Michael Harrison wrote a comment on my last blog post roundup post:

There is definitely a lot of good in ON 2007. Could you comment on some of the not-so good?

• http://www.dragonseye.com/blog/archives/340-OneNote-tag-summary-page-useful.html
• http://www.dragonseye.com/blog/archives/331-ON-2007-search-bug.html
• http://www.dragonseye.com/blog/archives/330-OneNote-and-Gestures-The-Missing-Link.html

I am actually quite happy to see someone blog about the things they don't like about OneNote because at times I find that more interesting than the positive posts, trust me we like reading all feedback.  Okay I will reply on Michael blogs but I will write some comments here:

1. I think the tag summary pages should link back to the source page.  The feature was unchanged since ON2003 when we didn't have hyperlinks.  I still think that summary pages are very useful and provide users a way to merge todo lists and other set of information (questions for exam, etc).
2. Search bug isn't officially a 'bug'.  There is only one recognizer in the app and when you write something we display the top hit in the page tab (that is why is says Contact on the page tab) but we also have other high percentage hits which is why you see a search hit for "lon".  Same recognizer providing ranked results.
3. Good feature idea, we do have crossout but the others would be nice additions.

Please post your pros & cons we like reading everything you all have to say, also thanks again Michael for posting some of your pain-points and thoughts.

Mike sends this out and I thought I would post it here, does anyone like these posts?  I think this one might be my last blog round-up posting unless you all want me to continue posting them, just let me know in the comments.

• yes, I have sold my soul to Bill Gates -- but OneNote is really fantastic
• Even people who hate Office love OneNote. In fact, the word love kept reappearing in the recommendations for this hard-to-describe program.
• Just use OneNote.  Use it, Love it.
• OneNote Add good to your life: If you have a OneNote and you want to collaborate with more professionals then you have to connect.
• A few weeks ago Matt Putnam sent me some notes in a Microsoft OneNote 2007 file and I've been hooked ever since.
• A friend told me I should try out Microsoft OneNote 2007 - I think his exact words were, “Dude, I don’t know how I lived without it!”
• I love OneNote.   When I first started working for Tim he asked me to sign up with a lot of things online, and start using different programs that I'd never even heard of before. One of those programs was 'OneNote'.
• Its Friday morning and I am feeling peppy. Haven't slept too long. Up late fooling around with my new toy - Microsoft OneNote. Incredible piece of software, a story of its own.
• OneNote is one of the best pieces of software available for use with Windows. No other software on any platform can match what OneNote can do.
• AMAZING!! OneNote 2007. A Great Tool!
• Microsoft Office OneNote is not a one-trick pony. True, Microsoft has had its share of software “misses,” so it is easy to overlook the useful software that Microsoft does produce. OneNote 2007 is definitely one such gem amongst the chaff, and it is quietly gaining a place in many lawyers’ software toolboxes.
• Another must-have for me is OneNote. This is a relatively new Microsoft application, which they haven’t yet ported to the Mac. I kept a ton of information in OneNote on the PC, and I want that information available on the Mac.
• I love Microsoft OneNote 2007! I never thought I’d express actually express love for Microsoft product, but then here I am raving about One Note like it saved my life! I love that program, If you can get Microsoft office, check it out
• I don’t like Microsoft much, but I have to say OneNote is a wonderful product, its flexibility is remarkable as a note taking tool for I am still using it…
• Having switched to a Mac, my biggest loss has been OneNote.  I have found nothing for the Mac that is as intuitive, as powerful, and as easy to use as OneNote.  Microsoft so rarely hits a home run, but that little note-taking application designed for tablets was great for class notes.
• And for the Mac followers who are cringing at this picture of a Microsoft program... please hear me out. I complain a lot about Microsoft's products. This is the first one that I have found to be absolutely perfect for what I need it to do.
• "I seriously seriously seriously gave thought to and deeply investigated converting to a Mac. I really wanted to switch, but it doesn't support two of my "I've gotta have 'em" applications... OneNote and MindManager. Can't break the addiction.
• The amazing thing about Office OneNote is that you can blog stuff written directly in OneNote into any blog on Blogger... If this isn't an incentive to blog more frequently, I don't know what is
• Blog Toolbox - MS OneNote: Being an  avid blog researcher, who takes copious notes, as well  being self-employed with lots of different  projects on the go, I need to be organised. Having  tried various methods for note taking that were lacking in some way, I am now a  firm fan of Microsoft OneNote.   I originally used it for my blogging research notes but, having got to know the  program better, I now keep all sorts of details and information in there.
• The Great Potential of Microsoft OneNote 2007: The more I learn about this tool, the more potential use I see for CEI team collaborations as well as for CRM projects.
• A goals list which is viewed when I Review OneNote Goals (W, M, Q). W=Weekly, M=Monthly and Q=Quarterly in case you were wondering. OneNote is a Microsoft product that is really cool! Click the link to check it out
• In class yesterday I saw one of my classmate's using Microsoft's OneNote. It was pretty impressive: he had a nice set of tabs for each of our modules and each tab linked to different pages with all the info for assignments, seminar times etc.

