Loop comes to OneNote: The good and bad of Loop's new app integration

Loop components are now available in one note for anyone who seen my recent video on Loop you will have learned three things I use one note a lot I wasn't particularly impressed by loop as a potential route to replace my one note work and I was disappointed that Loop integration hadn't come to one note in time for me to feature it in that video but now it has so I've decided to return to the topic to check out as a dedicated OneNote user what Loop integration brings to the table but before we dive in a quick introduction my name is Nick dorsy I'm the owner of bright ideas agency a digital transformation consulting company focused on the needs of small and medium-sized businesses I share information here to help you navigate the artificial intelligence age with a particular focus on Microsoft 365 and co-pilot if you enjoy what you see here then it would be great if you'd give the video a like to help it get in front of more people and please subscribe to the channel if you want to keep up to speed on topics such as this so there are really two pieces of loop there's the loop app that includes its workspaces and Pages where you create loop-based content and then there's the components which are blocks of loop content that can be flexibly shared elsewhere in apps like teams or Outlook and now one note these Loop components are important as they are these live building blocks of work that are really app agnostic meaning that if you share the same component in both Outlook and in teams two different people can use their app of choice to contribute to the content of that blog while a third continues to benefit from their contributions on the project that they're working on in the loop app this is the new concept of how working across office should work first presented as the fluid framework back in 201 19 my opinion is that this concept is really sound and exciting it potentially makes collaboration much easier and reduces duplication of content but I've been troubled by its execution there are certain architectural issues I have big questions on that I covered in my other video and the integration of loop into core office apps has been patchy with it missing from some and not equally rolled out into others with the addition of loop into one note one of my earlier complaints potentially get struck off that list and with one note being the closest in terms of matching the types of workloads that you might do in loop from our core Microsoft 365 apps is an important Advance towards Loop being a complete solution and for giving many people a path to transition to Loop over time if that's the journey Microsoft eventually sets out for one note users so let's take a look at how you you use loopin one note what new features it brings to OneNote whether there are limitations and whether this update addresses some of the opportunities for improvement I've identified for loop as always what you see on screen during my demos is from Scenario set up for that purpose and you never see anyone's private information so here I am in the OneNote web app and you can see that now under the insert menu in the ribbon I have the option to insert Loop components and why am I in the web app you might ask well because Loop isn't available in the desktop app yet oh and by the way what is missing from the web app that would be co-pilot come on Microsoft if I'm a OneNote user I have to choose between co-pilot and loop these are two generally available products and one note is one of the core Microsoft 365 apps surely we can offer a better experience than this to both Loop and co-pilot users by at least debuting them both in the same app first this is like selling someone a shovel and telling them the handle will be shipped next month but getting over that little hiccup you can see that we have a fairly expansive list of loop component types we can create directly inside one note including the paragraph table checklist bulleted list numbered list and task list and if I go ahead and select the table component you can see the familiar layout of a table Loop component now it's important to note that there are some big differences between how Loop operates when creating content in one node and other apps too versus working in the loop page inside the dedicated Loop app whereas in Loop you can grab really any content you've created retrospectively and turn it into a sharable loop component you can't in one note so you need to create new Loop components to begin with this means that using Loop in one note ends up with a different workflow than when you use the loop app as you have to be purposeful about what content you want to share as a component and create it that way from the outset unless you want to do a lot of extra work later another important thing to note is that just because you're limited in what types of loop components you can create in one node doesn't mean you're so limited in which you can use for example here I have a code block on a loop page I can turn this into a loop component copy it and paste it into one note and it just works fine even if I go for something that seems presentation distinct like a camand board component I can take exactly the same approach and paste it into one note I'm really not sure why this feature is developed with what is clearly an artificial limitation in the insert menu options rather than any technical limitation in making certain content work in one note across the suite of Microsoft 3 365 apps the insert options for Loop components are really confusing because they're pretty much different in each app due to the ease of sharing Loop components across different apps and keeping them in sync I can see there are lots of reasons why adding Loop to one note makes a lot of sense I'm an avid OneNote user and I can certainly see a use case where I might want to gather together components I'm working in alongside other contextual information on a page or perhaps it's aspects of my notes that need collaboration from people who don't tend to use one note this makes it really easy one of the big criticisms of one note is your ability to share and collaborate within it just isn't granular enough and you cannot get more granular than Loop components while I continue to have a lot of questions about Loop generally one note is an app where I'm really excited to see it makes sense rather than just only being a path for one note users to shift their use case directly into loop at some point the future one of the places where I've historically gained a great deal of value from one note is managing my meeting notes particularly when inking on a surface and one of the ways that this workflow has worked really well is one note's ability to pull in meeting details from Outlook and connect notes with the meetings themselves corresponding with this one of the places where I think Loop is having the biggest day-to-day impact is that notes for upcoming meetings in teams are now powered by by Loop if I jump into a team's meeting and create my notes I now have this really nicely designed Loop component I can work with and like the other loop components I've shown you I can copy it and paste it right into