Collections

Copper Contributor

I am curious about the Collections feature. How do people think this will be useful? 

12 Replies
I think its going to be one of key differentiates to Chrome. Quite useful feature to quickly make some notes while researching a topic like a coming soon trip. It will likely allow sync between devices.

How could you see it being helpful for planning a trip? What do you normally do when planning a trip? 
I'm wondering what they mean when they describe "using cloud-powered intelligence" too. This all seems like a good idea, but it looks like a simplified version of extensions like OneNote and Evernote.

@ntriulzi  The ability to take a collection and transform/reformat into a word document or Excel spread sheet sets it apart.

Hi @ntriulzi, we use local processing to pull out entities on the websites such as price or ratings. We hope that this will make it easier to compare apples with apples across different sites. The cloud portion is how we train the local processor to know what is what. This allows us to get better over time, and quickly adapt to changes in web pages. You can learn more about our Collections plans by reading the full blog post here. This is just our first peek at the feature, and we are not even close to feature complete. We want to get early feedback, so that we can adapt our plans to make it fit our customers needs most completely. Thanks - Elliot

Hi @Oldmil1165, we only have export to Microsoft Excel today, but we are going to expand this as we go. Beyond Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, what other programs would you feel most strongly about?  What do you use today to gather and track information in this way?

I personally use it for researching, quickly add texts, links and images + notes; I used to it in OneNote.
Collections did really help me cut times and focus better as I don't have to switch apps!

@Elliot Kirk   one thing that I am baffled by is that this featured wasn't fundamentally developed as an integration into OneNote?  That seems very short-sighted to me....

@Elliot Kirk   this article refers:  https://support.microsoft.com/en-za/help/17221/windows-10-write-on-the-web

surely strategically any Noting-taking should be integrated with OneNote???

@FMukbil27   the integration is great, but I don't understand why the collections are not just saved into OneNote?

That would be so bad. OneNote uses OneDrive storage space. saving collections to OneNote means more storage would be used.
Microsoft should dedicate a different free storage for collection syncing..
well you can use it for lots of things. for example you can create a collection and use it as a shopping list, and since it's not bound to one specific website, you can add products from different online stores to one collection, such as ebay, amazon, Microsoft store etc, all in one collection. then you can click on each product later once you've finished and open them up separately or just print them out.

you can drag and drop texts, pictures, videos, gifs etc from different websites and articles into one collection and then export your collection to a word or excel file. soon the export destinations will improve and you will be able to export in more formats.


you could take texts/images from multiple sources about one specific subject, put them all in one collection then export it to a word file, customize it and export to PDF. useful for researches and things like that.
And there is still no search bar, can't share your collections.
We need a web tool, or a web site to do it. I guess.
Windows edge is so important. I don't know why. It's not good.