I just saw this message on our internal bug reporting listserv and I wanted to share.  The user was having trouble opening a notebook on SharePoint, the user was getting an error saying “OneNote cannot open the specified location”.

The reason for the error was because the WebClient service is not enabled; which OneNote needs enabled for file-locks. Vista Server 2008 does not have this service enabled by default and if you are running Windows Server 2008 (2k8) you might have this problem.  To enable the service, go to Control Panel => Administrative tools => Services => WebClient and click Start (and probably make it automatic).

It has been a _long_ time since I have blogged and I apologise for that, but we have been very busy here in Office and on the OneNote team.  Anyhow if anyone is going to be there please let me know and maybe we could have a little OneNote meet up somewhere near the convention centre one night.  Just a thought if there are enough people there it would be interesting. 

I am very happy to announce that one of the coolest powertoys I have seen is available for download!  It is the OneNote Web Exporter powertoy which will take a OneNote notebook and convert it into an interactive website.  This is what a notebook looks like in IE:

You can read all about it here: http://www.codeplex.com/ONWebber

Dave has a great set of documentation: feature overview, user guide, installation instructions and more!  I know Dave even has this automated on his machine so every night his machine generates a webview or our PM notebook and uploads it to SharePoint so everyone can view our PM notebook.

But wait there's more!  Dave is hosting this on CodePlex which is a great community site that allows others to download, view and modify the source code of this project.  It is a living project that others can use to learn how to program against the OneNote API, to change for their own needs or just to see how it works.  If you have problems or issues just click on the "Issue tracker" link on the site and you can log a bug.  Sadly it doesn't work well with non-IE browsers as it uses MHTs which aren't supported fully by other browsers.

I am super excited about this!  Nice work Dave, a virtual pat on the back!

Consider this: on Windows XP you could sync to a SharePoint server in the cloud such as Office Live using just HTTP. Now when you upgrade to Windows Vista if you try and do this exact same thing you will get an error. That is due to changes in the Vista security model. From one of the developers on the team:

Vista does not allow access to an authenticated server that is using basic authentication over HTTP. The basic authentication scheme transmits passwords in the clear. Hence for security reasons, one must now use HTTPS thereby encrypting the contents including the password.

So if you are using SharePoint in the cloud make sure to connect via HTTPS.

I am a keyboard fan, I detest using the mouse and I always try and key my hands @ the home keys @ all points since it is so much faster. That being said I wanted to mention on my favourite shortcut keys: Ctrl-G which brings focus to the navigation bar in OneNote (that thing on the far left hand side). Many times I will want to move from my general work notebook (my 1^st notebook open) to the OneNote 14 planning notebook (the 4^th notebook I have open). Most people would get the mouse and click on the notebook and then click around some more. I will just hit Ctrl-G, down arrow a few time and then enter.

It works great!

The other day I got an email from an old high school friend, Rob who uses OneNote and reads this blog (hi Rob). It was pretty cool to get in touch with someone I knew because of OneNote and to hear that they liked it was even better! It got me thinking about something that we are thinking about on the OneNote team: bridging the gap. Let's look at the current OneNote users:

#1 Avid Fans – people who grok OneNote

One great think about working on this team is that we have a large amount of users who are in love with OneNote and use it all of the time. We know based on the customer improvement program that OneNote is open longer than all Office apps except for Outlook. Just think about it from my own usage as well as talking with customers they leave Outlook and OneNote open all day long! I can't live without those apps open, whereas I only open Excel or Word occasionally (though I tend to keep Word open for a while as I write specs and such).

The avid fans already love OneNote and know what it is all about. They can see the value in keeping track of things, using tags, taking meeting notes and more (heck people use OneNote in so many different ways).

