Onenote 2007, the flaws

There’s been a lot of blogging about OneNote 2007 and most of it’s been good. The fact is, there’s a lot of good about ON 2007.

There are also a fair number of annoying buglets.

Trial registration

Alright, this isn’t a bug but making people sign up for windows live just to try some software is really annoying. Come on Microsoft, cut it out. I don’t need yet another logon to keep track of just for a software download.

No paragraph feed back

They appear to have re-written the paragraph handling and overall it’s better except in one area. I really miss the ON 2003 paragraph feedback. ON would show you where it thought each line in a paragraph was and it made it much easier to help ON put ink in the right paragraph when writing.

This is gone in 2007 and it makes it harder to combine text and ink in the same paragraph.

Slooww

ON 2007 is notably slower when doing selections. The Lasso tool is neat but I’d most often prefer a rectangular selection tool that’s fast. The lasso tool isn’t.

Random scribbles

I haven’t figured out how this is happening but several times now I’ve opened ON (after having minimized the program) and found ink scribbles over the active page. Undo gets rid of them but I still haven’t found how they get there in the first place.

Unresponsive buttons

Collapse page tabs button and the search list close button have to be pressed multiple times when pressed with the pen. They work as expected when using a mouse. I’ve also found that the buttons are looking for a focus change. Click the button with the pen and click somewhere else and then the button responds.

No visual indication of pen mode

ON 2003 had three buttons that could be used to select the current pen mode and as a result would provide feedback about what mode was set. In ON 2007 there’s just a dropdown that just shows "pen mode" without showing what the mode is.

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Michael Harrison

Husband, Programmer, Irish dancer, tinkerer, astronomer, layabout (as much as possible)

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