OneNote Testing

Onenote for Android is available!

John Guin — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:17:11 GMT

This is really great. Onenote is now available for Android!

Full details are here: http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-onenote/archive/2012/02/07/onenote-mobile-for-android-is-now-available-worldwide.aspx so I won't repeat that. Jump on over and check it out.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John

From little acorns do big trees grow

John Guin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:12:00 GMT

It's never easy to predict where ideas from this blog will go. I received an email recently which mentioned my blog (indirectly) and the results from a teacher in B.C. asking me some questions about OneNote. Here's a cleaned up version of the email:

I wanted to take a moment and report the results of a unique blog/video content opportunity that [a]fellow writer and I pursued for the Office Blog in the second half of 2011.

A schoolteacher in British Columbia had originally reached out to a OneNote tester on MSDN, praising the benefits of OneNote in his classroom, but also expressing frustration with Microsoft’s lack of evangelizing the product’s usefulness in the public school sector—both for teachers as well as for students. As Office blog curators,[we] thought that this would make a great customer story and, not knowing exactly where the road would lead us, took a road trip to Canada to meet up with the teacher and his students. We first got a sense of his world over dinner and then spent the entire next day shooting video at the school to capture how our technology benefits him and his kids.

When we came back, we packaged our newfound knowledge into the following pieces that were published on the OneNote Blog:

Blog post: “Teaching with OneNote: How students benefit” (July, 2011)
http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-onenote/archive/2011/07/28/teaching-with-onenote-how-students-benefit.aspx
A chronicle of our trip to meet with the teacher and learn about his use of technology in the classroom. This post served as the container for the main video (see below).
Video: “OneNote in class at Pitt Meadows Secondary School” (July, 2011)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5X_iSRNueU&hd=1
This video promotes the teacher’s story and his use of OneNote in the classroom.
Blog post: “6 reasons why I used OneNote to plan a project” (September 2011)
http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-onenote/archive/2011/09/29/6-reasons-why-i-used-onenote-to-plan-a-collaborative-project.aspx
During the Back to School campaign, we published this productivity summary that shows how we used our own technology to plan the trip and interview.

It serves as a great example of how investing in real customer stories can have a big payoff in the street cred we gain in our user communities, especially when we don’t look and sound like a polished marketing campaign in the process.

I really hope we have a chance to do more of this kind of work in the future. Our customers really seem to like it.

Thanks for the email summary from the writers of the OneNote blog. Always great to see where these "offshoots" go! One simple contact from this blog set all that in motion. (And a quick thanks to the White Stripes for a good blog title today. I’m listening to “Little Acorns” right now).

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Pin a OneNote page to the desktop

John Guin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:04:52 GMT

Omer updated his onetastic powertoy to give the capability to pin individual pages to the desktop.

Jump over to http://www.omeratay.com/onetastic/ and check it out!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John

Making Mufflers at Microsoft

John Guin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:39:00 GMT

It's Midyear Check In time at Microsoft this month. At this point, we all sit down with our managers and have a good discussion about our long term careers. This is much different from status updates in which we talk about the state of OneNote, automation and tools, reporting, bugs, etc.… This is focused on where we all want to be three, five to twenty years down the road. Some testers here, especially those that are just starting, can struggle a little bit with this distinction. To help explain this difference, I have an analogy I figured I should share (and I'm a big believer in analogies).

Imagine Bob was hired at a car company to work on installing mufflers on the new cars. And Bob LOVES cars, and mufflers in particular. He throws himself into his job and starts welding mufflers into the new cars. After a few months, he masters all aspects of welding the mufflers into place and becomes the top muffler installer.

He isn't content with this, though. He starts to notice more efficient ways to install mufflers and meets with the car designers to make changes to the processes, lowering costs of installing mufflers by 10%.

As time goes by, Bob begins to notice the failure rate of mufflers is seemingly high. Bob investigates and find that the mufflers that use a certain type of steel fail due to rust after about 8 years. He sets up a team to choose a different metal and helps create a muffler that will last twice as long. He also notices that some cars simply look better with 2 mufflers than one, and helps the designers modify the mufflers to fit the redesigned car. Sales of those cars start to increase.

So after about 10 years, Bob has become the muffler expert. There is no question he cannot answer and has literally written the book the company uses to install mufflers.

