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!

I got an email from a blog reader and I wanted to share my answer with everyone since I don’t think there were any blog post about this.  The question was this:

It would be really useful to be able to view two tabs (i.e., notebook sections) side by side on the screen. Sometimes one needs to compare two types of information and this would make it much easier and far more efficient.

I realized that I do this all of the time and I thought I would share my tip with you all, here is how I do it:

1. Open OneNote
2. Open another window of OneNote, most of you might not know this but you can open multiple OneNote windows, just hit Ctrl-M or look in the Window menu:
   
3. Navigate the two pages to the locations that you want.
4. Now that you have two OneNote windows open look on the Windows taskbar and look for the two OneNote windows.  While viewing on window of OneNote (in this case page 1) hot Control (CTRL) and right-click on the second OneNote window:
   
5. Choose “Show Windows Side By Side”
6. Now you are done!  For extra writing area hit F11 on each OneNote window to enter full page view and you will get something like this:
   
7. Just hit F11 to open the full UI again.

This works pretty well and I use this quite often when I am consolidating notes and information.  It is great when you have a widescreen monitor (which I am fortunate to have).

Try it out and let me know if you have any comments/suggestions/let me know if you use it often!

Not sure how many of you are fans of Mozilla’s Firefox (I am!) but I wanted to point out a great blog post by Amit Agarwal which shows how to get the Clip to OneNote Firefox extension working with Firefox 3:

Install Clip to OneNote Extension In Firefox 3 and OneNote 2007

This is great Amit, thanks for sharing!

I just saw on Michael's blog that he posted a link to training material for beginners: New OneNote 2007 training course for beginners.  Here is some of what he has to say:

The Office Online training team has just published Get to know OneNote 2007, a new training course that beginning users can take to learn OneNote 2007 and then test their skills. The training takes about 30-40 minutes to complete. In a few days, it will feature optional audio narration to accompany the screens (right now, you’ll hear placeholder audio clips when the course loads).

If you're still new to OneNote 2007, this is a great way to take a tour of the program, learn the basics, get some hands-on experience, and review what you’ve learned. After you have completed the training, be sure to check out our video demos that introduce you to a variety of other OneNote features and techniques.

Check out all of Michael's post for the rest, nice work Office Online team (& Michael).

There is a nice review of OneNote in Law Practice Magazine by Nerino J. Petro, Jr..  You can read it here: Product Watch - OneNote 2007.  It is great to see Nerino talk about the sharing capabilities of OneNote as well as the side note feature, a few of my favourite features.

I wanted to share and interesting research project that the fine folks at Microsoft Research have been working on called InkSeine.  As they say:

InkSeine is a prototype ink application from Microsoft Research.
It is designed from the ground up to have a user interface uniquely tailored to pen input.

I have seen this a couple time at the Microsoft Techfest that Microsoft hosts so employees can see a lot of the cool technology coming from Microsoft Research (here in Redmond, Cambridge UK, India & Asia).  They have taken an interesting twist on using a Tablet with ink, UI interface and search integration.  I would recommend checking it out, you can download it and try it out on your computer.  Also you can check out a video of it in action:

If you are running Vista in English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese I would recommend going to Windows Update and downloading Vista Service Pack 1 which was released this week.  I have been running it for a few weeks now and it has been great on all of my machines, I highly recommend it.  If you are running other languages you will need to wait until mid-April.  Congrats Windows teams!

I am sure some of you have seen random "J"s in blog posts and other places you might wonder what that is.  In Ben's blog post there is one in there and also in other places I have seen these random J so I had to find out what they were.  They key was this I saw on a toast:

See how there is a J there?  Well if I look @ the email I see this:

What is happening is that the smile used by Word is actually a J in other fonts.  So when you see a J you should smile J

I wanted to pass on something from the Education, Innovation and Inspiration blog which has a post about how they have been working on a tool to help instructors and students use OneNote for learning.  This is their post: Instructor Prep & Next-Gen MOC.