#2 People who use OneNote because they have to

Then there is a second class of people out there, albeit much smaller who are 'forced' to use OneNote. These are people who are using OneNote because they have to so that they can be part of a community or share with others. Some people on their team are using OneNote and they too do because they need to use it. For these people we have found that they only use OneNote occasionally and don't really use it much for their own personal information or research.

#3 People who used OneNote and rejected it

These are the people who knew about OneNote, installed it and still didn't like it. Maybe they evaluated OneNote for a collaboration project on their team or maybe they just wanted to see what this OneNote program actually was installed on their computer. They ran the application took a look around and said to themselves, "This isn't right for me." They closed the program and never used it again. More on these people later…

#4 People who have never used OneNote

Then the final classification of people out there who have never used OneNote before and maybe they haven't even heard of it before. I guess when you think about the world population as a whole this bucket #4 is pretty big, eh? But there are a large amount of computer users who just haven't heard about OneNote before and therefore they haven't used it even though they may or may not have a need to use OneNote.

Okay now that I have outlined what I feel the main 4 buckets out there I wanted to touch on a couple of them:

Telling more people

With regards to bucket #4 I wish that more people knew about OneNote. Often times we hear from customers who say that they wish OneNote was marketed more to them. Interestingly there were marketing campaigns (for example: stationeryisbad.com) and it was given to college students across North America during recruiting events as well as partnership with laptop manufactures (such as Toshiba). However there still isn't a lot of awareness about OneNote which I hope is solved now that OneNote is part of a SKU. Still though we need to reach out to more people so that they know what OneNote is and that they have a great tool for their needs.

Bridging the Gap

Lastly we need to bridge the gap. How many people out there are in buckets #3 & #2? How many people use OneNote and just reject it? And from our standpoint why are they rejecting OneNote? I am sure there are a large number of people out there who just don't use OneNote because it isn't for them. They don't want to keep meeting notes and maybe they don't keep things and file them away. I get that and I wish them well even though I still think OneNote would make their lives better : )

There are still people for whom OneNote would be a great solution but they don't use OneNote. Why? Is the question that I want to know! Was it something small like when you typed it didn't act as you wanted? Did you want a save button? Was Word really better for you? How come?

Call to arms for fans: when you tell people about OneNote, why do they reject it? What is their feedback? "I just don't need that" or was it "I didn't like X feature" or "Y feature was missing so I couldn't use OneNote". Or if you yourself rejected OneNote let us know why (though I wonder why you would be reading a OneNote blog, hehe). If you have feature ideas please submit them to our OneNote Connect site. If you have testimonials about why you don't like OneNote or how your coworkers/friends didn't like OneNote please email those testimonials to me or post a comment below.

If any of you have read Crossing the Chasm (Amazon) there is a lot of discussion about this from moving from early adopters to mainstream usage. I firmly believe that OneNote is a tool for everyone and we just need to bridge that gap and cross it.

When you first open OneNote 2007 you are greeted with the OneNote Guide. I would encourage all of you to leave this open and take some time to read though it. There aren't that many pages and you will learn a great deal about OneNote 2007 and what features are available.

However if you to close it and you want to reopen it here are two ways to do this.

If you didn't delete the OneNote Guide notebook folder then you can do this:

1. Open OneNote
2. File-->Open-->Notebook
3. Go to Documents\OneNote Notebooks
4. Find the OneNote Guide folder and click on it
5. Click Open
6. Success!

If you deleted the OneNote Guide notebook folder then please do this:

1. Open OneNote
2. File-->Open-->Section
3. Go to %programfiles%\Microsoft Office\OFFICE12\LCID\
   The LCID is the folder for your language & locale; for EN-US this is 1033
4. Double click on ONGuide.onepkg
5. Unpack the notebook by going through the wizard
6. Success!

I just wanted to pass on this information for those of you who want to get back to the OneNote Guide even though you closed it or deleted it; just an easy way for your to restore the OneNote Guide. If you have questions let us know!

I am not sure if I have blogged about this before but you can easily create single file archives for entire notebooks, sections or pages in OneNote. This will include all of the embedded files, the notes, audio & video and section groups, everything all together like a zip file. We call them OneNote Packages, or single file package, the file extension is .onepkg.

Why would you create .onepkg files? Well there a few reasons why you might do this. First of all you can easily archive an entire notebook for future keeping. You can also use these to send a notebook or collection of notes to another colleague. Finally you can create notebook templates for projects or other repeatable projects.

