes, but the lost data wasn't there.   The troubleshooting process was primarily a matter of working on the web version vs desktop, reinstalling desktop version, and sending logs and app/browser versions over to EN support.  They did what they could but it wasn't solved.  It may work fine now, but I don't compose in EN anymore, so I don't know.  

I had one sync problem with ON from one device.  I forget the details but I was able to solve it by following the steps in a KB article.  I didn't need to get support involved.

One advantage EN has over ON in my use case is that there are more integration options with IFTTT and Zapier.  Making backups of my blog posts, youtube watch later videos, etc., just seems to work better with EN.  

Hi folks, 

I stopped using EN exclusively in February of 2014.  This was due to the fact that EN would lose part of my documents every time it would sync.  I was using EN as my digital file cabinet AND my workspace, and I simply couldn't afford to lose chunks of my work every day.  I signed up for MS OneNote and have been using that as my workspace since.  I'm happy with OneNote as my workspace, and I have kept EN as an archiving tool.  This worked out well because it's so easy to archive to EN, and I was using Postach.io to publish one of my notebooks as a blog.  

Since I'm not longer using Postach.io, I am evaluating whether I need to keep EN.  I have batch migrated my EN notes to ON and am still reviewing the results.  Overall, the process was 'ok' but could be improved by tweaking some things in EN prior to export.  I also need to compare the search, and make sure that all of the multimedia clips are being imported.  

Assuming the migration works out fine, I think OneNote will be my new digital file cabinet.  I will miss EN's superior web clipping, but probably not enough to keep EN.  

I originally thought that running both systems would work for me, but I like simplicity.  I just don't want to deal with two separate apps that each do 90% of what I need.  I'll pick one, drop the other, and make-do as needed.  I wish it could have been Evernote because I'm fond of it, but OneNote is the one doing the heavy lifting.  

At this point, I don't see any reason to renew my subscription to EN, aside from the fact that I've had it and loved it for a long time.  Sometimes that's enough for me to keep something though