First some background that I wanted to pass on, we have found that OneNote is a great learning tool for what some people call Next Generation Learning.  Briefly this is all about getting learning content into OneNote and accessible to people who are taking learning courses.  Think about a time where you go to a training where they hand you this giant binder at the start of the class, you flip through it during the training and take some notes.  Then afterwards you go back to your office and you put the binder on your shelf and you never see it again.  BUT imagine doing this with OneNote, where you have all of your material in OneNote and during the training course you can jot down your notes and highlight the important parts.  Then when you go back to your desktop you have those same notes and you can search over it and find the information you need more quickly.  Also there is an added benefit to the environment where you don't need to print all of these binders and it saves money too!

So getting back to what Ben posted on his blog was getting instructors using OneNote as well.  This would help them get all of their material together and ready to present it to the students.  Now I think they are working on a tool which will take all of the course information and it would generate the whole notebook based off the course material which is pretty cool!

Anyhow check out the post: Instructor Prep & Next-Gen MOC to see what they have been doing and give your feedback.  Nice work Ben, Lonn and Mark!

I wanted to point out something on Michael's blog: Meet the new OneNote 2007 “Help & How-to” home page.  Check out the link for more details but I will steal some of the flashy stuff:

Link to the OneNote 2007 Help & How-to homepage.  Thanks Michael for pointing users to the great resources available on Office Online!

I wanted to ask you all a question/favour, what can you not do without OneNote?  The other day I was listening to a focus group of information workers (what we call regular office workers) and they were talking about the problems that they face at work with sharing information and working together.  It was really interesting to see what they had to say and what problems they were facing in their workplaces.  I thought that OneNote would solve a lot of their problems, but of course that might just be me.  With the OneNote hammer everything looks like a nail : )   But seriously I thought that OneNote and other Office apps could solve a lot of the problems people face, but I wonder how you explain what OneNote is to people.  I think sometimes it is almost too generic for someone who has never seen OneNote before.

So my question for you all and the discussion I would like to start is what can you not do with OneNote?  What is something that you couldn't do before without OneNote?

I guess this is a bit of a vanity post as I will write about myself which I typically don't like to do.  I haven't blogged much recently as I have been really busy this year.  In the past 3 months I have flown over 30,000 miles on 6 round-trip flights so it has been a pretty crazy time over the past few months, so my apologies for not blogging more.  I would highly suggest that you read John Guin's blog he has been blogging up a storm and writes on a weekly basis where I typically will disappear and then blog 5 articles in one day (which I keep track of in OneNote actually).

We on the team have been working hard on the next version of OneNote, which is currently codenamed OneNote "14" (part of Office "14").  We can't go into details but I think you all will love what the team is cooking up.  We are all working out new scenarios and designs to make your OneNote experience even better, I am so excited when I think about the next release of OneNote.

So with that I hope to blog some more in the future, if you all would like more regular posts please let me know and I can try and pace myself but otherwise I typically work in the shotgun approach.  Also if you have topics that I should post about please let me know, I write this blog to help talk with you all so give me ideas about what conversations you want to have.

I feel like a copy and paste monkey as I just take what Mike sends out and then I post it here:

