Tell HN: Give OneNote another try for note taking or dumping thoughts | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Give OneNote another try for note taking or dumping thoughts

14 pointssmusamashah7 comments

Note taking apps are popular on HN and OneNote is rarely given any credit.

I take notes at work mostly where we use confluence for all the documentation. Confluence was slow so I tried local plain-text apps including Typora, Obsidian etc. and abandoned them quickly because I couldn't easily link to confluence documents. And if I am trying to write a new document, its not easy to dump thoughts in these tools.

Tried confluence again and while it allows copy pasting images etc. its hard to format code, its very slow to modify something and again its hard to dump your thoughts in a confluence document in a hope to refactor into final document in multiple iterations.

OneNote is what I have settled on finally. New OneNote design silly like all new Microsoft software https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-to-move-onenote-sections-back-to-top-of/4db9afb6-e8fb-49aa-b374-d357bd9b75f1 Every page is like a free-form white board on which you can write or draw or paste images anywhere. Also, the text in screenshots becomes searchable. I was on a complicated task recently for past few months and OneNote was a huge help. I made a section dedicated to my task. Then made pages freely as I needed in there e.g. a page for architecture I was trying to figure out, another page for things i tried to test memory usage, a page for configurations etc etc. Least resistance to put the idea down is very important and I couldn't have managed all this information without OneNote this easily.

You cannot write the final document in OneNote though. It's not built for that I think. But its a great assistant to jot your ideas down somewhere. I don't think there is anything else as flexible and as resistance free to dump information while still keeping it manageable. Give this a try if you can.

I've had a similar experience recently as well in re-discovering OneNote. I use it along with my Boox tablet and I made a video of it in the Boox sub-reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Onyx_Boox/comments/sq2msd/sample_of...

My idea is that there are basically two types of Notes; First type is to free-up working memory; example is solving a math problem and with pen and paper is much easier compared to doing it mentally. These types of notes are short-lived and are rarely referred to again since they've already served their purpose. In computer analogy, it would be the RAM.

MS OneNote is great for this type of notes since there is low friction in getting started with writing and can easily dump all sorts of stuff in it. It reminds me of the blank white bond paper used as scratch during math exams.

The second type of Notes is akin to the Hard Disk. In the Math example, it would be the Textbook which contains the principles which are important to refer to and to study.

In a Textbook, structure is highly important since it's main purpose is to be read and so it is optimized for reading rather than writing. From my experience, MS OneNote is not so great for this second type of Note.

> First type is to free-up working memory

You said it better. That's exactly what I have been using it for. There is too much going on the project and OneNote was like having a bunch of whiteboards you can write on and search too.

EDIT: You can even put actual files in a note, even execute them if they are executable. This is great to keep track of generated files like logs, saves etc.

I use OneNote pretty regularly and it's very useful. I like the search ability and the ability to instantly recall notes from meetings or conversations months previous can make you look like a genius. Something about not having to save as you go is pretty powerful too. It's not perfect but I do like OneNote for what it can offer.

I was once a fanatical OneNote user, but I can’t trust any closed formats anymore. OneNote 2013 was an amazing robust program with tons of PKM features and it was hobbled by MS’s idiotic product strategy.

I’m all-in on org-mode, and for handwritten stuff I use Stylus Labs Write—which, while not FOSS, edits SVGs natively which I can open and mess with in anything I want.

The primary thing I like about it is the sub-100ms response time for every action. I've got a few thousand notes and the search is instant. Of course, Confluence is a web app so there's only so fast you can make it go. I tried using Confluence spaces and just couldn't get into it, even though Confluence has a much better linking story than OneNote.

Many years ago, I was impressed by a colleagues efficiency in generating meeting notes in his iPad using OneNote, so I again gave it a go, in fact I’ve given it another go several times, as for note taking it can be really great. However, what keeps pushing me (hard) away from OneNote is, every time I tester my device, it asks me for a Microsoft system moving, which uses some absolutely horrific ID that is just a pain, and for some reason or other, it’s never made it into all of my other auto login apps - not sure why really, anyway, it’s a nightmare when you open the app to take a quick note, and are subjected to a long tedious app and system login that could only ever have come from Microsoft! They have to maintain their reputation I guess!

It's great for hand-written notes on a tablet with pen; The best program I've used for that.

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