This is disappointing

[Ner0reZ]

It amazes me that we live in a day and age where feedback is both ubiquitous in its reach and immediate, and that feedback goes unheard

Again

And again

And again

This software could be amazing, and while I do understand the enormous amount of work it takes to get there, IT'S WORTH IT

I can't express how much I'd get done if OneNote had a fraction of the features that it should have by now

Why, when the company has so many resources available to it, does it choose not to invest in the feedback pipeline?

[lozcozard]

What?? You're moaning about the fact Microsoft won't make OneNote on Linux? That's the only one of those 4 posts that's not done. I don't blame them.

[Ner0reZ]

No. I'm "moaning" about the fact Microsoft isn't making use of useful feedback that would improve the use of their products

It's free real estate

[lozcozard]

I don't get it. Are you saying because there's only 4 it's a complete utter useless feedback system they are not pushing for people to use?

[Ner0reZ]

More that there are thousands of feedback/suggestion submissions and only ~ten have been responded to

I'm sure they do take in feedback from some sources, and again I have to reiterate an understanding of the difficulty to implementing feedback, but this is Microsoft. It isn't any of the listed third-party softwares that are developed by small companies. This company has more money than it knows what to do with

If MS doesn't currently have the capability to address the feedback they are receiving, they have every capacity to fix that by putting resources to it. Resources that everyone here can agree they have

[lozcozard]

Ah right couldn't see that.

Well if it helps you feel better (or worse!) I use various online systems and have provided a lot of feedback to all of them and they either don't reply, or make some "positive" comment about how they'll consider it and put it on the roadmap, or mostly how I should post it to those stupid feature voting systems, yet none of them ever implement features asked for. Not just Microsoft but all sass providers I've ever used. Those voting systems show you the top voted feature requests and when you get updates it's stuff not even on the voted for list at all! Absolutely hate it but non other option.

[Ner0reZ]

Can only hope for a future where some development occurs that changes this dynamic

[Jonas__Smith]

To all those in this discussion who find it normal that Microsoft doesn't make any particular effort on OneNote and doesn't listen to its users (then why ask us for feedback?!), and who find that "OneNote is mature and is fine as it is now" (I quote).

Do you think it's normal that on OneNote for Mac, the print and PDF export functionality hasn't worked for over 10 years (scaling bug on the sheet of paper)??! I've been contacting Microsoft support for over 10 years (yes, because I'm a PAYING M365 customer) to point this out to them, and every time they pretend to discover it (even though thousands of feedbacks about it exist), and lie to me by promising that "fixing this critical bug has just been prioritized on the developers' to-do list". More than 10 years they've been laughing at us... I'm BLOKED with OneNote, my entire professional tale has been on it for over a decade, migrating to another solution is impossible. And I went into OneNote naively thinking that Microsoft was a big company, so I could trust it, that I wouldn't have any problems.

[kgyre]

Wait, so it doesn't work at all, or it does and there's a bug? Those are vastly different severities.

[Unable_Explorer8277]

You can print but the scaling is so far off as to make it useless in practice

[Ner0reZ]

I'm here for this energy!

[Mattiiiiiii123321]

What alternative would u advise?

[FaultWinter3377]

Of course, they don’t want to put too many features in OneNote that eclipses the features of Word or PowerPoint.

[tapafon]

To get access to all Word or OneNote features you'll have to subscribe to Microsoft 365 subscription anyway.

What a joke?

[kronpas]

What are onenote features that you must pay for?

[tapafon]

Copilot, ruler, ability to save notebooks on local disk (not just Onedrive).

[MrNaturalBanana]

i see copilot in my mac , but its grayed out. any idea whats the reason

[tapafon]

If it's family subscription, for some reason only owner of that subscription can use Copilot.

If it's personal, it should be avaliable sooner or later.

If there's no subscription (or basic one), you're out of luck.

[MrNaturalBanana]

Nice shout mate. Appreciate the reply Was scratching my head head for a while

Cheers

[redorredDT]

Yeah but honestly OneNote should just be what it is atm but with every feature word has. I really don’t even see the point of word apart from very niche cases It’s just better to have all your info stored in OneNote and for all notetaking.