And then the company decides to make all electric cars. (For the non mechanically savvy readers, electric cars do not use mufflers at all).

So now what does Bob do?

The situation arose because he has focused on only one specific technology and spent all his time and resources in investing in that one item (mufflers). He spent too little time investing in his long term career. And now a change the company made has exposed a tragic flaw with this work style.

So the tasks Bob could have done along the way, even while mastering mufflers, that would have helped his long term career are:

While welding, he could have studied more techniques about joining metals together.
Failure rates could have led to studying the different failure points of the cars in general. Now when the company goes to electric cars, he could modify the elements he is studying for failure rates.
Leading the teams to make changes could have been a natural lead in to building leadership skills

And so on.

So the point behind our discussions will be to identify what is important to the individual and how we can fit tasks that help reach those goals into our day to day work, and if we are getting stuck in our day to day tasking and losing sight of our long term goals.

Let me know what you think about his analogy.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John

Monitor problems

John Guin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 02:00:39 GMT

If it's not one thing, it's another. I've had bad luck with monitors since last Friday and currently only have my notebook and table working.

The first problem I noticed was that it looked like the red gun on one of my three monitors quit working last Friday. I first checked the cable from the computer to it with a second cable and saw the same problem. Since I had been using the VGA port on this monitor I decided to check the DVI input. I plugged in a cable from a machine with DVI output and the monitor looked normal. I figured maybe the red input pin on the cable had gotten loose, so I tweaked the VGA cable around a bit and the red gun would fire now and then and the monitor would look correct. But I could not find a position that was stable, so I disconnected the VGA input completely and connected this monitor to the machine with the DVI output.

About two hours later the monitor completely died. It would not recognize any inputs at all. Fortunately, it is under warranty and is getting replaced.

The second monitor died today - its problems started with the left 1/8 of the screen drawing yellow and degraded as the day went by.

The monitor stand on the final monitor went out as well, but the monitor works.

Finally, right in the middle of all this, I got a DVI and USB junction box so that I can switch monitors, the mouse and keyboard around more easily. But it was not a multi-monitor junction box, so once I got all the old VGA cables and such disconnected, I got stuck.

That was my Monday. Sigh. I just want to get back to testing OneNote!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John

Powertoys from the test team for 2011

John Guin — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:36:47 GMT

It's been a fairly busy year for the OneNote test team. One way I can give some "proof" for that statement is by looking at the number of powertoys the test team gave out over the past year. Frankly, there have not been that many, and most of the results here are merely updating addins from OneNote 2007 to OneNote 2010.

And for good measure, I'll add a link to Omer's (excellent) Onetastic powertoy. He's not a tester but since he's on the team I figured I would include a link here.

New for OneNote 2010:

OneCal http://www.omeratay.com/onetastic/ Has a calendar view and image cropping. Super fantastic extension!

Updated from 2007:

Image Importer http://blogs.msdn.com/b/johnguin/archive/2010/12/20/a-bulk-image-importer-powertoy-for-onenote-2010.aspx

Sort Pages http://blogs.msdn.com/b/johnguin/archive/2011/01/24/updating-the-page-sorter-powertoy-for-onenote-2010.aspx

Table Of Contents http://blogs.msdn.com/b/johnguin/archive/2011/04/28/updated-the-onenote-table-of-contents-and-sorter-powertoy.aspx

Section Color Powertoy http://blogs.msdn.com/b/johnguin/archive/2011/07/11/onenote-section-color-powertoy-updated-for-onenote-2010.aspx

Table Sum http://blogs.msdn.com/b/johnguin/archive/2011/09/19/table-sum-toy-updated-for-onenote-2010.aspx

For OneNote 2007:

Tree Control http://blogs.msdn.com/b/johnguin/archive/2011/03/07/a-treeview-control-for-onenote-2007.aspx

This has been replaced in functionality with the Quick Filing Dialog in OneNote 2010.

If you want to write your own addins, here are some links to get you started.

Visual Studio (the Express editions are free) http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/visual-csharp-express

The OneNote 2010 Developer Center: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905452 Has links to the reference materials and lots of code samples (this is new!).

And one of our external users has written a good step by step guide you may want to study.

