OneNote: March 2019

Like many of the people who care enough about this product to read its blog, I am a long time user (circa 2008).  OneNote is an app continuously open on my work desktop.  I currently have access to about 25 notebooks.  About half are private, the rest are a mix of mine shared with others, others shared with me, or shared notebooks on Teams (SharePoint). 

I always avoided the UWP version mostly because of how ingrained the old layout was.  Late last year I forced my to start using the Win 10 version to see what I really lost.  Overall, I use Win 10 version 90% of the time and will open v2016 for specific activities I need to do that can't be done yet with the Win 10 version.  I'd be super bummed if I didn't have that fall back.  Below is my ongoing list of pros and cons of the new version.  Please note loss of local notebooks is not on my con list because I was happy when moving notebooks into the cloud became possible.

Things I like about Win 10 version

• Speed
• Recent Notes list
• It can tell if you recently opened a notebook on another device that isn't open in the app and will offer to open it for you (discovery)
• How links to pages and sections pasted in a notebook automatically reformat to the name of that location.
• Ability to pin certain pages on the start menu.  Not useful for me, but it could be for others…

Things I miss about 2016 version

• Snipping tool in the toolbar is missing; have to use the windows snip tool instead
• You can't restart the numbering of a list if there is a break in it
• Very limited tagging tool
• Search for tags is very limited; can't ask for a certain type and only the unchecked versions, no export of the list
• Can't promote or demote sheets by dragging
• Can't send an email with attachments to a page using the button in the Outlook ribbon
• No option at all to drag and drop from Outlook Online to OneNote UWP
• Can't email a page or a section! - all you can do is share the entire notebook - not always ideal…
• Search function breaks if you use the apostrophe character ( ' ).  For example, searching "pro's and con's" or "pro's" or "con's" turns up nothing.  Yet searching "pro and con" turns up the proper results even though the text string is literally "pro's and con's"
• If you nickname a notebook, no easy way to see the "real name".  Causes problems with shared notebooks because in things like Flow, if you trigger a flow related to OneNote, it loads the nicknames and not the real names.  Prior to letting you select a section.  If you pick the nickname, it will not load the sections.  You get an error.
• You can't add outlook task checkboxes (which now integrate nicely with the To Do app)