How do you create .onepkg files? Easy! Just open OneNote 2007, go to the notebook/section/etc that you want to archive and choose File-->Save As. In the resulting dialog change the Page Range to whatever you want to save, typically Current Notebook. Then choose Save as type: OneNote Single File Package (*.onepkg) and then type a file name, like this:

Choose Save and you will have the file for your package!

How do I create new notebook templates? You can easily install new notebook templates by storing your .onepkg files in the following folder:

    %userprofile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates

Just place the .onepkg in there and then it will appear in the new notebook wizard when a user choose File-->New Notebook. You can also store them system-wide, like when you are deploying OneNote to many computers, by storing the file here:

%programfiles%\Microsoft Office\Templates\1033\ONENOTE\12\Notebook Templates

Note that the 1033 folder is for English, check your local computer for your LCID = language ID.

I am not sure if everyone knows about OneNote's Audio Search but this is the information from the OneNote Guide:

With the Audio Search feature enabled, you can search your audio and video recordings for words, just like you would search for typed text in your notes. For example:

• Record phone conversations with customers, and later search for keyword of topics that you discussed
• Record an interview and then search for specific quotes
• Record voice reminders on a Windows Mobile Smartphone or Pocket PC. After you synchronize them with OneNote, you can search through your reminders.

Important! Recordings must be made with a good quality microphone or phone that is close to the speaker's mouth. Audio recognition technology does not have perfect accuracy and is very sensitive to recording quality, ambient noise, and distance.

You can enable the Audio Search feature in Tools > Options > Audio and Video.

The audio recognition process and indexing happens only when the computer is left idle and OneNote is running. It will take at least twice the length of a recording, so you'll have to let OneNote index for some time before you can begin searching.

When Audio Search is enabled, use the regular search box (above the page tabs) to type your search term and then click View List to see the audio results at the bottom of the results pane.

Why do I keep getting poor results (or no results at all)?

You may be searching for a sound that occurs in too many words. For example, if you search for "Asia," you may get "information", "conversation", "ratio", "hey Sean", and so on.

Here are some workarounds that might help you:

• Longer words

Try to recall one of the longer words mentioned in the recording. You will get best results with words of three or more syllables.

Example: imagination; Microsoft

• More words

If you can only think of short words, try to recall an exact phrase that may have been mentioned.

Example: Frank wrote;

• Spell out the sound of unusual words

If you are looking for an acronym or an unusually spelled word, spell out how it is pronounced

Examples: em es en (for MSN); ex box (for XBox); area code four two five (for code 425)

Visit the Office Online Help topic or article most relevant to this OneNote feature. Our site is frequently updated based on user feedback, so keep checking back!

Olya might want to comment more on this as she is the owner of audio search but I also wanted to mention which languages are supported:

1. English
2. Japanese
3. Chinese Traditional
4. Chinese Simplified
5. Korean
6. German
7. French
8. Spanish
9. Italian

Enjoy everyone! In B2 & B2TR I believe it was turned off by default and in the final version it should be turned on by default. Please try it out!

Mike, our Test Manager and singer/songwriter for My One and Only OneNote, sends us a round-up of the OneNote blogs and I just copy and paste them here to my blog and then I read them. This is the most recent round-up:

• Blogging with Live Writer versus OneNote 2007
• "Psst.  There's one Office application that I consider to be a nifty little secret weapon on my war against "Information Overload"." 
• Good blog about OneNote's potential to "cross the chasm" into mainstream usage 
• "I am pretty impressed. The program has some very nice, and very subtle interface changes that make using it much easier."
• "Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, I don't think I will be using OneNote on a regular basis... even though I truly believe it's one of the more elegant products we've ever released."
• "The Top 10 Best Things in my Life" 
• "Favourite feature: New in 2007 is the syncing of 'flagged' items in a notebook with Tasks in Outlook 2007."
• "That's right… the for the next week… 7 days… 168 hours (that's 7×24 hours thanks to my old pal Calc!) I will be living and breathing Microsoft OneNote 2007. " 
• "OneNote 2007, a UMPC and....fantasy football"
• Cool new OneNote blog that has regular posts- the Unknown OneNote Guy - great OneNote community post 
• "OneNote is a platform for innovation. I really think this is one of the best chances for MicroISV development we've had in years."
• "Prop Hunting With OneNote Mobile"

Thanks Mike!

We here on the OneNote team value your customer feedback and we strive to collect as much as possible.  I cannot tell you how important it is for us to hear your voice about what problems you are having and what you would like improved/fixed.  Now more than ever is your chance to give us this feedback for OneNote 2007 Beta2 which was just released today. 

