OneNote--8 Things I don't like

Yesterday I talked about a number of things I really like about OneNote. At the same time, I also struggle with OneNote. I find some tasks difficult and even clumsy to do. Let me relate a few things that come to my mind:

1) It uses the notion of folders, sections, notes, and sub-notes for hierarchy management. Even though this isn’t a complicated structure, it has taken me a long time to understand that that’s how it organizes notebooks.

2) Common tasks seem hard to do. For example, the section tabs across the top cannot be repositioned easily. In most programs, I can simply drag and drop a tab from one location to a new location. Not so with OneNote; I have to right-click a section header and click Move. The following screen appears:

This means several clicks and mouse maneuvers to move a tab. (Lotus Organizer version 1.0 on Windows 95 supported drag and drop tabs. I guess its hard to do now).

3) The TabletPC integration is clumsy in my experience. This is the hardest one to describe, but it’s very hard to write effectively with their stylus in OneNote. Every time you write, it creates a little canvas area where your notes appear. If you write somewhere else, another canvas appears. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they merge, sometimes I have no clue what it’s doing.

I’ve also been annoyed when trying to convert writing to text. Sometimes all the translated text is different sizes and ends up on different lines.

I've wondered if this may be a result in subtle differences in Tablet PC hardware. However, I own 2 tablets and have had the same experience with both.

Or its probably as Chris Pratley states: Welcome to version 1.0.

4) You can turn a line in a note into a task that can then be exported to Outlook. However if you complete the task in Outlook, it is not synchronized back into OneNote. So much for “Tight Office Integration.”

5) OneNote does not support OLE Object embedding. At first I did not think this would be a big deal. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to insert an Excel worksheet range or Chart, a Visio diagram, or a Word table.

6) OneNote does not support tables. This shocked me, as a table is a common metaphor for structuring information in notes. The work-around is to use tabs to create columns that align. This is not a good solution for two reasons: tabs have never been an effective way to manage tables and what happens when you need to resize a column? You have to adjust every tab. Second, OneNote handles tabs in an unpredictable way. In the same note file, I’ve seen OneNote place the Tab indentation at different places. It looks weird to have one tab be 0.5 of an inch indented and another further down the note be 1 inch indented, for no obvious reason (I didn’t change the tab).

When I want a table in my notes, I have resorted to creating the table in Microsoft Word and then capturing the table as an image. That image can then be inserted into OneNote. The following picture shows how this looks:

You can click the image for a larger picture. Isn’t it beautiful to see a table in OneNote?

7) There is no programmability model and no accessible data model, like XML. The thought that a Microsoft Office program is not programmable is foreign to me. It feels like I bought a new home and I’m not allowed to put pictures on the wall.

8) You cannot import a Tablet PC Journal document into OneNote.

I could keep going with my list of OneNote annoyances, but I’ll stop here for now.

Tomorrow I’ll share my conclusions on OneNote.