MicrosoftOneNote and additional features for it are the ONLY reasons I subscribed to Offfice 365 ) and I still bought 2 licenses for Office Pro Plus 2016. With no changes in OneNote 2019 (which I guess really doesn't even exist) there will be NO reason to ever purchase MS Office again. I'll be watching for some enterprising company to come out with a new and improved tool like OneNote as the online version pales in comparison to the desktop version. Not to mention that I use numerous add-ins that bring additional functionality to OneNote that MS never provided. Gem for OneNote and Onetastic add unbelievable functionality to OneNote even though there are still shortcomings that MS has never addressed. The add-ins make OneNote into a powerhouse of a tool and the online version will never have the functionality that the desktop version and add-ins provide.
Scanning is one example of deletions from OneNote that made no sense to start with as it is a critical function, yet MS removed that as a native function. PDF handling is pathetic as OneNote , being document oriented for a lot of uses, should handle PDF's natively. Scanning to OneNote online is just another example of a big step backwards. Who has time to scan a large document that they are working with and wait until it uploads at very slow upload rates and then find out that they have to make some revisions and rescan and do it all over again. No thanks.
I will have to than MS. They will be saving me much money in the future. I'll have the best that they will have to offer now and for the future. All the other apps are pretty much at maturity as well. There is little else that can be done to dramatically improve the other staples of an office suite... spreadsheet, word processing, presentations, publishing, and email/schedule/contact management will unlikely see any major breakthroughs. So I have little doubt that I will ever really have to upgrade past 2016. MS is missing the boat. Instead of making Office the irreplaceable flagship of office suites, they have succumbed to Googles free and online model. Fine for the casual user. Inexcusable for professional users. They have torpedoed themselves. Professionals do not live in an online world.... and carry laptops that run full fledged programs so that they can use the full-blown tools of their work anywhere... with no need for an internet connection to do their jobs. So... I'm betting that most people will buy their final version of Office - either 2016 or 2019 and make sure that they have it safely secured for the future as it will likely be irreplaceable and also be the last version that they will likely ever need.
P.S. - I don't know about all versions but some 2019 versions are still coming with OneNote 2019 (which I presume is the desktop variety), and Office 2016 in the various versions is still available to purchase. So... grab it while you can. It will probably be the last version you'll ever have to buy.
Farewell to MS Office upgrading. It appears that the next "big thing" as far as office / productivity software won't be coming from Microsoft anymore. I'll be waiting for the next major change... a whole new paradigm. I won't be holding my breath and I'll still be using OneNote Desktop version while MS tries to figure out ways to make the online version do things it will never be able to do. Long live OneNote Desktop.
