I am not happy with the new Microsoft whiteboard. I am a computer science professor who uses MS Whiteboard in the classroom every day. It seems that Microsoft is more concerned with cross platform web interfaces rather than user experience. I see marginal improvements since the last attempt in Fall 2021. However, the new release of the MS whiteboard is significantly worse than the thick client app that was around until April 2022. Here are the issues I have: First and foremost, the app is "Whiteboard." It is NOT MS Sticky notes, MS Reaction emojis, MS Shapes, MS Collaboration, etc. It is "WHITEBOARD." It needs to do whiteboard features and do them really well. If "Whiteboard" feature works well, then add some other features but make sure inking works well. 1B) The new whiteboard limits the number of colors/marker that you can have at once. I love having lots of colored markers. We are now limited to only three colors at once. The responsiveness on the new whiteboard is just terrible. Sometimes it takes two seconds for your ink to appear. The lag forces you to question if you actually wrote something. Then you begin writing again only to have the lagged data appear. My use case is using a PC Windows laptop with a digital pen. My laptop is folded in half. Most people write from top to bottom. The pen selection tool was moved to the top. This should at least moveable to float on the bottom. There's all find of shortcut keys not available since I have my laptop folded in half. Same issue with the undo button. That is way up at the top and my hands sit at the bottom of the screen. MS Whiteboard should be focused on local responsiveness. It seems to be more concerned with sending data to the cloud to sync up rather than having a responsive UI. Let whiteboards be a true local thick client app with local storage and let it sync up after all UIs are updated. You can no longer delete a small piece of something drawn with the pen. For example, if you draw a line a bit to long, you used to be able to erase a little piece. Now erasing causes the whole drawn object to be deleted. Ruler is not available but MS still released whiteboards without it. Even with the old version, it is a shame you cannot work when offline and let the data sync later. I suppose this protects against collaboration sync issues. Let the owner of the board get a lock/mutex on the board and work in local mode only. I don't see a UI control to paste something that your drew with the pen. I use a digital pen with the laptop folded in half so my keyboard is not available. In the old whiteboard, you could touch the "+" button and it had the paste option there. Now the "+" button only has notes, shapes, reactions, etc. So for me top copy/paste something that I drew, I have to draw the lasso around the object, touch the copy button on the popup menu, unfold the laptop, press control-v, then fold the laptop. Before responding with "Check your internet connection, close other programs, etc."... MS Whiteboard is the only app running and I have typically at least a speed of 80MB/s up and down. I hope that MS considers these issues and improves whiteboard. -- November 2022 updates: The board constantly reports errors on the top of the screen that it lost connection and cannot sync, even when there is a reliable and fast connection. The scrolling, writing, and overall responsiveness gets slow as you write more on the board.

Dr.JB speaks a lot of common sense here. For Microsoft who has totally dominated the Office Productivity space for 20+ years, with awesome products including PowerPoint and Visio, it's staggering to me that we cannot have a ribbon with some rich shape and icon tools at our fingertips. I.e. modularize some of those functions out of PPT and Visio and make the simple multi-user experience of them into Whiteboard. In the meantime, look at www.miro.com.

Best to post this sort of detail to the Feedback Hub in Windows 10 (select winkey+f) for the dev team. This is a user forum and users here don't work for Microsoft.

It seems like us as users are replacing QA, minus the pay. I'd recommend everyone use anything else for the foreseeable future. Though, I wouldn't hold my breath, even if Microsoft manages to fix everything they'll make sure to break it again in a few years time. A list of keyboard isn't available within the software itself, when you click "Help" it sends you to an external webpage cluttered with links. CTRL + F = no mention of keyboard shortcuts, you have to use their search and click from there. After confirming I was pressing the right keys, panning still doesn't work from my Wacom tablet, nor do arrow keys. I simply cannot pan without using the mouse, which is problematic because my mouse doesn't have anywhere close to the same precision or even pressure sensitivity. Their "onboarding tour" is useless, it brings attention to the a few (exactly 3) of the most noticeable and already labeled buttons. I find it very interesting that opening the "Format Background" distorts the colors of the whiteboard even when it's the thing you're changing the color of. Perhaps it was user error in this case but I struggled to find the way to change background color; "Format Background" isn't exactly what I'd look under for coloring. Of course, nice-to-haves such as dark mode UI or default/on creation whiteboard background are not here either.