We have created a Microsoft Connect website to help you all submit bugs and feedback.  (NOTE: if you were in the Office 2007 Technical Beta you do not need to use this, continue to use the same bug submission tools.)  This is in addition to the OneNote public newsgroup, the advantage to the Microsoft Connect site is that it connects your bug directly into our bug tracking system.  Additionally you can upload files so we can see your feedback and problems.

Here are directions to getting to the Microsoft Connect site:

1. Visit http://connect.microsoft.com
2. Click on "Available Programs"
   
3. Sign-in with your Passport / Windows Live account
4. Look for "OneNote 2007 Beta2". Click "Apply"
5. Read through and agree to the Terms of Use and click "I Agree"
6. Please go through and quickly fill out some information on the Registration page.  This information is valuable to us so that we can get back to regarding the bugs that you submit and click "Register".
7. Now you will be on the landing page for the OneNote 2003 & OneNote 2007 Beta2 site.
8. On the right hand side look for "Feedback"
   
9. Then on the top of the page you will see a Submit Feedback link, click it.
10. Now you can log whichever bugs that you want for OneNote 2007 Beta2, make sure to select OneNote 2007 as the version.
11. In the future please use http://connect.microsoft.com/onenote/ to get to the OneNote site

In the future once the Microsoft Connect v2 comes out we will have a way for you to register for the same OneNote site and the "OneNote 2007 Beta2" program and then submit bugs through there.  The feedback page will prompt you for which program you submitting bugs, but in the meantime this will work for you.  Check back for any updates!

More information about Microsoft Connect:

Diary of a Feedback Madman

Microsoft Connect Feedback Blog

(Update: to submit setup or migration bugs please go here for directions: Submitting bugs about migration or setup.  2006-05-24 @ 17:45 PT)

Awhile ago I blogged about Submitting Watson Crash information and now I wanted to update this for Windows Vista. Here is how a crash goes in Vista and where you can get the Watson Crash information so that we can diagnose your problem and you can submit a bug on OneNote's Connect site.

The crash!

This is what it looks like when you get a crash, to send information to Microsoft please click on "check online for a solution". I think my Vista build thought it was offline even though it was since I was connected via remote desktop!

Then you will see this dialog as Windows prepared the report to send:

Then please click "Send information" to send the report:

Now this information will be sent to Microsoft (and the OneNote team). Eventually you can actually get a solution back from Microsoft telling you how to fix the problem so you don't see it again. Since you are beta testing software there aren't any solutions yet : )

You will need to get the Watson bucket number from Windows. In my earlier post I talked about Event Viewer (eventvwr) and you can still do this in Vista but you will get a UAC prompt and instead you can use this new tool in Vista called Problem Reports and Solutions. To find it just click Start and then type "problem reports":

Note: this is also in the Control Panel

Then on the left you will want to select "View problem history":

You will end up in a window like this:

And you would open the option for any OneNote crashes:

Your bucket number is on the bottom there and this is what you would want to send us to submit a OneNote bug on the OneNote Connect site.

Of course you can still do this with Event Viewer:

Note that they no longer say source = Microsoft Office 12 instead you can find the two crashes right next to each other.

So that is how you can get us Watson info off of Vista machines. Please let me know if you have any questions!

If you are using Vista you might have fallen in love with the new start menu which automatically includes Windows Desktop Search results when you search for something.  This enables you to search for programs, files and emails all from the same place.  The other day the OneNote PMs where in a meeting and someone said that they didn't see OneNote hits in the search menu results and I told them that this wasn't the case as I use it all of the time.  We I found the difference, I had changed a start menu search option which included the OneNote files and by default the option was set differently.  I wanted to share this with you all, here is how to set this up:

Include OneNote hits in Vista start menu search results:

1. Right-click on the taskbar and choose properties:
     
2. Start Menu tab and then the “Customize..” button
3. Scroll down to “Search files” and set it to “Search entire index”
     
4. Click Ok & Ok.
5. Success!

For example I have an ING Direct account and I never remember my account number so I just type this into the search results and hit enter:

Enjoy!

I saw someone ask about Misplaced Sections on the OneNote newsgroup so I thought I would blog about this.