• I am totally in love with Microsoft office OneNote!! It is one of the most brilliant 'invention' of Microsoft!! usable for students and working people. And i am so using OneNote at the moment, I cannot stop!!
• Microsoft in Good Software Shock! But what has impressed is places that have made me sit back from the keyboard and go, "Whoa! Dude. Cool." Well, maybe not, I'm English and from the home counties but you get the point.  The first WDC moment was when I found the OneNote tab in Outlook. Right Click on a calendar appointment in Outlook and it offers the option to go to OneNote.
• A scatter minded persons dream come true- OneNote. It has tons more features that make the software three times as user friendly as any other Microsoft Office software program
• I apparently have been living under a rock. I've heard of OneNote and have heard people talk about and even say good things about it, but I had no idea!! It's one of the most intuitive and powerful programs I've ever used.
• It's also so ridiculously performant. I believe that it could go a lot further without loosing it's precious responsiveness
• One of the happiest days of my recent life was the day I ran across somebody's tip that you can right-click on that background text and copy the text from the page to the clipboard From there I can dump it in a Word, file and take out a quote for a paper, etc.
• Before the next class, I will be completing my OneNote homework and hopefully able to talk my boss into purchasing this program. I love it and hope that I can get the chance to use it every day. 
• I am not a heavy user of OneNote, but the more I use it, the more I really like it
• OneNote is a program that is like Word on crack, with tabs! Go to the left and click "Church Planting", go to the top of the page and click "Events" and go to the right of the page and click "Wesleyan Church Planters Event
• After using OneNote for many years, I am of the opinion that I don’t want to be without this useful application. OneNote is an integral part of the Office2007 software suite or can be purchased separately here
• Bill Gates at the Office Developer Conference: "Interesting to note is how he mentions keeps mentioning Tablet-related tech: including OneNote, Touch, Natural Input and Surface"
• OneNote web view + Sharepoint = happiness
• Although what impressed me the most was their demonstration of OneNote.  I’m not terribly familiar with all the functionality in OneNote, but it seems straightforward enough that I could sit down without reading any user guides and get the basic functionality down.
• The more I use OneNote the more dependent upon it I become and the more I wish there were an equivalent application for the Macintosh. OneNote has become indispensable to me as I create and manage projects.
• In theory, it's a fantastic idea.  A product which eliminates the annoying bits of paper everyone uses once in a while and then saves you time in writing up your final article. In practice, it doesn’t let you down.
• Probably the most intuitive and natural note taking application around.
• I (heart) MS Office 2007.  Boy, did that not sound right coming from a Macgirl like me ...What I love in particular is OneNote.  My officemate tipped me off on this one, and I’ve been using it ever since to make notes and write my drafts, switching to Word only when it’s time to submit the final version to the boss. 
• Have you tried ONENOTE for eLearning?: Okay, so I'm NOT a big fan of Microsoft...but I think truly think the ONENOTE team might be onto something.
• For Windows users, I’d recommend OneNote. When I switched over full-time to a Mac a few years ago, this was the only program I worried about not being able to replace.
• A Mac person deep down at heart - but is really into this MicroSoft powered tablet, because OneNote is just so cool. And I haven't even gotten to the parts that got me all choked up yet. Although, yeah, that did make me a little moist eyed.
• Recently, I discovered OneNote 2007, a Microsoft office application that is given little press and is certainly not well promoted by Microsoft.
• Office's Undervalued Prospect: Microsoft OneNote:  I never really see it get hyped, but if you take the time to get to know it, OneNote has a lot to offer.
• I just now learned that I can use Microsoft® OneNote to publish blog entries. Given that I spend a LOT of time in OneNote, I'm just blown away by the fact that I can use it to post to my blog..
• My Top 10 Tools for Learning 2008: #1. Microsoft One Note 2007 – Simply an amazing program that I have only been using since January and wish that I had been using for the last 5 years. I am reducing my paper use tremendously thanks to this program.
• Microsoft Office OneNote: This was indispensable this year. It does such a good job of keeping all your notes in one place and eliminating the need to print out pages and pages of course notes. It would make your life almost paperless if you have a tablet pc, but even if you don't have one... there is no better way to organize you school life.
• There is one compelling new software program in the suite called OneNote. For students, teachers and writers it is an excellent program for taking notes and recording research. It however is only found in two different versions.
• Green IT: Defra also encourages staff to travel less to meetings and work from home using technologies such as OneNote, Sharepoint, Live Messenger and teleconferencing.

Thanks to everyone for blogging & talking about OneNote!

Another set of feedback from Mike that I wanted to share with everyone (if people get tried of this please let me know and I can stop it).