Update 11.06.2022r. (UTC+2 Timezone) ---------------------- This week, Microsoft has been doing some huge improvements to the board. In the beginning of the week, they changed the ruler icon (to the new gray one), however the ruler still didn't work, but the same day they also changed how the eraser works, cause it stopped lagging, and now it works correctly as it should. Undo and redo functions now work properly as well. Today, when I clicked on the ruler, I was positively surprised. It just appeared on my screen! It has been working fairly well till now. I can rotate it using the middle wheel of my mouse and also if I try to draw a straight line with the stylus, the app helps me, and it snaps the line that I drew to the ruler. Moreover, I have a feeling that the app starts faster now, and creating a new board doesn't take as much time as previously. However, the ability to copy things between boards still doesn't work, at least on my side. But there's been massive progress done this week and I hope that Microsoft will continue to improve the Whiteboard further. Best Regards, Adam

I have exactly the same issues as You in the new version of the Microsoft Whiteboard. I am also not able to copy stuff between boards (the only thing being copied is text describing the thing that I'm copying like "Image" or "Handwritten text", but not the image itself), which is pretty frustrating to me, because I have to write the same things again and again, like math theorems etc. Also, recently the board started to behave weirdly when erasing stuff, namely: when I'm erasing some handwritten text, other things get erased too in other places of the board (text that I have written before with my pan) and clicking and the undo button either doesn't work or it creates recovers the handwritten text not exactly where it was (there's like a 5 cm shift). It didn't happen, till I received the updated version of the board, where the ruler icon was updated (the ruler still doesn't work on my side, like there is an icon, but when you click it, it only says that the ruler will be working soooon ;) And it says that already like for 2 months, so I don't have any hopes in it ever working. Fortunately, I don't have any input lag. Don't get me wrong. I'm a big fan of the idea of creating one cross-platform version of the Whiteboard, which looks the same and has the same features across all platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux). I love how Edge handles PWA in general, because it creates a really nice environment for web apps. Microsoft is constantly adding new features to the Edge browser regarding the PWAs, expanding its possibilities, but weirdly their own apps don't make use of these features. (like custom title bar, offline mode for PWA, etc.) As far as I know, the current version of the Chromium engine allows webpages to ask for a permission to access the clipboard. And the Whiteboard should do exactly that and allow users to copy stuff between board. Moreover, the caching system should be improved, because it takes a lot of time to create a new board (like there's a significant delay just to create an empty board). Also, moving the tools box should be an option (where you select the pens etc.) The idea behind the change was great, but the final product is pretty disappointing and in my opinion there should be a longer beta period, meanwhile still allowing users to be able to use the good old legacy apps, until the problems with the web based version aren't resolved. Regards, Adam

New Version of MS Whiteboard Fall Update 2022 has poor user experience

Anonymous

I am not happy with the new Microsoft whiteboard. I am a computer science professor who uses MS Whiteboard in the classroom every day. It seems that Microsoft is more concerned with cross platform web interfaces rather than user experience. I see marginal improvements since the last attempt in Fall 2021. However, the new release of the MS whiteboard is significantly worse than the thick client app that was around until April 2022.

Here are the issues I have:

First and foremost, the app is "Whiteboard." It is NOT MS Sticky notes, MS Reaction emojis, MS Shapes, MS Collaboration, etc. It is "WHITEBOARD." It needs to do whiteboard features and do them really well. If "Whiteboard" feature works well, then add some other features but make sure inking works well.

1B) The new whiteboard limits the number of colors/marker that you can have at once. I love having lots of colored markers. We are now limited to only three colors at once.

The responsiveness on the new whiteboard is just terrible. Sometimes it takes two seconds for your ink to appear. The lag forces you to question if you actually wrote something. Then you begin writing again only to have the lagged data appear.
My use case is using a PC Windows laptop with a digital pen. My laptop is folded in half. Most people write from top to bottom. The pen selection tool was moved to the top. This should at least moveable to float on the bottom. There's all find of shortcut keys not available since I have my laptop folded in half.
Same issue with the undo button. That is way up at the top and my hands sit at the bottom of the screen.
MS Whiteboard should be focused on local responsiveness. It seems to be more concerned with sending data to the cloud to sync up rather than having a responsive UI. Let whiteboards be a true local thick client app with local storage and let it sync up after all UIs are updated.
You can no longer delete a small piece of something drawn with the pen. For example, if you draw a line a bit to long, you used to be able to erase a little piece. Now erasing causes the whole drawn object to be deleted.
Ruler is not available but MS still released whiteboards without it.
Even with the old version, it is a shame you cannot work when offline and let the data sync later. I suppose this protects against collaboration sync issues. Let the owner of the board get a lock/mutex on the board and work in local mode only.
I don't see a UI control to paste something that your drew with the pen. I use a digital pen with the laptop folded in half so my keyboard is not available. In the old whiteboard, you could touch the "+" button and it had the paste option there. Now the "+" button only has notes, shapes, reactions, etc. So for me top copy/paste something that I drew, I have to draw the lasso around the object, touch the copy button on the popup menu, unfold the laptop, press control-v, then fold the laptop.

Before responding with "Check your internet connection, close other programs, etc."... MS Whiteboard is the only app running and I have typically at least a speed of 80MB/s up and down.

I hope that MS considers these issues and improves whiteboard.

-- November 2022 updates:

The board constantly reports errors on the top of the screen that it lost connection and cannot sync, even when there is a reliable and fast connection.

