Why does OneNote have sparkly rainbow ink? Microsoft explains.

OneNote is a great, arguably industry-leading notation taking tool. The gratuitous awarding is bundled with Windows 10, and is available on virtually every device y'all may own. The app synchronizes your content beyond devices, allowing you lot to share and collaborate on notes with friends and family, and if you take the educational licenses, your entire classroom.

Indeed, OneNote like many of Microsoft'due south products accept enterprise and education-level versions, which frequently some with some sort of fee. For Function 365 users, OneNote comes with some intriguing extra features, such equally rainbow inking, which you might think is a bit of a useless characteristic.

Ian Mikutel from the Microsoft Whiteboard team recently shared some interesting insights into why OneNote has rainbow inking, reminding us in the tech bubble that only because some of us might call back a feature is useless, other people certainly won't.

Responding to a thread on reddit which opened with a dismissive comment about the rainbow and milky way inking options, Mikutel jumped in to share an interesting story about how the colourful inking solutions can inspire youngsters to engage in course.

About that rainbow and milky way ink: people really practise care most these, peculiarly in the education market, which is a major place OneNote is used and loved. This feature's origin story is actually pretty funny. I was at a school visit, learning how students and teachers apply digital ink in OneNote, and asked a class "if digital ink could do anything, what would you desire it to do?". This girl in the back of the class raised her paw, and said "I think...it would be cool...if the ink...looked similar a rainbow?" and immediately the entire class erupted in "oohs" and "ahhs" every bit if fireworks were going off in front of them.

I took that feedback back to our Design and Engineering teams, and nosotros created Ink Furnishings, including Rainbow, Galaxy (which samples actual Hubble space imagery), and the more than muted Silver and Gold pens and then nosotros offered a variety of furnishings that would work in settings from EDU to Enterprise. The issue has been a pretty big hitting, only search "rainbow onenote" on Twitter to see some examples for yourself. The best thing I got was a letter from a teacher thanking me later she re-wrote her content in Ink Effects, and said finally for the first fourth dimension in 10 years the kids are paying attention now. The bespeak was that in product development, especially in productivity software, it's super easy to focus on the applied, and forget the fun. Real people utilise our products, and real people become bored, need to stay engaged and inspired, and can use a bit of rainbow in their solar day to day to make that happen. Ink Effects are a minor stride in that direction.

Information technology's an of import thing to consider; productivity tech and software doesn't always have to be boring and functional. Microsoft itself often struggle to place where it falls on the line between fun and work, claiming to exist a productivity company in one jiff while touting heavy Xbox and gaming investment in the side by side. I retrieve the company could stand up to embrace fun a little more, even in Office 365.

If you're an Office 365 subscriber, requite rainbow inking a try, it might burnish up your solar day.

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