Malte Ahren's blog - he tells how to create Ribbon based addins:

http://www.malteahrens.com/#/blog/howto-onenote-dev/

Thanks Malte!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Source code for the OneNote Table Sorter and Table of Contents powertoy

John Guin — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:37:00 GMT

Odd - I normally blog on Monday and Thursday. I looked back at the last few weeks and between vacations, holidays here in the USA and other whatnot, it has been a long while since I posted anything.

One thing I noticed last year is that I never posted the code to the Table of Contents and Table Sorter powertoy. I got a few requests for this over the past month and figured I better get it put up here before I completely lose track. So here you go.

Enjoy!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Cropping screenshots in OneNote 2010

John Guin — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 23:11:13 GMT

Omer updated his toy to allow clippings in OneNote to be cropped!

Have you ever clipped something from the web or pasted some image in OneNote and realized that it is not quite right? Word, PowerPoint and even Excel enjoys rich picture formatting features, while OneNote is about quickly capturing information and not much about fine detailed presentation of it. Still it wouldn't hurt to be able to crop an image you just captured to reduce the clutter and unwanted content.

Well, Onetastic now supports a new context menu item for images: Crop. Just right click on an image and select Crop at the bottom and you will be able to cut it the way you want.

Finally when you click Accept, your image on the page will be cropped and replaced. If you need to crop it further, you can keep doing so.

If you want to learn more about other features of Onetastic, read it on the website. If you want to get your hands on the add-in quickly, head to the download page.

Jump on over to his page to get the latest bits!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome, (but send Onetastic questions to Omer )
John

Another tip for getting Unfiled Notes on Skydrive

John Guin — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 03:24:06 GMT

This question came to me again a few times this last week. On the one hand, this means more OneNote users on Skydrive! This is great to see since we put so much effort into getting this rolled out. On the other hand, though, if you start from a machine that is set to use OneNote with local notebooks, it can be a bit tricky to get your Unfiled Notes section on the cloud.

I wrote about he drag and drop method here. Not much more to say about it.

If you upgrade to OneNote 2010 Service Pack 1 (download link here), there is another little bit of functionality available that may help you. You may be in the position of having a section already on SkyDrive which you want to use as your Unfiled Notes section.

If you click File | Options | Save and Backup, you will see this:

If you highlight the Unfiled Notes section here, you can click Modify. When you do that, you get the folder picker dialog we added to OneNote 2010 and you can select any section you have to use as your Unfiled Notes section:

Just click Select and you are done!

Something (fun?) to do, and related to testing, would be to run a tool like ProcMon and monitor the registry to verify the correct registry keys are written when this is done. Give it a whirl and make sure we are updating your machine correctly! (I'm just trying to link this article back to testing. This is something that I did do when working on this fix - I had to verify we were creating the registry key correctly. I'll leave it up to interested readers here to track down which key gets added, and what value it gets. Should be relatively straightforward. Hint - it is in the HKCU branch.)

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

A poweruser tip to moving OneNote files around to free hard drive space

John Guin — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:04:34 GMT

Dan is a buddy of mine here at MS and he was facing the problem of his hard drive (c: drive) getting full. He needed to move some files to another drive to free up some space and came up with this nifty little process to move them around.

Here’s the tip in his words (and “you” below refers to your user name):

----

Running out of space on your system drive, realize that you’ve got a bunch of large OneNote Notebooks and lots of great backups, but don’t want to ditch any of them? Just move all the OneNote files to another drive and use a symbolic link to reference them.

1. Shutdown OneNote

2. Start | Run | cmd

a. C:\Users\you> mkdir D:\OneNote

b. C:\Users\you> robocopy %localappdata%\Microsoft\OneNote D:\OneNote /e

c. C:\Users\you> rmdir %localappdata%\Microsoft\OneNote /s

d. C:\Users\you> mklink /d %localappdata%\Microsoft\OneNote D:\OneNote

e. C:\Users\you> exit

3. Start OneNote

After each step in #2, make sure that it succeeded. And feel free to replace any of them with the more friendly version using explorer UI (for instance, making directories, copying content, deleting content, etc.). The mklink step however needs to be done on the command line – I don’t think there’s a way to do it using explorer.

These instructions work on Vista or higher.