The scrolling, writing, and overall responsiveness gets slow as you write more on the board.

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Anonymous

2022-04-21T16:27:05+00:00

Dr.JB speaks a lot of common sense here. For Microsoft who has totally dominated the Office Productivity space for 20+ years, with awesome products including PowerPoint and Visio, it's staggering to me that we cannot have a ribbon with some rich shape and icon tools at our fingertips. I.e. modularize some of those functions out of PPT and Visio and make the simple multi-user experience of them into Whiteboard.

In the meantime, look at www.miro.com.
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Neil D 33,155 Reputation points Volunteer Moderator

2022-04-05T11:59:48+00:00

Best to post this sort of detail to the Feedback Hub in Windows 10 (select winkey+f) for the dev team. This is a user forum and users here don't work for Microsoft.
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Anonymous

2022-07-24T20:28:47+00:00

It seems like us as users are replacing QA, minus the pay.

I'd recommend everyone use anything else for the foreseeable future. Though, I wouldn't hold my breath, even if Microsoft manages to fix everything they'll make sure to break it again in a few years time.

A list of keyboard isn't available within the software itself, when you click "Help" it sends you to an external webpage cluttered with links. CTRL + F = no mention of keyboard shortcuts, you have to use their search and click from there.

After confirming I was pressing the right keys, panning still doesn't work from my Wacom tablet, nor do arrow keys. I simply cannot pan without using the mouse, which is problematic because my mouse doesn't have anywhere close to the same precision or even pressure sensitivity.

Their "onboarding tour" is useless, it brings attention to the a few (exactly 3) of the most noticeable and already labeled buttons.

I find it very interesting that opening the "Format Background" distorts the colors of the whiteboard even when it's the thing you're changing the color of.

Perhaps it was user error in this case but I struggled to find the way to change background color; "Format Background" isn't exactly what I'd look under for coloring.

Of course, nice-to-haves such as dark mode UI or default/on creation whiteboard background are not here either.
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Anonymous

2022-06-11T16:44:52+00:00

Update 11.06.2022r. (UTC+2 Timezone)

----------------------

This week, Microsoft has been doing some huge improvements to the board. In the beginning of the week, they changed the ruler icon (to the new gray one), however the ruler still didn't work, but the same day they also changed how the eraser works, cause it stopped lagging, and now it works correctly as it should. Undo and redo functions now work properly as well.

Today, when I clicked on the ruler, I was positively surprised. It just appeared on my screen! It has been working fairly well till now. I can rotate it using the middle wheel of my mouse and also if I try to draw a straight line with the stylus, the app helps me, and it snaps the line that I drew to the ruler.

Moreover, I have a feeling that the app starts faster now, and creating a new board doesn't take as much time as previously.

However, the ability to copy things between boards still doesn't work, at least on my side.

But there's been massive progress done this week and I hope that Microsoft will continue to improve the Whiteboard further.

Best Regards,

Adam
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Anonymous

2022-05-31T20:16:53+00:00

I have exactly the same issues as You in the new version of the Microsoft Whiteboard.

I am also not able to copy stuff between boards (the only thing being copied is text describing the thing that I'm copying like "Image" or "Handwritten text", but not the image itself), which is pretty frustrating to me, because I have to write the same things again and again, like math theorems etc.

Also, recently the board started to behave weirdly when erasing stuff, namely: when I'm erasing some handwritten text, other things get erased too in other places of the board (text that I have written before with my pan) and clicking and the undo button either doesn't work or it creates recovers the handwritten text not exactly where it was (there's like a 5 cm shift).

It didn't happen, till I received the updated version of the board, where the ruler icon was updated (the ruler still doesn't work on my side, like there is an icon, but when you click it, it only says that the ruler will be working soooon ;) And it says that already like for 2 months, so I don't have any hopes in it ever working.

Fortunately, I don't have any input lag.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a big fan of the idea of creating one cross-platform version of the Whiteboard, which looks the same and has the same features across all platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux).

I love how Edge handles PWA in general, because it creates a really nice environment for web apps.

Microsoft is constantly adding new features to the Edge browser regarding the PWAs, expanding its possibilities, but weirdly their own apps don't make use of these features. (like custom title bar, offline mode for PWA, etc.)

As far as I know, the current version of the Chromium engine allows webpages to ask for a permission to access the clipboard. And the Whiteboard should do exactly that and allow users to copy stuff between board.

Moreover, the caching system should be improved, because it takes a lot of time to create a new board (like there's a significant delay just to create an empty board).

Also, moving the tools box should be an option (where you select the pens etc.)

The idea behind the change was great, but the final product is pretty disappointing and in my opinion there should be a longer beta period, meanwhile still allowing users to be able to use the good old legacy apps, until the problems with the web based version aren't resolved.

Regards,

Adam
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New Version of MS Whiteboard Fall Update 2022 has poor user experience

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