ON2007B2: "Flip through pages" broken?

[alainr]

In the "General" Section I read:

"Flip through pages To quickly review your pages by flipping through them
like in a paper notebook, click a page tab, and then hold down the mouse
button while you move over the other page tabs. Each page is displayed for as
long as you hold the mouse pointer over its corresponding page tab. "

This was a nice feature which I could use as advertised in ON2003. I could
also flip with my scroll button. Now there does not seem to be a way to
quickly flip through pages to quickly scan through pages.

Is it just me or is this broken?

 

[Patrick Schmid]

Any way I try this here, I end up dragging the page instead of getting
the flip through feature.

Patrick Schmid

 

[Thurman]

Any way I try this here, I end up dragging the page instead of getting the
flip through feature.

Try Ctrl-Page Up or Down.

 

[Grant Robertson]

Any way I try this here, I end up dragging the page instead of getting
the flip through feature.

I hope this is just a bug and not a "design decision." I would hate to do
without this feature.

 

[Patrick Schmid]

I cannot find this in the ON guide. Can you tell me exactly where you
read this?

I can flip through the pages if I move the move cursor over the page
tabs and hold ctrl while using my mouse scroll wheel.

Patrick Schmid

 

[John Waller]

I hope this is just a bug and not a "design decision." I would hate to do

without this feature.

Same here, Grant.

 

[krypticide]

This behavior has changed since the very first beta, and it's because of the
new drag and drop functionality. So while you can't flip through pages like
you could in ON2003, you can drag and drop pages among pages, sections, and
notebooks.

I think they just forgot to remove that from the guide.

 

[Alex]

It looks like this is broken in Beta2. You will have to use a modifier key
to flip through the pages though. We changed this because a large number of
people were failing at the more common task of simply moving pages. And now
that we support drag/dropping sections, notebooks, and pages, we couldn't
have dragging on pages flip, so we added the modifier key (which is broken in
beta2).

-Alex

 

[Alex]

This should work now with Control-Scroll. So hold Control down and scroll
with your mouse wheel when you have your cursor over the page tabs.

 

[Ben M. Schorr - MVP]

Aloha Alex,

And make sure you have the correct mouse driver installed. I had Intellipoint
configured for the wrong model of mouse on my Tablet and got erratic results
with CTRL+Scroll. When I corrected the error it works fine now.

-Ben-
Ben M. Schorr - MVP
Roland Schorr & Tower
http://www.rolandschorr.com
Microsoft OneNote FAQ: http://www.factplace.com/onenotefaq.htm

 

[Tom S.]

Alex,

Crtl-scroll zooms the view in and out, at least with my mouse (a cool
feature by the way). The proper driver is installed and I don't think its a
feature of the mouse itself as only the OneNote entry itself changes (i.e.
not the page tabs to the left or the notebooks tree to the right).

Tom S.

 

[Tom S.]

Alex,

Crtl-scroll zooms the view in and out, at least with my mouse (a cool
feature by the way). The proper driver is installed and I don't think its a
feature of the mouse itself as only the OneNote entry itself changes (i.e.
not the page tabs to the left or the notebooks tree to the right).

My apolgies. This feature does work when the mouse is over the tabs. When
it slips over to the note itself, as it did on me earlier, the zoom feature
kicks in. Alex was correct.

Tom S.

 

[Grant Robertson]

This should work now with Control-Scroll. So hold Control down and scroll
with your mouse wheel when you have your cursor over the page tabs.

And... Um... What about us with a tablet PC. Yet another of the features
I find the most useful seems to be going away. Why can we no longer just
drag the stylus up and down like we could before? And don't tell me to
hold the control key down as I drag or something. In tablet mode there is
no control key. (And yes, I know I can program one of the tablet keys to
act as the control key but there are only so many of them and they are
all being used by more important things.) I thought OneNote was supposed
to be the killer Tablet PC app but it really is starting to seem as if
the Tablet PC specific features and usability are being abandoned.

 

[Patrick Schmid]

Where is the big deal to just tab on each page with your tablet pen?

Patrick Schmid

 

[alainr]

With 100 pages, that's 100 clicks too many!

 

[Patrick Schmid]

You mean "tabs"

Sounds like your notebook screams for suborganization in more folders
and sections

Patrick Schmid

 

[Grant Robertson]

Where is the big deal to just tab on each page with your tablet pen?

Sounds like your notebook screams for suborganization in more folders
and sections

Patrick, your replies are becoming so blatantly Microsoft apologetic that
many of them are almost unworthy of a response.

I can think of plenty of situations where a user may have quite a few
pages in a section, even hundreds. And, yes, even in a well organized
notebook. We are supposed to be able to organize our note the way we see
fit. For you to insult someone and tell them that they must be
screamingly disorganized if they find a particular feature useful is
uncalled for.

You claim that you have been using OneNote 2007 beta for several months
and don't remember what is in OneNote 2003. So, perhaps, you don't
remember just how handy that feature is. It is incredibly faster than
just tapping on each page tab in turn. You can just put your stylus down
on one tab and drag it down the screen. In 2 seconds you have just
flipped through 20 pages. Each one is displayed in full and your eyes can
stay focused on the pages so you can quickly recognize the page you are
looking for. When you get to the blue arrow on the top or bottom you can
just keep your stylus there and it will continue to flip through all the
rest of the pages in the section. If you go too far you can just drag
your stylus back up again till you backtrack to what you were looking
for. All without having to lift your stylus from the screen or having to
continuously shift your eyes back and forth to aim your stylus at the
next page tab. I have even gotten to where I can just feel where the blue
arrow is by how far away it is from the physical edge of my screen. I
just hold my hand a certain way and when my little finger hits the corner
of my screen I can just hold my hand there and the flipping will
continue.

