Hi there!

Being an satisfied evernote user for many years now I now must deal with MS OneNote because my company uses this. I read quite a lot, imported dozens of notes from Evernote to OneNote, fooled around etc. to see how things are going in OneNote. The software has some advantages but there are a few downfalls for me - at least if they are. It would be great to get some help here with it - thank your very much!

1) I have a windows PC with Office 2013 on it but mainly I use my Chromebook or one of my Android devices to access my notes. For that reason the web client and the Android app are pretty important to me. Both have a different (and very minimalistic) UI that significantly differs from the windows software - which is a pain. To make things even worse important functions are missing e.g. uploading PDF files to OneOne. Bug or feature?

2) The OneNote clipper can only cover whole websites - the web clipper from Evernote offers more possibilities e.g. just the article thus eliminating banners, ads etc. Additionally you can choose which notebook shall be the destiny, add tags etc. The OneNote clipper can't be configured for that, eh?

3) The android app of Evernote offers a special document mode for the camera. OneNote has the same functionality ("Office lense") but really just for Windows Phone?! Huh?

4) I like to add reminders to certain notes either to get push notifications or email notifications. OneNote doesn't offer that without Outlook which I don't use. Is it planned to integrate real reminders...as every competing product already offers?



Thank you very much and best regards,
Matthias

PS: Hopefully my english is good enough?! I'm from germany and my last english classes were 23 years ago

Hi,

First of all your English is great! Now let's see if i can answer some pointers here for you:

1. The OneNote app for Android just got an update i think yo will like. No so minimalistic anymore.
2. you are right the clipper takes whole websites. Personally i use the clipping tool from windows if a want a specfic part of a website.
3. The OneNote app does not have the camera option. The regular application OneNote 2013 has a button Video which you can use as a camera. You will find this on the Insert Tab.
4. Outlook integration was perfect in OneNote 2007 this has been changed since Office 2010. So reminders? Trick - add a task in OneNote this will at a task in Outlook. Set your reminder there. :-)

hope it helps a little
Have a look here for some more tips: http://wp.me/P57J76-3D

Hi,

and thank you very much for your reply!

In the meantime I decided to continue my Evernote premium account - it is (for my purposes) significantly better.

PS: I do not use Outlook, so that's possibly the biggest downfall on OneNote. A system without notifications is pretty useless for me...

Cheers from germany,
Matthias

Hi Matthias,
Life is all about making choices. In this case you have to make the right choice which is working for you. It's that simple But remember OneNote will always be available for you when you need it.

Still not through with making the final decision...I migrated all notes from Evernote to OneNote to see how things are going.

Within the desktop client (ON 2013) all things are pretty finde but the web and android client drive me insane...

- Is there really no way of searching over ALL notebooks? After logging in (web client) I see all notebooks but no search option so I have to chose one first. And even the I can search through the section or page but not through the whole notebook. A pain when searching for invoices because I ordered them in noe notebook with a section per year and every scanned invoice as a page. No problem on the windows client though.
- I can't even upload a file on both mentioned client? WTF?

I can't believe this is the way it is meant to be...

I hope that someone lifts the secret for me :-)

Kind regards,
Matze

Hi Matze,
It's nice to see you are still giving OneNote a chance :-) Of course i looked into the Android client option. I am running OneNote on a Samsung Note tablet with Android on it. Opened OneNote and went on a search. I have a couple of Notebooks which contain the word Excel. So i tried a search for this word and have to say that my search results were based on all notebooks available. So where do we differ here?
As for the file upload you are right there. This is client specific and only available from there. A sneeky workaround might be adding a link and let that link refer to your file.

Hi,

guess it's my fault - the Android client is OK, it's the webclient (OneNote online) that has no search function over all notebooks. Not even over one (after opening it) - just within a section or a page. This isn't a mere downfall but another reason why switching seems so hard to me.

The other main factors are

- the GUI - it's somehow cluttered, especially when you have a lot of notes e.g. invoices per year.
- awful webclipper - I'm clipping quite a lot of websites to Evernote...to read it later or to save it for further requests. Thanks to the flexible web clipper of EN I can not only choose in which notebook to clip but also give tags, choose to save the entire website or the article view (my favourite because you get rid of banners and stuff that doesn't belong to the article itself). ON just takes a picture of the website. Not comparable at all.

The windows client is OK but I rarely use my fat client running Windows 8. My life's is more an android (smartphone and tablet) and my beloved Chromebook so web applications are extremely important to me.

Have to take deeper thoughts...

Cheers,
Matze

Nothing is bad, making different choices is what life is all about. That's good otherwise we would not have different applications right?

Cheers!