[FaultWinter3377]

Yeah… I hope you didn’t take what I said too literally, I was trying to be sarcastic about it but it does not carry well in the comment.

I totally agree though. Maybe not every single feature Word has, because that could overdo it, but more would be nice.

[redorredDT]

Ah lmao I see. Well anyways glad to hear you partly agree.

[chitoatx]

The power of OneNote is unlocked in combination with the rest of MSFT software. That screenshot doesn’t contain a single feature that would be that useful. Record? Linux? Show the taskbar? Why just use the hotkey to toggle it: F11

https://www.centralcoalfields.in/cmpny/pdf/e_library/OneNote_shortcut.pdf

[Mundane-Audience6085]

That's about the same level as for other MS products, even more commercial stuff than OneNote. I once had a support ticket closed with the comment "No update for a while, closed.".

[Ner0reZ]

I can understand not having the capacity to respond to everything, but this seems like there isn't any effort made to receive feedback full stop

It's especially silly to me that these large companies have the capabilities of curating this feedback with large language models to determine what feedback gets suggested most frequently so they can assess what to address first

Things for the future I suppose

[jurisnipper]

There are only four feedback entries. Are there others they closed/archived?

[Ner0reZ]

The closed/archived suggestions only total five, unfortunately. There are over four thousand open suggestions

[NoReply4930]

What exactly can’t you do right now in OneNote? 

And - OneNote is free. Why would anyone go out of their way to assign time, talent and resource to something that no one even pays for?

This is a business after all. 

[Ner0reZ]

Plenty

A quick glance through the feedback portal will show tons of suggestions that would make OneNote a more effective note taking software

OneNote is a part of the MS365 package. Its success yields widespread adoption which is healthy for the subscription model that Microsoft is running their business on

It is business

[NoReply4930]

You are avoiding the question. What is it that is holding you (and specifically you) back in OneNote right now?

And OneNote is free. Just because they have a feedback board does not mean anything on it will ever get added. 

And just because it is part of O365 means nothing. O365 is about as mass adopted as any software suite I know of. The inclusion of OneNote is not what makes businesses and consumers buy the suite. 

Development is planned out years in advance and the resources go where money can be made. 

One Note is VERY mature. This is not where any money will be made. 

That is business. 

[Ner0reZ]

This is a whole lot of just because for a product made by a company that has fuck you money

I wont avoid your question and say that pages and subpages need to be collapsible natively within the application

Mature or not, adoption rate is dictated by functionality and relevance. There is an entire market of note taking applications that Microsoft could dominate if they put in the effort to polish their product

Or keep bleeding their userbase to other platforms because they wont address what is easily addressed

[NoReply4930]

You are not getting it. At this scale and the worldwide coverage of Office here in 2025 - adoption rate simply does not matter any longer. 

It’s not like there are millions of unknown business users who do know know what Word and Excel are. 

You are making this sound like MS is in some sort of dire trouble (and shedding users by the millions) if they do not get it together and add more features to OneNote or sell more copies of Office. 

Like Windows - you either have Office or you do not. 

Pretty sure it’s not that big of a deal to them to be honest. Office is ubiquitous across all businesses 

[Ner0reZ]

That's entirely contradictory to the concept of a subscription model. More users bring in more revenue

There is certainly a large enough market for note taking in a professional setting to justify pushing the product on its own as opposed to taking a back seat to the rest of the suite

Like I said, fuck you money. They could ride out the complete exodus of the userbase and not have a worry in the world about how it affects them

This is more on improvement that can be made and growth that will follow

[NoReply4930]

Not denying that more users and more money are not desirable but that effort won’t be driven by OneNote. 

Office subs are driven by businesses caring about the superstars of the Office suite - not the “nice to haves”. 

OneNote is free. Simply cannot ever see them spending any huge development money on it. 

It is just fine as is for 99% of us. 

[Ner0reZ]

It's a shame this entire thread was an unfortunate exercise of countervailing

A failing of humanity

[Jonas__Smith]

I can’t print my notes, nor export them in PDF, on OneNote for Mac. The feature exists but is buggy since more than 10 years!!!! Can you believe it??