Love and Affection

• This is not an advertisement for Microsoft, it is simply a case of being truly impressed by a product.
• OneNote is awesome - sharing documents with yourself and others
• Seeing the light about OneNote - Been in Paris at a Management Excellence course.  All of our group work was on OneNote.  Ick!  I really HATE OneNote.  I don't use a tablet PC so I just didn't "get" it about OneNote- how good it was...  But, in the spirit of the event, I started using the pre-populated workbook for the course.  Eureka!  I'm a convert.  Even the guide to OneNote now makes sense.
• So I've been talking to educators in my little frozen corner of the world and they've been telling me about educational hotness that they are using.  MS Onenote came up.
• I've noticed that people seem to either be fanatics about using OneNote, or they've never tried it.
• I know a few people who'd kill for onenote for os x
• Man, what a cool program this is. I discovered it when a customer of mine asked me about it. I did some research and realized that it was a program I’ve been wanting for a long time.
• Using OneNote is such a pleasure; I tell people about it all the time. It is so versatile and can contain anything I need in one spot.  Thanks for a great product. If you ever want an extra tester, please let me know.
• I love OneNote and I store all kinds of things in it...I decided to move all my OneNote notebooks to a 4 gig USB drive that's attached to my keys... all the notebooks will sync between each PC and the USB drive.
• I downloaded <OneNote>  to help my husband figure it out when he got it with MS office home edition for his new laptop. After about 15 minutes, I realized it was going to change my work habits profoundly.
• I added OneNote 2007 recently and it's really been improved -- lots of new features and integration with the other Office 2007 apps and IE to easily move information over to OneNote. OneNote's new indexing and search within images is utterly fantastic.
• WELL I AM IMPRESSED - MICROSOFT ONENOTE: Well I have been working in Microsoft's OneNote quite a bit today -- I am definitely and quickly becoming a convert. I am very impressed with it so far, OneNote is very sophisticated and usable!
• Fed up with the backs of envelopes? Try OneNote instead

Don't Dig MS, But Dig OneNote

• onenote for the mac, or a similar free-canvas type note taker. I've tried every note application, and haven't found one I like as much as (gasp!) onenote.
• I have been using Microsoft products since Windows 1.0 and had been jumping aboard the use other products and open source whenever you can bandwagon to a point. However, IF what I have seen in Office 2007 so far, continues, I won't bother continuing to look to much further for my Office Suite software needs, especially if/when I could have these capabilities in the "cloud".

Awareness

• OneNote - an unsung hero? Ask most people what's in the Office suite, and they'll be able to tell you about Word, Excel and PowerPoint. And at a push, they'll mention Access, or Publisher. But most people haven't even heard of OneNote, or even tried it. And yet, of all of the Office programmes, it is the one with most untapped potential for education.

Personas and Scenarios

• Last semester I used OneNote's shared sessions as a way for my class to collaborate among groups during an in-class group exercise.

Today in class we learned all about Microsoft OneNote. It was very interesting to learn that you can use it just as an electronic notebook. By using OneNote, you can alleviate all of the other programs you use and keep all information in one place. I think that it will be very interesting learning more about OneNote and is definitely a program I will use in the future.

• Staying In Touch with OneNote: Between the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, we had a few Forest Ridge families who traveled to locales that forced their daughters to have to miss a little bit of school. In Cantu's case, she ran her class as she normally did using a common OneNote page shared with the class, except at the beginning of the class she hit the "audio record" button in OneNote.  She could, then, send the OneNote page to the absent students and when they opened the OneNote page on their laptops, they could play the audio, which by the way, was also synchronized with all of the tablet and keyboard action during the class.
• Now there's a good way to manage all those recipes torn out of magazines and newspapers or printed out from the Web. That's because without knowing it, Microsoft has created the home cook's dream software.

Room for Improvement

• Thanks Ken.  However, I really do not like the Print to Onenote driver.  I prefer the Print to Journal driver because of the way that the pages in the document are placed at the bottom of the screen.  OneNote just takes up too much real estate.

Misc

• Cool OneNote ink blog

We have reports of the "Send To OneNote 2007" printer disappearing or stop working. We're looking into the causes and possible fixes. In the meantime, here are some fixes that have been shown to work. If you run into this problem and one of these steps fix it, please let us know (by leaving a comment below or email me directly). That will help us track down the cause(s).

