OneNote 2007 (Beta) Unanswered Question

[Rebecca]

Greetings. This question has been asked in several posts (including one of
mine), but it has not been answered by a MS ON person, though we do know some
of them read the posts in this group. To the MS OneNote developers, esp.
Chris, I hope you can put yourself in our shoes. If we commit, and
(exhausted from endlessly hunting for a powerful PIM / Database [e.g.,
EverNote, AskSam, Ultra Recall, etc., etc.]) put all our stuff into OneNote,
we want to know if it can handle large quantities of data, including hundreds
of images and the like. What good is it if searches can't be done relatively
quickly over large quantities of data. Please give us some specific
information about limitations, though you don't have to repeat that it
depends on our hardware, which is something we already are well aware of.
Powerful and fast searches -- that's the name of the game. If the program
can't deliever in this department, well, you get the picture.

 

[Patrick Schmid]

Hi Rebecca,

I am not from MS, but I would like to help you get an answer from them.
Can you give an estimate in gigabyte how much data you are thinking
about? As far as I know, OneNote shouldn't have any trouble with 4 GB.
That is for storage and keeping it in its offline cache (which happens
even if you are using it on the same computer as the .one files are
stored).
I don't think searching is going to have any real limitation, as the
Windows Desktop Search engine was built in mind with users searching
their entire harddrives. You might run out of storage space for the
index, but that's the only real limitation I can think of.

Patrick Schmid

 

[Ben M. Schorr - MVP]

Hello Rebecca,

This question has already been answered several times I believe. There aren't
any hard & fast limitations in the product. If you want to put 5 gigabytes
of notes in the product go right ahead. How well it will perform will...dare
I say it...depend upon your hardware.

The question is far too ambiguous for us to quantify an answer. What do
you mean by "large"? What do you mean by "fast"? The new OneNote incorporates
Windows Desktop Search capabilities so it constantly indexes new material
in the background. Because of that you should get very "fast" searches even
of very "large" datasets.

We have a shared folder that is about 900MB at present and it searches pretty
fast. I just tried a search for a word I know is pretty common in that notebook
and it found 27 hits instantly. This on a TabletPC that is RAM heavy but
has a somewhat slow disk subsystem and is currently running half a dozen
apps (including Outlook and Omea).

-Ben-
Ben M. Schorr - MVP
http://www.rolandschorr.com
Microsoft OneNote FAQ: http://www.factplace.com/onenote.html

 

[Daniel Escapa [MS]]

Rebecca -

You have some great questions in here and I will try and resolve them as
much as possible.

OneNote is powerful and it will hold volumes of information and it really
depends on what you are doing with OneNote and how you want to work with it
and as everyone has said what your hardware is like.

As for notebooks, you can create as many as you would like (they are just
folders on a machine). So depending on how many files you open the more
files you could create. Of course if you try and open 30 notebooks in
OneNote that might be an interesting experience.

With sections they are just files inside of a folder. I believe in Windows
XP 32-bit you can create 65535 (2^16 - 1) files in a folder before NTFS
fails. Again this depends on your OS (32-bit vs 64-bit and your file
system, FAT, FAT32, NTFS (please use NTFS)). Since sections are just files
you could create that many sections.

Also since seach section is a file there is a filesystem/OS max file size.
I just found a great chart here:
http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm
They say that the max file size is 2TB, so you could have a section of that
size.

Pages, we don't limit the number of pages you can have in a section. I know
personally I have seen test files with over 600 pages and OneNote still
works.

Now when you have images on a page that increases the size of the .one file
(contributing to the max size of the section) whereas embedded files are
stored elsewhere in the notebook (in a folder near the section).

All of this will work with Windows Desktop Search, as we send information
over the WDS indexer and it keeps track of all of the information just as it
does when you have it index your whole harddrive. Once the indexer has
indexed everything OneNote will search pretty easily since it is just
looking through an index.

Does this solve your questions? I know of people who have gigs of notes, I
personally have about 500 megs and it just works.

Greetings. This question has been asked in several posts (including one
of
mine), but it has not been answered by a MS ON person, though we do know
some
of them read the posts in this group. To the MS OneNote developers, esp.
Chris, I hope you can put yourself in our shoes. If we commit, and
(exhausted from endlessly hunting for a powerful PIM / Database [e.g.,
EverNote, AskSam, Ultra Recall, etc., etc.]) put all our stuff into
OneNote,
we want to know if it can handle large quantities of data, including
hundreds
of images and the like. What good is it if searches can't be done
relatively
quickly over large quantities of data. Please give us some specific
information about limitations, though you don't have to repeat that it
depends on our hardware, which is something we already are well aware of.
Powerful and fast searches -- that's the name of the game. If the program
can't deliever in this department, well, you get the picture.

 

[Rebecca]

Thanks, Daniel, you have put my mind completely to rest about these issues
(audios EverNote, AskSam, Ultra Recall, etc., etc.). Now all you have to do
is hurry up and get the final version of OneNote 2007 ready for all of us who
are eagerly waiting to buy it.

Rebecca -

You have some great questions in here and I will try and resolve them as
much as possible.

OneNote is powerful and it will hold volumes of information and it really
depends on what you are doing with OneNote and how you want to work with it
and as everyone has said what your hardware is like.

As for notebooks, you can create as many as you would like (they are just
folders on a machine). So depending on how many files you open the more
files you could create. Of course if you try and open 30 notebooks in
OneNote that might be an interesting experience.

With sections they are just files inside of a folder. I believe in Windows
XP 32-bit you can create 65535 (2^16 - 1) files in a folder before NTFS
fails. Again this depends on your OS (32-bit vs 64-bit and your file
system, FAT, FAT32, NTFS (please use NTFS)). Since sections are just files
you could create that many sections.

Also since seach section is a file there is a filesystem/OS max file size.
I just found a great chart here:
http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm
They say that the max file size is 2TB, so you could have a section of that
size.

Pages, we don't limit the number of pages you can have in a section. I know
personally I have seen test files with over 600 pages and OneNote still
works.

Now when you have images on a page that increases the size of the .one file
(contributing to the max size of the section) whereas embedded files are
stored elsewhere in the notebook (in a folder near the section).

All of this will work with Windows Desktop Search, as we send information
over the WDS indexer and it keeps track of all of the information just as it
does when you have it index your whole harddrive. Once the indexer has
indexed everything OneNote will search pretty easily since it is just
looking through an index.

Does this solve your questions? I know of people who have gigs of notes, I
personally have about 500 megs and it just works.

Greetings. This question has been asked in several posts (including one
of
mine), but it has not been answered by a MS ON person, though we do know
some
of them read the posts in this group. To the MS OneNote developers, esp.
Chris, I hope you can put yourself in our shoes. If we commit, and
(exhausted from endlessly hunting for a powerful PIM / Database [e.g.,
EverNote, AskSam, Ultra Recall, etc., etc.]) put all our stuff into
OneNote,
we want to know if it can handle large quantities of data, including
hundreds
of images and the like. What good is it if searches can't be done
relatively
quickly over large quantities of data. Please give us some specific
information about limitations, though you don't have to repeat that it
depends on our hardware, which is something we already are well aware of.
Powerful and fast searches -- that's the name of the game. If the program
can't deliever in this department, well, you get the picture.