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OneNote Is Like the Jam to Outlook's Peanut Butter
Updated November 07, 2019

OneNote Is Like the Jam to Outlook's Peanut Butter

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with OneNote

We use OneNote individually, departmentally, and interdepartmentally throughout the entire organization. It is an excellent tool for capturing notes, meeting minutes, checklists, and project-related tasks. It enables collaboration and improves communication by allowing shared notebooks that multiple users can edit at the same time. It also automatically tags edits with the user's initials who made them, thereby providing a basic level of traceability.
  • Creating task lists and daily notes that can link to Outlook.
  • Generating collaborative content that is easy to search and edit.
  • Creating "live" work instructions that can be updated and maintained.
  • Creating basic wireframes and prototypes for software development.
  • The table editing tools are too simplistic and lack the features found in other Office products.
  • Some content loses its rich text formatting when being pasted into OneNote. A workaround is to paste the content first into Outlook or Word and then copy/pasting that into OneNote.
  • Microsoft is moving away from a local install of OneNote, which means notebooks have to be in the cloud in Office 2019. This will actually reduce the usefulness of OneNote in some environments and opens the door to competitor products.
  • Update: Microsoft has now announced that it will continue to support OneNote 2016 through 2023. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Blog/Your-OneNote/ba-p/954922
  • It has improved our collaboration across departments.
  • It has improved our note taking capabilities in meetings.
  • It has reduced our dependency on written notes.
We do not use the cloud version of OneNote because of security concerns and licensing. We like OneNote because it is similar to other Office applications, which lowers the hurdle for adoption by other users in the organization. Because of Microsoft's decision to move OneNote to the cloud in Office 2019, we will have to evaluate non-cloud competitors in the future.
OneNote is widely used so that there is a lot of helpful content that can be found for support by simply conducting web searches.
Microsoft has been receptive to product feedback provided through https://onenote.uservoice.com/, including making the decision to continue to provide mainstream support for OneNote 2016 through 2023 (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Office-365-Blog/Your-OneNote/ba-p/954922).

Do you think OneNote delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with OneNote's feature set?

Yes

Did OneNote live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of OneNote go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy OneNote again?

Yes

It is well suited for capturing weekly departmental task lists. For example, each week we create a new page in a shared departmental notebook. In this new page, each department member enters his/her top 3 accomplishments for the week and the top 3 things which the member will attempt to accomplish in the coming week. We then use this page during our Monday morning stand-up meeting and it helps provide an agenda, structure, and discussion points for the meeting.

OneNote Feature Ratings