1. Misplaced Sections are created whenever OneNote could not sync some changes from the local cache to the master copy of the file. This might happen if you make some changes offline, then delete the master .one file and then come online; OneNote will move that section to the misplaced sections. You might also see this if you make changes to some notebook and while offline you try and close the notebook. OneNote will prompt you if you are sure you want to do this and if you choose to do so OneNote will create a Misplaced Sections virtual notebook and store the changed sections in there.
   The main point here is that OneNote will not delete changes to your content, we want to be very conservative with your content and lose it.
2. Misplaced sections are only in the cache. These misplaced sections are not in the file system, you can only get to them from the cache and by running OneNote.
3. They work like other sections so you can move them to other locations or deleted them; but they are read-only while they are in the Misplaced Sections notebook. If you have lots of misplaced sections and you want to quickly clear them out you can navigate to one of the sections and then choose File-->Delete all Misplaced Sections.
4. If you reopen the notebook in question OneNote will attempt to patch up problems and move the misplaced sections out of that virtual notebook and move them to the master copy of the file. It works magically in certain cases, I was really impressed when I saw this working well.

If you have more questions please let me know and I will add to this.  Ideally you should never see misplaced sections : )

Over the weekend it looked like Josh Einstein (TEO author) released a OneNote powertoy to display all your notes in a calendar view. Looks like he is using the common control in Vista that is used by the PIX image viewer, Windows Calendar & Media Player and generating a HTML page via OneNote's OM. I really like the UI and the experience, though it works best on widescreens imho. Thank to Patrick & Mike for the pointers. You can download it here: Einstein Technologies OneNote Calendar

This is what Warner @ GottaBeMobile wrote:

Josh Einstein, the developer of TEO 3.0, has created a nifty new application for OneNote. The OneNote Calendar gives you a calendar view of all of your notes, allowing you to view them by when they were created or modified. There is a preview pane that allows you to view your notes. More good news. It is free.

Check it out or download it here.

I thought I would take some time today and write up how to program a C/C++ add-in that works with OneNote 2007. Here are the directions I had and downloads below.

1. Open Visual Studio and create a new C++ project.
2. For my example I am creating a Win32 Console App:

   

3. Now I want to add the OneNote2007 header file, OneNote12.h. You can find that attached with this document. Make sure to copy it to the folder with your C++ source files as well as add it to your header files like this:

   

4. Add a new #include for OneNote:

   #include "OneNote12.h"

5. Now just connect to OneNote like you would any other COM API. Please see here for an example:

       CoInitialize(NULL);

       IApplication* piOneNote;

    

       CoCreateInstance(__uuidof(Application), NULL,

           CLSCTX_LOCAL_SERVER, __uuidof(IApplication), (void**)&piOneNote);

    

       if(piOneNote)

       {

           BSTR temp;        

           HRESULT hr = piOneNote->GetHierarchy(NULL, hsNotebooks, &temp);

           wprintf(L"%s", temp);

       }

A huge thanks to Ilya Koulchin for his help with this, I couldn't have done this without you!

Downloads:

• Sample project (what you see above): OneNoteC++Example.zip
• Just the header file & IDL file: OneNote_Header_IDL.zip

This should be all that you need to get this working, but if you need anything please let us know!

As I was reading the beta newsgroup I told everyone about a tip to quickly see the section in a notebook.  Instead of needing to click on a notebook and then click on the section tab you could shift-click on the notebook on the navbar and then quickly select your notebook.  It works like a charm and I wanted to pass it on to you all:

Hope you all are doing well!

One of my favourite features in OneNote 2007 is that when you hit tab it auto inserts a table for you, I have found this to be the best way to start making tables.  I have only once wanted to enter an old fashion tab in OneNote and I did it by copying and pasting from Notebook/Windows Run dialog.  Anyhow it looks like Olya Veselova, OneNote PM, has blogged something new: Workaround for "turning off" the TAB key creating a table instead of a regular TAB in OneNote.  Here is her tip:

Create an Auto-correct rule that turns your chosen character sequence (e.g. "\t") into a regular TAB:

1. Open Notepad and type one TAB. Select it and copy it.
2. Go to OneNote and click Tools > Auto-correct Options...
3. In the dialog, put your desired sequence of characters (e.g. \t, or \tab, or TAB, or <t>, or whatever you like) into the "Replace:" field.
4. Paste the TAB that you copied from Notepad into the "With:" filed. Click Add.

Now, any \t followed by a SPACE will be replaced by a regular TAB.

Check out the full post here: Workaround for "turning off" the TAB key creating a table instead of a regular TAB in OneNote. Nice post Olya!