---

I think this is pretty slick and I need to give it a try (full disclaimer – I have not had a chance to do this myself yet). I have used robocopy for a while now and never realized it was built into Windows – I assumed it came with Visual Studio or one of the other apps I typically install.

Anyway, if you are scraping for hard drive space on a particular drive and understand what the mklink command does, this may be just the thing you need!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John

Back from a week of interviewing

John Guin — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:57:38 GMT

Last week I got sent to Mexico on a recruiting trip. In some cases, it is cheaper to send a small set of Microsoft employees overseas to conduct interviews than sending a large group of folks back to Redmond so we do these trips every so often. The fact that it is sunny and warm there versus cold and icy here is just good luck, I suppose :)

Anyway, when we got there the facilities folks had set up rooms for us to use. They hung signs on each door like this:

Notice the typo? The testers in our group noticed "interview" was spelled incorrectly on the first day of the first morning we were there. The developers with us did not notice this until much later.

This made complete sense to us since testers (by and large) are much more nitpicky and interested in finding flaws than other disciplines. One of the other testers pointed out that he had fully expected all the testers to notice this first (and we did) and had been internally counting the time until the rest of the group there noticed. Kind of a silly way to point out such differences in our teams, I know, but I figured I would share it here since it gives insight into the test mentality.

And we never had the signs changed. No point in it really - why waste paper once we knew which rooms we were using?

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Some new powertoys for OneNote

John Guin — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:36:35 GMT

Omer is a developer on the OneNote team and has a set of powertoys he wrote on his own time that he wants to give out. The set includes a printout rotator, the calendar tool he already let me give out here (I'll update my page to point to the new location) and a tool to help get rid of an obscure information bar alert which shows in some printing to OneNote cases.

http://www.omeratay.com/onetastic is his website. Jump over there and check it out. Be sure to let him know what you think!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John

I'm a OneNote 2010 MOUS!

John Guin — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:48:42 GMT

Heh. A few month ago, I had the chance to take the "beta" exam for Certiport's OneNote 2010 certification course. They now have rolled it out here, and the twittersphere had a storm about this a week or so ago. The beta test was interesting. I was told that we were taking the test as they expected to give it, but if there were questions that everyone consistently missed, then that question might get removed from the final pool. Then, based on the results, a baseline score to receive certification would be established. This seemed reasonable but I honestly have no confirmation that this actually happened.

And when I say "we" I mean a bunch of OneNote users from around Microsoft. I think one other tester and I were the only two folks from the product team who took the test so there should be minimal chance of us skewing the results. And the exam was fairly broad in scope - I got 85% correct. I have no feedback on what I missed (probably some shortcut keys somewhere), and when I was done I gave them some feedback on questions which seemed a bit vague to me.

Then over the long weekend I received my certificate which now confirms I am a MOUS (Microsoft Office User Specialist)! I'll hang it on my door here for a few days as a boast then take it down. I kind of wish I could have taken some of the other exams, but we only heard about the OneNote opportunity very shortly before the actual exam. Maybe next time.

I won't give away any of the questions (obviously) but there is a study list of topics from the exam here: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=77-853&Locale=en-us#tab2

A nice little certificate is now hanging out for all to see! This was a nice little task that I gave me the chance to volunteer and help with getting more folks certified.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Getting a full size video card into a compact desktop

John Guin — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:18:54 GMT

Gary came by today with a nice tip. He had a compact desktop machine and someone had given him a full size video card to go with it. It had been using the integrated video before, but we wanted to diversify our video configurations we have.

The problem he had was that the card, while small by itself, had a large metal bracket on the back which allowed it to fit into a full size case. Naturally, the card would not fit into the smaller case with that large bracket. Taking the bracket off was simple enough, but now the card was too small for even the mini-tower case. Gary took a look at the card and the little bracket placeholder piece of metal on the smaller case, and realized he could fairly easily break the placeholder bracket apart and cut it into a shim to use. Here's what he did:

First, he removed the placeholder from the mini-tower and cut it to an appropriate length to serve as a shim on the new card.

