OneNote

Onenote Calendar and clipping tool

I use Onenote extensively at work and love the ability to take freeform notes in meetings and organize stuff into the separate folders. One of the things I use it with are the various projects that I’m running in the office and these notebooks are shared amongst the project participants so we all are working off of one realtime document. This has the advantage that most of the data is in one place and we have a historical record but it is hard to tell what documents have been changed recently and with the proliferation of notebooks, it’s hard to remember which notebook contains a particular document that I worked on last Tuesday for example.
Previously I was using a toolbar icon that shows me the notebooks changed in the last 7 and last 14 days of use. This was really useful, but recently I stumbled across Omer Atay’s Onetastic addin. As the name suggests, this is really good addin (should have been in the shipped product) that enables you to tidy up the print to onenote output AND also has a built in calendar display option that shows you the documents that have been changed on the day, week or month that you select. The Calendar option is also available as a standalone application, but you might as well have the web clipping (which also contains a cropping tool too) add in too.
Highly recommended – especially if you share your OneNotes with other people or you are not that organized in filing your documents 😉
Note this does require OneNote2010 – but you are on that already right?

OneNote 2010 webapp now live.

I’m a big fan of OneNote as it makes it really easy to take notes during meetings and presentations. I was pleased to see that the OneNote Web App is now online, allowing you to save OneNote notebooks to the web (on Microsoft’s SkyDrive) which then means you can edit them in a browser – without needing OneNote on the machine.

I uploaded the OneNote notebook that I made whilst upgrading my Dell Mini10v a couple of weeks to triple boot XP, OSX and Windows7 and was pleased with how things have turned out. I’ll be using this functionality to create an upcoming blog post on how to do the triple boot – having the notebook on the web means I can update and work on the blog post from any computer – I’m not tied to my home desktop which hosted the original notebook.

Note that you do need to “share” the notebook by going to the File/ New/ Web or going to File/Share/ Web as appropriate.  Keeping the document in your personal folder means it is kept private – as long as nobody  else finds the url.

Thanks to The Office Blog for the heads up and see an Introduction to OneNote Web App for more details.

Onenote export to web

A very cool OneNote Powertoy to export a OneNote Notebook to a website looks like a great must-have for publishing data to those unfortunate people who don’t have OneNote. I’ll be installing this on Monday and will try uploading a small notebook to see what the output looks like in IE and firefox.
I’ve used OneNote for several years and now have at least 4 of my colleagues using it on a daily basis as it is just so useful for gathering customer related information into one place. Just showing them the features such as audio notetaking,the offline functions and collaboration doesn’t take long to get them to see the potential and start using the software. The only problem we now have is that it is an extra storage location for customer data – we now have a OneNote Notebook per customer, a directory on a file server containing word files etc and the Lotus Notes Database with information. Sometimes it takes longer to find the data as you now have to remember where you stored it. This could be stored all in OneNote but for people who don’t have OneNote that wouldn’t be very useful and heaven forbid we use anything other than Lotus Notes! Thanks Daniel

OneNote text recognition

Did you know that if you right click a picture in OneNote there is the option to Copy text from picture? I discovered that this morning. The formatting is not great, but the text recognition from the screenshot in the previous window was pretty good (pasted in the extended entry).
One cool use for this feature would be to capture the text from error messages that have no option to select the text to copy into another application.