From the beginning, OneNote has been designed to do things quite differently
from Word and there are many reasons that we explicitly differ from Word in
certain ways. At a high-level, OneNote was designed to quickly capture of
rich content, organize it, search and share. Word was designed for final
format document output. These are two very different sets of DNA. I've
taken a few snippets from other internal folks on the OneNote team explaining
some of these differences and merged them below. But first, to answer your
initial question, you can easily embed a Word document onto the OneNote page
using copy paste. You can also use the "Send to OneNote" Printer and "print"
a Word document on the OneNote page. Finally, you can use the "Send To -->
Word" comment to take content out of Onenote and put it quickly into Word
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Word’s surface is hugely driven by the output experience. It’s got tons of
rich formatting/styles/etc. It’s got headers and footers and margins and
other printed page-centric capabilities. There’s really no way a feature in
Word can afford to automatically put content on a page that the user wasn’t
paying attention to – the notion that you might print out your doc and hand
it to your boss and be surprised by some of the content that had “appearedâ€.
OneNote’s surface is driven by a remarkably different vision. It’s about
capture and input. It cares way more about the information itself that you’ve
recorded and much less about the precise formatting, layout, etc. The OneNote
“paste†command by default pastes in the URL from which the content came when
pasting HTML – that would be right out in Word. The OneNote “napkin mathâ€
feature (type 1+1=<return> and see what
happens) couldn’t happen in Word. Tags (mark stuff to help find it later)
make sense in OneNote, not so much in Word.
Among other things, the OneNote model and file format gives us:
- Super fast incremental save (so we do it frequently, crash has little
consequence for you, you don’t need to think about save, we keep all your
stuff)
- Multi-user / multi-machine simultaneous edit and merge (online and after
offline) – a big value if you’re using shared notebooks, or sharing across
your own machines
- Fast sync (by just syncing the revisions/deltas since last sync) – this
is a key part of the offline availability story for OneNote
- The smooth integration of ink. It’s a lot easier to say “Word should also
get OneNote’s great ink abilities†than to do it. The reason OneNote’s ink
capabilities are “great†is because the model, editing experience, and file
format are designed for it from the beginning. Word is designed in a way that
makes ink regions (rectangles) feasible, but having a smooth experience where
you can ink anywhere and have correct and meaningful things when you’re
working with other content types in the same space might require some pretty
radical redesign that would have big implications for backward compat for
Word (backward compat is a very, very important feature of Word).
- … the list goes on (noteflags etc.)