1. Open up the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel applet, and run Repair on the Office/OneNote install
2. Disable the Send To OneNote IE add-on
   • Boot Ie and go to Tools | Manage Add-ons | Enable or Disable Add-ons
   • Find the entry for a "Send to OneNote" add-on. Click the radio button to disabled it
   • Restart IE as requested
   • Open up the Add/Remove Programs Control Panel applet, and run Repair on the Office/OneNote install
3. Remove an conflicting print driver

• Go to Control Panel - Printers
• Identify the printer (sometimes a pdf printer) installed after OneNote.
• Right click mouse and open properties.
• Go to Ports tab and check the entries.
• Check if the box next to "Send to Microsoft OneNote Port:" is ticked.
• If ticked this appears to be the source of the conflict.
• Delete the offending printer driver.
• Perform a repair install of Office/OneNote.

I hope this works and also do this if you are comfortable messing with installations; this is a working theory and might not fix everyone's problems.  Thanks a bunch and I hope this post is useful to those people who are facing this problem and they search online for a solution.  Take care

Update on 2009-05-05: If you are seeing this and you are on Windows 64bit (x64) then you might want to read this: OneNote Print Driver – A 64 Bit Solution, check it out!

I wanted to point people to another post of David's regarding a regression OneNote 2007 SP1 contained where you can no longer create a notebook on some servers that are running WebDAV.  You can read about it here: OneNote 2007 SP1 - Can't Create notebooks On Some Servers.

At a high level I will copy and paste the issue:

Issue: can't create notebooks on Windows file share running WebDAV

• If you try to create a new notebook on a Windows file share server that also runs WebDAV then you will fail to create the notebook.
• For example if you try to create a notebook called notebookname at \\fileservername\filesharename you'll get an error message like: "OneNote cannot create a new notebook at: http://fileservername/sharename/notebookname"

If you are facing this problem please read the post to learn the workaround and also please leave a comment on David's blog with your information (again David covers this in the blog post).

Back in December I pointed people to something David wrote about notebooks in Windows file servers: OneNote Shared Notebooks - Options and Troubleshooting - Part 1: Windows File Shares.  Well it looks like David has posted part 2 of this guide and this time he talks about OneNote notebooks on SharePoint:

OneNote Shared Notebooks - Options and Troubleshooting - Part 2: Notebooks On SharePoint

If you want to learn more of how OneNote stores files on SharePoint please read this guide!  Great post David!

I wanted to call on you all to settle a question we had here on the team.  We have gotten lots of comments from users saying that they couldn't get the toolbar buttons working in OneNote.  This means for these people they were unable to get a lot of the powertoys working and we wanted to try and understand more about this.  Would you please fill out this poll:

OneNote 2007 Toolbar Addins , sorry I couldn't get the embed to work :(

1. OS Version including Service Packs and more
2. .Net Version installed (if you know this)
3. If you just run the .msi or if you installed with the setup.exe
4. Any other information you have

Thanks a bunch!

I just saw this up on Channel 8 where Mike Tholfsen, the OneNote Test Manager, did an interview up on Channel 8.  Check it out: OneNote: the Mega-Tool for Learning.

The other day I got the following question via my blog:

How come I cannot get the NEAR search operator to find anything in OneNote 2007 no matter what I try? I have just installed the new SP1 Office pack but the problem remains.

The AND and OR operators work fine.

The user was having a problem getting the NEAR operator to work in OneNote 2007 whereas it worked in OneNote 2003.  I asked a few of our search gurus and they told me the following answer:

NEAR was removed in OneNote 12 since WDS does not support it

As some of you may know OneNote 2007 uses the Windows Desktop Search engine for search operations and therefore we are constrained by what the platform offers us.  Not many of you use Boolean search methods but we do support AND and OR because WDS does.  Hope this post helps some of you out there.  Take care!

 Update 2008-03-03: I got a few emails from internal people at Microsoft and they told me that I should correct this.  They said my blog should say that: While WDS supports the concept of NEAR, AQS (Advanced Query Syntax) doesn’t.  There you go!