Notice the little slot between the SVGA and DVI ports? Gary bent a little bit of the placeholder bracket so that it would fit into that slot and provide stability. Here's what it looks like when the shim is put into place:

And finally, what it looks like when it is in the case - there is even a slot to screw the shim to the case:

Pretty slick, eh? Just a few minutes with a multi-tool and he has a video card that would have not fit otherwise installed and up and running. Now if only Gary will post a better step by step over at Instructables...

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

How I view OneNote automation

John Guin — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 18:47:18 GMT

I had an interesting discussion this last week with a tester about the purpose of automation for OneNote. She was acting on the assumption that the purpose of automation was to accurately mimic OneNote user's behavior and was struggling with a technical detail she had (how to verify OneNote was properly accessing a file).

The viewpoint I hold is automation is a tool whose purpose is to tell me information about the product. That's it. It's not rocket science and not hard to describe. Where confusion can creep in is when talk about different types of automation and think the goal of that particular automation is the only goal.

An example here is performance testing. I can create a test that types 5000 words on a page and runs spell check. This test can measure the time spell check takes to run, memory usage, file i/o, etc… and if properly constructed, can give valuable information about the performance of OneNote. If I wanted to make this a stress test, I could intentionally misspell all 5000 words. If I wanted to mimic user behavior, I could gather data about the typical frequency of misspelled words and match my text to that data. But I don't have to do this - I can focus instead on the edge case of how long OneNote takes to correct the spelling of 5000 words. This can let the team make decisions about where we need to focus efforts on performance for the product.

So the overall goal is to give me data about the performance of spell checking. I have two methods I can use to get that data - the stress case of 5000 words in a row that are wrong, or mimic the human behavior and match the expected percentage of misspelled words. (Since this is all going to run in a lab, I can do both, but bear with me). Each case has a different methodology - mimic human behavior or not - and in this case both get me to my goal of telling me about the product.

Back to this specific example of tracking whether a file was accessed properly. A quick definition of properly - the file is accessed only once, only the needed data from it is read, then the file is released. Clearly, users are not going to directly see this behavior, but can indirectly tell if the test is failing - the hard drive "grinds away" would be one way the user can tell the file is not being accessed a minimum number of times, for instance. Now, to cause the file to be accessed, OneNote needs to sync to the server. There are a few ways to do this. One is to let OneNote sit idle for a short period of time, and sync will kick in. This is the most frequent way OneNote syncs. Alternately, you can type SHIFT+F9 to force a sync, or use the folder properties sync dialog, or add a command to the ribbon, etc… So the method she chose was a forced sync - she did not want to pay the time to let the machine sit idle. She wanted the test to run quickly and get the results back. She can add a second test later that verifies the sync happens at idle and focus that test only on that functionality since she has a test which verifies the file will be accessed properly once sync happens. No need to duplicate this verification (which can be tricky).

I'll close that by saying all the different types of automation - performance, security, functionally, unit tests, etc… - all serve to tell us data about OneNote. The particular methodology of the test is merely a means to that end, and each has its purpose.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Network problems causing grief

John Guin — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:48:45 GMT

Last week could have gone so much better but our building is experiencing some network problems. General sluggishness, high latency and so on have really put a crimp on what I have been able to get done. Even doing something simple like saving a text file to a shared location can take a minute or two (or it may get done as fast as it ever has - just luck, I suppose). When behavior like this has cropped up in the past, it generally means there is some hardware somewhere that has burned out, broke or is otherwise in a bad state. Considering how many folks and machines are in this building, it can take some time to get this fixed, so I'm just waiting it out.

On the odd side, our phones our now all voice over IP. In practical terms, this means my phone has been acting odd this week as well. I've been logged out several times and gotten a few messages that told me the network was in such a state that my audio quality was suffering.

To top this all off, before I knew the network was in its current state, I decided to wipe my main machine so I could reformat and partition the drives more efficiently. That actually went well since I installed Windows from a thumb drive, but getting all the applications I need installed is bogged down. Not to mention that I shortsightedly decided not to back anything up before I started on this since I knew all my data was available elsewhere. So now I don't even have my usual OneNote cache to serve as my fallback.

On the plus side, though, our IT people are investigating and I expect the problems will get fixed shortly. Plus, being forced to reinstall everything will make me look through logs, examine setup and in general put a testing focus into those areas.

