I’m writing this post using OneNote. This isn’t very interesting and I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that just about every blog post I’ve made over the last decade originated in OneNote. I’ve used any number of editors over the years, the content almost always originated in OneNote.
What is special about this post is that it is actually posted from OneNote. To be more precise, this post was pulled directly from a OneNote Notebook into WordPress (the platform I use for this blog). This was done using a WordPress Plugin developed in partnership between WordPress and the OneNote team at Microsoft.
I really like the workflow this plugin enables. Unlike blogging from Word or LiveWriter, I am not posting directly from the editor. While this may seem like the most efficient workflow, it presents some challenges. I often found myself having to side-step the default workflow so that I could ensure the intended formatting carried through to WordPress cleanly. Most often than not I ended up having to teak links, images, etc. before I could publish the post.
With the OneNote plugin I am instead importing from my Notebook into the WordPress editor. This cleanly separates the creation process from publishing process. It may seem like a trivial change in workflow but I finding it surprisingly impactful.
Is it perfect? No, of course not. I still had to mess with the paragraph formatting a bit and I’ve had a few issues with some images not importing properly. Even with these issues, I find it quite usable. It may note be as seamless as LiveWrite was when it first launched but it is certainly more capable than LiveWriter today.