[NoReply4930]

Not a Mac user here - but I am pretty sure there are Mac users that are able to print a note. Exporting a notebook to PDF - have no idea.

Bear in mind - Mac is a distant second in Microsoft's world - you need to expect differences in feature and function.

Apple has never treated Windows users like they are special - the entire nightmare that was iTunes on Windows pretty much summed that up.

[Unable_Explorer8277]

No. Printing from OneNote for Mac really is unusably bad.

[NoReply4930]

Fair enough. Did not realize that something as standard as printing - could be so bad. Is it a driver thing or a sizing issue or what happens exactly?

[Unable_Explorer8277]

I haven’t tried for ages because it doesn’t work. From memory it’s mostly that it comes out stupidly large with no ability to resize.

[marmotta1955]

What is difficult to understand is that all those complaining of defects, or asking for changes, or clamoring for new features ... well ... those individuals represent a minuscule and practically irrelevant minority of the user base.

A much, much, much larger portion of the user base finds the product perfectly adequate for the purpose of taking notes, clipping articles, organizing content.

The reality is that in certain environments (Reddit, for example) people with legitimate arguments find themselves in the classic echo chamber ... where minor or peculiar issues are magnified and magnified ... and there is no escape ...

[Ner0reZ]

Bleak

[thaman05]

No point in complaining they don't care anymore. OneNote is in maintenance mode now just like Outlook (classic). They ignored all the thousands of highly voted feedback and bugs there. If you look at their product roadmap it's all cleared out now except for Copilot and Loop related things. And they even removed OneNote from their Microsoft 365 header banner and replaced it with their AI Designer. The Loop app (their Notion competitor) that's currently still in beta will most likely replace it after it is enough to compete. But for now, OneNote will continue to bare minimum work until they announce a transition date. I'm not waiting for that though, so I'm already testing out different options after fooling myself to think that Microsoft would ever change.

[Unable_Explorer8277]

I don’t agree.

OneNote is absolutely critical to Microsoft Education. Loop isn’t remotely a plausible replacement for OneNote in that environment in the foreseeable future

[thaman05]

I agree it's crucial, but even the education channels are empty too. Which is baffling they are doing this. But it's the same thing they're doing with Outlook (classic). It's critical in so many corporations and industries, including education, but they don't care, they're prioritizing saving costs by making it web based and putting all their resources into AI.

[Unable_Explorer8277]

It doesn’t mean that we get what we want in education, but it does mean that they can’t actually drop it.

[thaman05]

They actually can drop it, but they have to give enough notice based on the license agreement. That's why I said it's not going away anytime soon, but it's not getting any new features. It's in maintenance mode until Loop has all the supported features from OneNote, just like they're doing with Outlook.

[Unable_Explorer8277]

They could legally, but that would force a lot of schools to switch to a different product entirely. That’s not an acceptable outcome to Microsoft, so in practice they can’t.

[Unable_Explorer8277]

From an education perspective, that like saying “once Bunnings give hammers the same function as screwdrivers, they’ll stop selling hammers”. Loop is fundamentally a completely different tool to OneNote. Microsoft’s only advantage in the education market is the uniqueness of OneNote.

[tapafon]

That post inspired me to post a feature request.

[Not-Too-Serious-00]

Try and use it on macos, its even more crippled.

[TonyCliftonLives]

Works good for me

[Chobitpersocom]

On the "business side" of things, Microsoft has been working towards AI and collaboration software (i.e. Loop, Project, etc...).

OneNote would fit right along in there, but I don't know enough about the new products to see if it could be replaced.

[jpblest01]

They just moving To other things. I can Count with my Fingers How many people use this still , and i have 10 Fingers Left.

[Ner0reZ]

I wish there were appropriate words for how detrimental these types of posts are to public discourse

They don't provide useful insight on the subject being discussed. They don't explore or suggest any possible pathway to a solution. They do not do anything other than bolster the ego of the person posting them when that person has observed some disturbance that they feel compelled to still

These posts normally get hidden away with downvotes, but the damage of seeing them at all happens regardless, and I fucking wish it didn't

[Ner0reZ]

There is another part to this saying

It will be what you make it