We recently announced that Notebook would be shutting down and that Notebook data will be moving to Google Docs. Here are answers to some questions about this transition. We may add or update questions over time.
Only if you want to delete some of your unused Notebook data. Once we start the transition (we’ll provide a firm date soon), each notebook you have will automatically be exported to Google Docs. We will do this for every single notebook, and you won’t have to do anything. This export will work the same as the existing “Export to Docs” feature in Notebook. The format of the new documents will be as if you manually exported each of your notebooks to Docs.
If you know you don’t use some of your older Notebook data, you can delete these notebooks before the transition to avoid cluttering your Google Docs account. Other than that, you don’t need to do anything before we complete the transition.
Once we start transferring the notebook data, Google Notebook will move to a read-only mode, and will stay that way for a few months. During this time you can confirm that all your data was moved to Docs.
Once the transition is done, you should see a new document in Google Docs for each notebook you had in Google Notebook. The titles of these documents will match the name of the notebook it came from, and the documents will contain the data from the original notebook including labels, comments, and urls.
Sure! The “Export to Google Docs” feature appears in the “Tools” menu in www.google.com/notebook. Keep in mind that you have to export each notebook individually. Also, once you’ve exported a notebook and verified that it’s appeared in Docs, be sure to delete it from Google Notebook – otherwise, when we do our transition, we’ll make another copy of it in your Google Docs account, causing clutter.
We expect it to happen within the next month. We’ll update this FAQ once we have a fixed date.
All public notebooks will be unshared.
Bookmarks data is not affected; you will still be able to access your bookmarks at bookmarks.google.com. However notebook.google.com/bookmarks will no longer be available.
The Google Docs team has put together a getting started page here.
Initially we will keep the data visible in read-only form in Notebook to make sure the transfer to Docs can be validated. Longer term (likely sometime in 2012) we will delete the Notebook data.
We loved working on Notebook, but sometimes we have to make the hard decision to focus more of our efforts on products and technologies that will yield the most benefit to users in the long run. With all the great innovations and improvements to Google Docs in the last few years, we think it’s a great replacement for Notebook.
Notebook