the OneNote web app and I can work with it here and see if I add content here in one note and then I jump back to teams everything is kept in sync the special source of Loop in action and like other loop components I can share this meeting notes block wherever Loop is supported this is so easy and really shows off the potential of loop to remodel how we work collaboratively by breaking down the borders between different apps next though I want to look at some areas of Loops integration into one node and its overall execution that are less Rosy in my opinion but before we do let's talk about another new technology from Microsoft co-pilot for Microsoft 365 do you have your plan in place for adopting co-pilot for Microsoft 365 or other AI tools yet or have you started to roll out Ai and you need more help and guidance to maximize your return I can help my one-on-one virtual digital transformation coaching that you book time with me flexibly to help you plan your AI adoption or other aspects of boosting the value of Investments like Microsoft 365 in your business or if you're not yet ready for dedicated face-to-face time time why not check out my on demand course for leaders thinking about adopting AI fly into the age of co-pilots or my book on the same topic who's in the co-pilot's seat links for all three of these options are down below I hope I will get the opportunity to help you on your AI Journey soon so back to loopin one note what about that linked meeting notes feature surely that's Loop power to right so on a new page in one note let's grab the info for that meeting and unfortunately we just get the same plain old linkage while I could go ahead and just paste my Loop meeting Block in here as I did before and it would continue to be linked through both the loop and one note approaches independently these two functionalities are not tied together and don't work symbiotically in the way one might hope and what does this look like in the one note desktop client well it's not that impressive where my useful teams meeting block was before now I just get a link to the loop component and while I can click on it and access it I can't do so within the context of what else is on the page this isn't unique to one note Loop is a primarily web app based technology and to be clear this is the expected way this works right now as to how it's built Microsoft makes no claim that loopin one note works in the desktop app this problem though highlights one of the other big flaws with this technology the content in the loop component isn't really inside the one note notebook all that's in the notebook or in the case of other apps the word document or the Outlook email is a link to the loop component and you might be wondering why that's a problem well one of the big benefits of a tool like one note is giving you immediate access to pass content in the right context through search so let's take this simple example I have a paragraph block from loop with the term project one note written inside it on a OneNote page I then have another OneNote page with the term project OneNote written on it just as you normally would in one note now say I want to search for everywhere in my notes I've written about this project and it could be a project name or a team name a regular meeting whatever the the term you're searching for isn't really important but you can see that despite the term project one note being shown to us on two pages one note search can only find it on one and that's because it isn't really there when you're seeing that Loop component or that's actually on the page is what you're seeing in the desktop client a link to that Loop component so we can come at this from the other direction I can use Microsoft search across Microsoft 365 to find content with the term I'm looking for and both one note notes and loop content are indexed if I click into my one note search reference then I come back to the page where that term is written but if I use the loop base link I'm taken to the view of that component in the loop app interface there's no indication that this is derived from one Lo except for the fact that the loop component file itself is stored in a folder for one note based Loop components what this highlights is that right now when you're dealing with components that you can create anywhere in Microsoft 365 Loop only demonstrates a certain level of contextual awareness of where its components are used as can be seen in this example here but I've actually got this component in both one note and word as well as Outlook but the only place is accessible via this method is Outlook and certainly not from the loop based view of the component that opens if you access it through Microsoft search as we've already seen so unless you 100% remember how the jigsaw pieces of your various loot components fit together to access them without search that surrounding context is for nothing but in an app like one note surely your use case would be to write notes around the loop component that are contextually relevant to it why else would would you be working in one note so in my opinion this continues to be a mixed bag and I tried really hard to frame a video where I didn't just beat up on Loop again if you really want to see me do that check out my last video on Loop but while I'm full of excitement for the potential of this technology once again I'm frankly scratching my head at its execution the experience of Loop in the loop app is fine you know it's pretty good but the promise of this technology is integration into apps like one node and where that integration comes at a cost of app features that work really well like surge just not working because of loop I'm left wondering what on Earth the point is at a conceptual level I want to be excited by Loop and I want to be passionate about using it and within certain narrow use cases I can see that this offers wonderful new options wrapped in a sleek and modern interface but where adopting one technology requires educating your team members to unlearn features of another while continuing to use it in order to get the best from both it feels like a hill I'm still somewhat unwilling to climb in the case of one note this is a preview feature but some of the criticisms in this video are foundational to how Loop is executed as a technology right now a technology that is now generally released rather than specific to its preview in one note what are your thoughts on Loop in one note have you started using it I'd be really interested to learn about those use cases that are working and those that aren't down in the comments thanks for watching through to the end until the next video bye-bye

Channel: Bright Ideas Agency

Views: 3,210

Keywords: microsoft 365, microsoft loop, microsoft loop app, microsoft loop component, how to use microsoft loop, personal productivity, what is microsoft loop, loop vs onenote, loop app, microsoft loop meeting agenda, microsoft loop components, microsoft onenote, onenote, onenote tutorial, microsoft office, microsoft loop demo, microsoft onenote demo, loop in onenote, loop for onenote, onenote loop, loop onenote

Id: 7ak7IWOykOg

Length: 15min 31sec (931 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2024