Using this feature I can find what I am looking for in seconds rather
than minutes. Let's see you do that by tapping on each page tab in turn.

 

[Patrick Schmid]

What do you prefer: drag & drop for page tabs or flip through?
Both require to tap on a page tab with the stylus and then drag the
stylus up or down on the screen. So you have one user action, but two
features for it. Which one do you pick?

If MS had picked flip through, you'd be posting here to complain how
inconvenient and a hassle it is to move pages around. You'd be
complaining how immature ON is and that drag & drop is such a basic
Windows function, so why doesn't ON support it? And you'd be making the
case that there is a valid reason to rearrange pages frequently and the
current method just takes minutes whereas drag & drop would take only
seconds.
If MS had picked drag & drop,...

You have one user action, but two features which you both want to be
triggered with it. You can only get one. Do you pick the one that
Windows users generally expect to happen when they tap on something and
drag it (drag & drop), or do you pick the one that no one even has
noticed was missing until now, 6+ months after the first beta version?

So, you are the Microsoft OneNote team and you need to pick. Which one
do you pick Grant?

Patrick Schmid

 

[alainr]

It was perfectly intuitive the way it was implemented in ON2003.
Drag-and-drop worked perfectly... for both operations. The operation just
had an decent intuitive twist to it. In a real paper-file, you pull the page
off to the side and re-insert it in its new location.

I would like to see numbers on the efficiency increase and time-saving
introduced by taking-out the "yank-to-the-right" part out of the
drag-and-drop operation!

What do you prefer: drag & drop for page tabs or flip through?
Both require to tap on a page tab with the stylus and then drag the
stylus up or down on the screen. So you have one user action, but two
features for it. Which one do you pick?

Both

 

[Patrick Schmid]

I would like to see numbers on the efficiency increase and time-saving

introduced by taking-out the "yank-to-the-right" part out of the
drag-and-drop operation!

Probably no efficiency and time-saving increase at all, but an increase
in discoverability of the feature. Yanking to the right and then using
drag & drop just isn't very intuitive and so most users probably never
were able to find that feature. So it was changed to the standard
Windows way of doing it. Even though ON is a note-taking program, it's
still a program and there are simply certain things users expect to work
a certain way, or they think it doesn't work at all.
Office 2007 is a lot about discoverability. A lot of what was changed
(mostly of course for the new ribbon apps) was based on usage data (SQM,
or in the 2003 UI it's called "Customer Experience Improvement Program",
that one feature that you probably always switched off. I always did).
So the argument that flip through was a great feature doesn't work for
Microsoft, if only maybe 1% of all ON users actually used it. If at the
same time only a few percent of all ON users used drag & drop in 2007,
but yet screamed for the feature to be implemented, then the picture for
the ON team is rather clear: A feature that is used by a small number of
people (aka as power users) is preventing the discoverability of a
feature that most users would use. Hence the change.
The drag & drop probably falls probably into the same category as
drawing tools in Word. People actually commented with Word 2007 that
they think it is fantastic Word now has drawing tools. As Word has had
drawing tools for several versions though, it was mainly the problem
that people couldn't find them and hence thought Word didn't have them.

As this probably sounds like I am apologizing for Microsoft (which I am
not, I am mainly explaining what I think the reasoning behind changing
this is), let me add: Office 2007 is not the Office for power users.
Power users get screwed everywhere in Office 2007, especially in the new
ribbon UI. If there is something that would only affect a tiny
percentage of the users (the power users), the feature probably was
removed or the UI to use the feature was made inefficient.
Since November, I have filed over 300 bugs and design change requests
for Office 2007, posted countless newsgroup posts in the private beta
newsgroups and sent lots of emails. A lot of my requests to make Office
2007 more efficient to use or better to use for power users ended up
being shot down. In the beginning, I was screaming over every item that
got shot down, then I went to just complaining and now I am pretty much
resigned to accepting Microsoft's decisions and not waste energy and
time on making a major fuss about every one of them. Flip through gone?
*shrugs, it's not the end of the world, if you think about what all has
been lost in 2007: user customization in ribbon apps, charting tools
that are horrible to use for power users, no floating & customizable
toolbars anymore, PPT advertising stupid WordArt stuff everywhere but
making it a pain in the butt to use plain text formatting (such as
bold), no object model for add-ins to query, change or do anything
dynamically really with the ribbon, etc. The list is rather long.

There hasn't been really anything to complain seriously about ON 2007.
As it didn't get the ribbon, it didn't get a lot of the issues
associated with the ribbon, and the bag of features added in 2007 are
just terrific. I never used flip-through, so I won't miss it, even
though in retrospect it sounds like an interesting feature. I can't
recall whether I ever figured out how to do drag & drop in 2003, but I
know for sure that I figured it out the first day I had 2007. So for me
I lost a feature I never used and another feature became
discoverable/easier to use for me. Overall, from my point of view, not a
bad deal.

Btw, MS won't make the data available. Similar requests were not even
acknowledged in the past 6 months. Nor doesn't it seem like they will
ever answer the question of how they compensated for all the users
(probably most of them power users) who switched off the "Customer
Experience Improvement Program" due to it being a phone-home feature.
Believe me, once we found out that this data had been the major driver
in developing 2007, everyone made sure to always have it enabled and
regretted switching it off for 2003.

Patrick Schmid