While I greatly prefer to create content for my blog rather than linking to other blogs, this tip from Justin Knight is just far too handy to overlook.
Before I get into it, I want to give you the sales pitch. Suppose you are reading some document on your computer. There is some content (text, images, whatever) that you want to copy into OneNote. The current workflow would go something like:
Wow. 5 steps to gather the information you want. Wouldn't it be easier to do this with one keystroke?
And that is exactly what Jordan came up with. He uses AutoHotKey to create a "macro" to do all of the above in one keystroke. He gave away his code at his blog.
Here's what I did to get it to work in case you haven’t used this tool before (I had not - thanks for the tip, Jordan!).
I replaced the link to the website right after the z:: with the text from Jordan's blog. I left the bit that reads:
-----------------
^!n::
IfWinExist Untitled - Notepad
WinActivate
else
Run Notepad
return
----------------------
intact, as well as the text below it. Then I saved the file and restarted AutoHotKey. I got its green icon in my taskbar:
Now to test it. I started Notepad and highlighted some text. I pressed WINDOWS+Z and the highlighted text was placed right on the active OneNote page. Focus came back to the application I was using to test (notepad) and the selection there was intact. Awesome!
Next, over to the www.cnn.com\technology page and highlight some random subset of it. WINDOWS+Z -> BAM!
Jupiter's stormy Great Red Spot is shrinking
Everything about Jupiter is super-sized, including its colorful, turbulent atmosphere. But there's fresh evidence that one of the planet's most recognizable features, the Great Red Spot, is shrinking. It is possible that the giant storm may one day disappear, astronomers say. full story
Pasted from <http://www.cnn.com/TECH/>
(notice you also get the link from the web page, and notice that the layout got messed up when I posted this to my blog). This took a few seconds on my very slow machine.
Nice work, Jordan! And kudos to the team at AutoHotKey - this is a slick application.
I'm including the full text of the autohotkey file if you want. It's below under my signature.
Just open it, select it all and paste it overthe autohotkey.ahk file contents after step 3 above.
Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John