Ideas to help OneNote better...with the help of Steve

[Cossackx]

Steve. First off. You are my hero. If it was not for OneMore, I would completely give up on OneNote. Thank you for everything you do. Microsoft should be thanking you too with lots of $$$!

OneNote is great, but there are many competitors that do many things. If OneNote could do these things, it would be amazing.

1. Database function of Notion.
2. Linking/Tags/Metadata/Files and visual graph of Obsidian (with the help of plugins like Dataview, Excalidraw, Excalibrain, Templatar, etc.)
3. Ability to easily find/link to any page with "[[ ]]". Bi-directional needs to be more intuitive.
4. OpenAI integration:

• 1. Features like Obsidian plugin "Text Generator" to organically get GPT and DallE 2 prompts and capabilities in OneNote.
• 2. AI to find and recommend semantic search/linking, similar to Mem and the Obsidian plugin "Smart Connections."

5. Better Macro / Addon support and transparency. Currently, OneTastic is an 3rd party addon and even that seems like it's out of date.

[stevencohn]

Notion

Database function of Notion

• Notion - I'm not sure Notion is a competitor really. It seems to be trying very hard to be something different, something aimed at project management, task management, where each page is a ticket or story. It appears to be on a collision course with Altassian Jira or a Jira+Confluence hybrid. I really don't think this is appropriate for OneNote. I'd argue that even the Classroom Notebook solution by Microsoft is a stretch of for humble little OneNote.

Obsidian

Linking/Tags/Metadata/Files and visual graph of Obsidian (with the help of plugins like Dataview, Excalidraw, Excalibrain, Templatar, etc.)

• Visualizations - The OneNote canvas is capable of just slightly more than what HTML 1.0 offered: text, tables, hyperlinks, images, some formatting and layout. What makes it stand apart is its drawing and handwriting features. However, technically, the Ink implementation is quite limiting in that it's impossible to bind Ink to textual objects on a page. Rendering information in other forms like mind-maps, is not a trivial task and any interactivity with such a rendering is impossible or, at best, clunky, needing to rely on keyboard interceptors, screen-scraping, and polling mechanics. The OneMore Interop API used by add-ins like OneMore is simply not rich enough.
• Tagging - This is challenging since everyone has their own "perfect idea" of what tagging means and how it should work. I attempted, early on, to emulate the likes of OneNoteTaggingKit with my own take on it but that doesn't seem to have gained much traction.

OpenAI Integration

Features like Obsidian plugin "Text Generator" to organically get GPT and DallE 2 prompts and capabilities in OneNote.

• Open AI - OneMore has a Search Engine feature where you can specify the query URL of a search engine and then expose that on the context menu. Select some text and choose your search engine to open the browser with results related to that text. This could be extended to integrate with OpenAI/Dall-E and inject content on the page. (Note that OpenAI is a paid service so users would have to set up their own account, access key, and payment plan.)

AI to find and recommend semantic search/linking, similar to Mem and the Obsidian plugin "Smart Connections."

• Semantic Searching - More challenging. OneNote search relies on Windows Search which is shockingly lacking compared to most contemporary search engines. Integration of an AI semantic search engine would require a custom adapter to crawl notebook contents and build a specialized search database.

OneNote Enhancements

Ability to easily find/link to any page with "[[ ]]". Bi-directional needs to be more intuitive.

• [[]] hints - please talk about this more. I'm not sure it's possible, but I'd like to know what you're thinking*
• Intuitive bi-directional linking - agree 100%

Better Macro / Addon support and transparency. Currently, OneTastic is an 3rd party addon and even that seems like it's out of date.

• Macros - I'm very familiar with the other OneNote add-ins. I have expressed my opinion many times on Onetastic specifically. I'm not interested in making OneMore a programming platform. OneTastic is an amazing idea - but an idea created by an ex-Microsoft engineer who created an engineering solution for engineers. OneNote is a tool for the masses and macros are too opaque for real people, meaning non-geeks like you and me!
• Plugins - Having said that, I have documentation on how to add commands to OneMore, in the language of the OneMore command framework. And OneMore has its own plugin capability which lets you tweak pages and simple hierarchies with scripts or external programs. I continually improve that documentation when I have a chance.

Knowledge Incubation 

I'm mostly interested in how OneNote can enhance, empower, enable, streamline the concept of knowledge incubation. Given the original intent of OneNote – a place to keep ideas that are not yet documents – there is a huge opportunity in coming up with solutions that help people organize content, thoughts, ideas, and discover meaning, understanding, and ultimately, ways of pushing into a real knowledge management system. That might be Confluence or Words docs or something else. This intrigues me. 

[koppor]

Thank you, Steven, for sharing your thoughts!

When reading the wishes above, it reminds me of Microsoft Loop.

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I think, the [[ is a feature from Confluence. When one types [[, an autocompletion is triggered. Typing letters search for the existin pages. When selecting a page (from the auto-type-combo-box), that page is linked.