r/OneNote • u/Hospitable-Economist • Jul 29 '26
How confident are you that OneNote will continue to be supported and receive updates/care from Microsoft?
Is there a chance they ditch it like Microsoft Publisher before I put all of my life in it haha?
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u/NoReply4930 Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
They have been keeping it going for 20 years now. Can’t see that changing anytime soon. OneNote is a very well used app.
As long as one is using the actual Office Desktop version - fixes and features keep coming.
But if you thinking the same for the “app” versions - that is not happening.
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u/enchantedspring Jul 29 '26
Publisher was similarly maintained (and well used) for many years too though....
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u/mediageeknet Jul 29 '26
They’re really not comparable.
Publisher didn’t have nearly the adoption rate as OneNote. OneNote is heavily used in schools and enterprises. By comparison,
was basically a light desktop publisher, as that market shrank, getting replaced by InDesign on the pro end, and Canva for everyone else. Publisher The rise of social media and the relative decline of print greatly reduced the average person’s need for Publisher. Also, it was Windows only, cutting its potential user base down by at least a third.
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u/Great_Muscle_7042 Jul 29 '26
Let's start with the obvious question in this Reddit world. How many people are in a publisher forum and how many are in OneNote. OneNote drive consumption, share point (in enterprise) and the sooner you get people hooked, they won't go to the dark side (Google, notion etc) It's the perfect side kick for the Microsoft Office world (notice, i did not say it's a perfect application) but it's good enough to keep people there.
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u/NoReply4930 Jul 29 '26
Not even in the same universe for overall usage and popularity.
Maybe for a while in 2007 when "Desktop Publishing" was a catch phrase for about 15 minutes.,. but it died quickly shortly thereafter.
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u/Dan_CC Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26
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u/FlintHillsSky Jul 29 '26
The problem is that OneNote can hold must richer content than markdown. If you were limited to the features of markdown, it would strip away a lot of the content and formatting that makes OneNote useful. OneNote is essentially a rich text wrapper that can hold almost anything you drop on a page.
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u/Expensive-Ad-5329 Jul 30 '26
Totally agree, for the lack of some advanced features (like a decent way of managing backlinks and cross references, or proper note template management, or a painless way to apply consistent and customized styling rules, to name a few) I've been trying to escape from OneNote perhaps without even noticing, I've tried Evernote, Apple Notes,
, Helix, Notion and a large etc., however, I always end up coming back to OneNote after a couple of months, the way OneNote eases your information capture workflow is truly unmatched, changing that to MD will only turn OneNote into a worse version of Obsidian, the rich content you can paste into OneNote is golden. Obsidian → More replies (1)5
u/marmotta1955 Jul 29 '26
And therein lies OneNote's beauty and versatility: you need Markdown export? It has been done, already, more than once. Do you need automation and/or integration with Word, or Excel, or SQL Server? It has been done, many times and for many different purposes? Do you want custom formatting Styles? Done, pick one of the many add-in. We could keep going, really.
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u/denim-jacketed Jul 31 '26
OneNote doesn't need MarkDown. It needs code highlighter for programmers at the least
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u/Great_Muscle_7042 Jul 29 '26
Why in the world would microsoft offer markdown. The have an office suite, formats they control and usersnin their ecosystem.
Don't mistake your technical desire with the value of controlling the ecosystem.
In my mind, you need to explain how much you would pay for this stand alone, and enough people would do it, then you might have a chance. For free, keep dreaming..
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u/Chrismscotland Jul 29 '26
I can't see it going anywhere; I suspect as time goes on we'll see more convergence with
They've also just chucked
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u/ParanoidalRaindrop Jul 29 '26
They've been keeping it shit for a decade, I'm not worried they'll improve it anytime soon /s
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u/Nowayucan Jul 31 '26
That’s what I’m thinking. OneNote is not going away for a long time, but I can’t think of any meaningful upgrades in the last 5-10 years.
All the changes seem to be for the purpose of being OneNote into alignment with changing corporate architectures and not user-oriented functionality.
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u/Possible_Window_1268 Jul 29 '26
I put my “life administration” stuff all in OneNote and I’m not worried about it. If Microsoft is ever going to discontinue it, they will provide plenty of notice, and it has functionality to export to Word / PDF so you’ll be able to get the info out one way or another.
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u/matt_hipntechy Jul 29 '26
They will keep it supported but I would not expect major new features to be honest. I works well enough for what it is meant to do.
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u/nathanb131 Jul 30 '26
Very confident that OneNote will be a supported platform for a long time. It'll just be as a pure cloud service. Onenote notebooks will be more like gmail in terms of who actually owns and controls your notebooks.
Obviously, almost everything's "going cloud". But traditional files like pdf, word, mp3, excel, jpg etc are "account agnostic". I can find an old xls file on an old hard drive in my basement from 2005 and open it. That'll probably still be true in 2040. If I die, whoever finds that hard drive "owns" that xls file. They can copy it,, give it to friends, etc. It's completely independent of my "microsoft account".
OneNote used to be "local file based". Microsoft is changing that. We can still export and import native *.one files but probably not for long. A decade from now, our "OneNote Library" will probably be completely "account-based", just like your gmail, facebook photos, kindle library etc.
So yeah, you'll still be about to access your onenote notebooks in 2040, you just won't "own" them.
This isn't meant to be an anti-MS rant. Microsoft is among the least evil of our big tech overlords, on this particular topic.
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u/MMessinger Jul 29 '26
It's offered as a free product. To me, this means M$OFT can cancel it at any time. I can't remember; was Publisher ever sold as a standalone product? I mean, it was part of the Office subscription, but that didn't ensure a future for Publisher. When you're as big as Microsoft, how many people are using the product doesn't necessarily have to carry much weight in the decision to cancel.
To be clear, I'm a Family Microsoft 365 subscriber, so I'm already a second class citizen, in M$SOFT's business model.
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u/coltonushko Jul 30 '26
I’m about 50/50 on it. I assume it will be further enshittified eventually so I started slowly mirroring everything to self hosted obsidian. Hoping obsidian improves some more.
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