And for those of you emailing me, please bear with me a little longer here.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John

Filtering the tag summary page to have only the tagged information you want

John Guin — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:02:31 GMT

I mentioned on Monday that you can use the Tag Summary page to show you only the tags in OneNote you want but did not give details on how to do that. Here's how to (again, imagine that I only want to see my text that was tagged with a priority).

First, click the Find Tags button on the Home Tab of the ribbon. You should get a Tags Summary pane over to the right, like this:

In this case, I have several tags other than the three from the page I showed in my last blog article. Suppose I only want to see the Urgent, Medium and Low priority tasks, since those are the only ones to which I assigned a priority. The tip here is simple - just collapse the tags you don't want to see on the summary page by clicking the triangle icon:7

And you wind up with this:

Click Create Summary page and a page will get created in the current section with only the tagged information that is still expanded:

That's all there is to it! Just collapse the tree control for the items you don't want (in computer lingo).

I hope this helps.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Use note tag colors to prioritize information on a OneNote page

John Guin — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 15:32:32 GMT

I got a question from Denis last week that went like this:

"[I] have different priorities on my daily To Do pages, and would like to be able to change the [background] color of the note containers based on priority/urgency levels. Is this possible…?"

This is a request we get every now and then, and the short answer is no, this is not directly possible. But there is a workaround I sent to Denis that goes like this.

In this case, I imagine Denis has separate paragraphs of text that need to be colored differently based on priority. The fact that they are in separate containers won't turn out to matter, because you can use customized note tags to highlight the text. First, click the drop down arrow for Tags on the Home tab and choose "Customize Tags":

Then click the New Tag button and create a tag named Urgent, and set the highlight color to whichever color you want to use, like this:

Then click OK. It will get added to the top of the list:

and is assigned the shortcut key CTRL+1 be default. You can use the arrow keys along the right to move it down. I moved it to position 4, then renamed (modified) the Remember for later and Definition tags to be Medium and Low priority, respectively. I did not make a screenshot of moving Urgent down or renaming the other tags.

Now I can select any text on a page and hit CTRL+4 to tag it high priority, CTRL+5 for medium and CTRL+6 for low. I could also create more ("critical", "optional", etc…) and color code them accordingly. Then when I look at a page I could see something like this:

and be able to tell which task was at a given priority by its highlighted color. I can also use the Find Tags option with its functionality to create a summary page with only the given priority items as well.

I hope this tip helps, and feel free to send me any other feature wishes you have for OneNote.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Source code for OneCal

John Guin — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 01:21:00 GMT

Not much to talk about here. Just about all the code here is set up to draw the calendar and compute dates and times. The OneNote part of the code is pretty much summed up in:

void ProcessSection(const ON::Section &s)

in which the Created Time of the page is used to figure out when the page was made. If it has been modified since, the Last Modified Time is used instead. Then the code gets a link to the page and adds it to the calendar.

This addin is written in C++ instead of C#, so if you want to see what this type of application looks like, this is a good example.

If anyone wants to update this, feel encouraged to do so and I can post the results here. Some ideas for work include adding localized support for other languages and support for non-Gregorian calendars. Performance can always be improved or you may even want to add this to the ribbon. Oh, and a save feature would be great…

Anyway, I hope some folks learn a little from this.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Calendar view power toy for OneNote 2010

John Guin — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:30:00 GMT

Omer, one of our developers here, kicked out a nice little powertoy for OneNote 2010 that lets you see when pages were created in a calendar type of format. He graciously agreed to let me share it here, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Here's the quick start to it:

OneCalendar

Calendar view for OneNote that displays the pages on the date you created or last modified them.

Features

Click on the page titles to navigate to them in OneNote
Quickly switch to a different month/year from the top right
F5 to refresh
Requires OneNote 2010

I will also add that this is a standalone tool and you just run the executable to make it display the calendar. Also, I have a very huge number of pages in the 30+ notebooks I have open, so it takes a while to load that large of a data set.

The download is below my signature. Just download it and then unzip the file to get to the EXE.

Edit 11/30/2011: Omer has released this on his own blog at http://www.omeratay.com/onetastic/?r=onecal - jump over there to get it!

