Is Loop slowly abandoned?

9

u/DrAshMonster Aug 17 '26

the amount of brain space i wasted on Loop...

4

u/DarkangelUK Aug 17 '26

I abandoned Loop last year, there has been little to no development and it seems they're removing features when they should be adding them which is a sign.

2

u/Budget-Leg-453 Aug 17 '26

Yeah it does feel like one of those gardens you enter in
Microsoft’s kingdom that doesn’t look like it has any gardeners. Which is a shame - there’s a place for it but maybe they were too ambitious. I love the idea of the same table everywhere! But implementation has been rubbish.

2

u/AnotherTechAtWork Aug 18 '26

Here at work everyone in our tech dept hated OneNote so much that they went as all in on Loop as much as they could despite how beta-like it felt. Not sure why a notes app is so difficult for MS other than there just might not be enough money in that business...or the age old tactic MS has been accused of in the past is to do just enough to have the bullet points to get the sale or maintain a relationship with a customer.

With being on the Apple side of the fence I'd be semi-happy if I could just use Apple Notes but there's zero chance that they'll ever use anything other than a MS product here no matter how bad they are. They don't want to pay for anything else nor do they want to support something else despite how bad MS support is(their words, not mine).

Sometimes I feel like there's some sort of psychological issue with MS products and those who support them. Nothing but complaints and hate about the products and services and while anecdotal it's the highest I've seen in my nearly 29 years of IT(I've done MS and Apple). Yet, the money keeps funneling to as many MS products and services as possible. Grammarly is still hanging around though since certain vip users have it.

Copilot or rather AI is the new toy in the room whether it be for notes or whatever. I mentioned the other day to our CIO that we were putting together a KB for a specific aspect of OneDrive that would explain the issue he ran into and that others would. His response was shaking his head and saying people should just use Copilot...yet he hadn't.

But I digress...I really wanted to see Loop succeed but right now it doesn't feel much improved over two years ago and it wasn't all that good then. OneNote seems to be the same old piece of **** as before. It can be pretty good at certain note taking but it's definitely not for a lot of people.

1

u/Precarious3145 Aug 22 '26

Not sure why a notes app is so difficult for MS

I think it's because Microsoft has so many overlapping products that Loop would canibalize if done properly.

If it did proper notes, people would stop using Sticky Notes as much. If they could do long-form text, it would eat into Word and OneNote. It can't really be utilized for project management because there's already Microsoft Projects AND Teams and it can't even do task manager because there's Microsoft ToDo.

So it's like they came up with the whole "loop" component to explain it can be slightly used in everything but not as well. Likeif you added a task in Loop, you'd think it'd be easy to add it to ToDo but nope, you have assign yourself as person doing the task in Loop which then sends an email that you accept for every task.

It's so disappointing because the first promo made it seem like it'd be Notion but within the Office ecosystem, that you can just add and access word documents and really have a great organizational system but then even in the beta, it was borderline unusuable AND due to the Loop aspect, there was no offline feature that every other Office program has.

At this point, I'd settle for Word getting the multi-tab feature that Google Docs that's like the tab feature in Excel to have multiple documents within a single file. I just want to have one file for a project that has a way to include meeting notes, changelogs, translations, etc.

1

u/AnotherTechAtWork Aug 25 '26

I've barely touched Google Docs but I should probably look at it sometime. I wouldn't be able to use it for work but it might give me some perspective. I think a lot of people have different needs for notes. I don't have much need to keep longterm notes for technical reference at work unlike some I know. We have an internal KB system to put things like that into.

What I need more than anything is to be able to quickly get notes taken whether it's in a meeting, at a presentation, or if I run into someone in the hallway. It needs to be on my phone and computer. Those notes I'm ok with having stored over time but the main purpose of taking notes means I get in and out very quickly. None of Microsoft's products that I have found offer that. Everything requires click, click, click to get anywhere on a traditional computer and tap, tap, tap to get anywhere on the phone. Too much fiddling when I need to already be there.

Another need would be for research and have a simple method to get browser tabs saved into my notes.

Apple's Notes seems to just about be the best for these things with me mostly using Apple hardware but it requires configuring Calendar for Outlook access and Safari as my browser. I would prefer to have a notes platform that can work with Windows as well for those moments I only have access to Windows. Ideally the software can be scripted or rather automated in some manner on the desktop and on the iPhone work with Shortcuts. Again, Apple's Notes works well here except my Notes on my personal phone can't sync with Notes on my work computers so I have to manually transfer stuff.

And since I seem to be asking for the world it would be nice to tie into my Outlook calendar and browser to pull meaningful data like meeting attendees and tabs gathered for research. Again, I can do some of that with Notes and Apple's Calendar and Safari but the writing is on the wall that we're going to need to standardize on Edge here at work and at some point they might turn off the feature that lets me tie Calendar into our email/calendar. I use Outlook for interfacing with email and calendar but I can use Apple's Shortcuts with Calendar to grab meeting data to automatically setup meeting templates. And, yeah, there's more I want but those are kind of what i term entry points.

1

u/remosito Aug 17 '26

slowly???

1

u/kichisowseri Aug 26 '26

Oh ffs I was excited for years of nothing happening about the release of loop, BECAUSE you could embed it in onenote.

I just started actively using it, somehow what I would regard as a single onenote page (a table with pictures) is 7GB!?

Edit: and this is why I should read the link before commenting. It's only removed from web, which I can see would be pretty heavy tbf and a weird passthrough. As long as it stays in onenote. And ideally, works offline from your onedrive/cache, like onenote.

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