Enjoy!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Tip: Quickly getting to Zoom commands in OneNote

John Guin — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:18:22 GMT

I catch myself needing to zoom on pages in OneNote more and more frequently. Typically, I have a mouse with a scroll wheel and zooming while holding the CTRL key and using the wheel works great. Occasionally, though, I am on a laptop or tablet or something that does not have the mouse with the wheel and need to zoom. I have a few options to zoom in this case.

First, I can open the View tab and use the Zoom Out or Zoom In buttons there. Personally, I prefer to keep the ribbon minimized, so this is not an action I want to take. But that's just my preference.

A second option I have is to use the shortcut keys in OneNote to zoom in and out. The keys are SHIFT+ALT+CTRL+ the keyboard + to zoom in, or - to zoom out. I say "keyboard" + and - as opposed to the keypad + and - in case you have a large keyboard. On all but my Lenovo, this actually works well once I developed the muscle memory for it. The Lenovo tablet keyboard I have is a bit cramped for my fingers, so I came up with a solution for it.

The third option that I use on that machine is to customize the Quick Access Toolbar to hold the zoom commands. To do that, click the drop down arrow at the right of the QAT and select More Commands… Then change the "Choose Commands From" to be All Commands, and scroll down in the list, like this:

Then click Add and they will get added to the QAT when you click OK:

Now when you hit the ALT key, you get a shortcut and a popup to remind you how to invoke all the commands in the QAT and Ribbon:

In this case, my shortcut to zoom in is ALT, then 5, and to zoom out is ALT, then 6. If you have customized the QAT differently, your numbers may vary.

Finally, remember this is ALT and then hit 5 or 6. If you hold the ALT key down while typing numbers, you are actually typing an extended character code in the location the cursor is at. (If you have never tried this, try typing ALT+0162 with the cursor on a OneNote page - it's a nice way of adding your 2¢ to a conversation).

Anyway, this makes life a little easier for my eyes and I thought it would make a nice tip. And adding to the QAT really helps on a tablet since physical keyboards are a rarity.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

No phone for new testers

John Guin — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 02:31:52 GMT

As I was (sort of successfully) getting our new tester's office set up for her, I opened a box labeled "phone." Those of us that have been here a while have had a desktop phone since we started. Originally, they had analog phones and phone lines which was the norm 10+ years ago.

On a side note, analog phones were a blast. I remember using a 56K modem for 6 months for all email just to verify Outlook's performance. Cached mode really helped there - the only downside were people sending huge attachments.

Anyway, a few years ago we switched to VOIP phones. Now instead of simply having a phone on my desk, I have a network connected device with a number pad that makes me log into the domain every so often. It also ties into Lync, which is nice, but it takes a network cable into my hub which limits how many computers I can have in my office. I've always believed testers should have more machines than other disciplines. It's just very handy to have a German Windows 7 machine, an Arabic Windows 2008 server and a Japanese OS ready to use at any given point to test interoperability of the language support we have as an example.

To get back to the phone, our new tester only had a headset with a microphone. We have started the transition to using Lync for all communications, apparently. I guess this is just expected change. The only downside was when the network port in her office had a "hiccup" last week - for about an hour, her network connection simply was not working. Back in the day of having an analog phone, you could just call our internal helpdesk to report the problem. But since the phone now requires a network connection, you now have to roam the halls to find a working computer to report the problem. No worries with this - by the time we were ready to contact helpdesk, the intermittent problem was resolved.

Now back to work!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Setting procmon to put logs in the TEMP folder

John Guin — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 20:43:27 GMT

One of the testers on the team assigned a bug to me that concerns a test tool we use regularly. Specifically, we run procmon (from Sysinternals) to track basic information about OneNote. The logs that we generate can get fairly large after a day or so of running - think 6-12GB or so - and due to some tools we have that install Windows and Office for us, it was becoming possible to fill up a hard drive during an automation run.

The way I had originally written the startup routine for procmon was to save all the logs to the c:\ drive ( a hardcoded location. Experienced testers will know that something about "hard coded" anything is bound to create problems, and in this case, those testers will be proven correct). This was a "down and dirty" quick attempt at getting the logs saved for our runs. The problems started to come in with the tool we use to install Windows. That tool installs Windows to the d:\ drive, and leaves a relatively small disk size on the c: drive. So I was pointing procmon to a location that would very possibly get filled very quickly, and then we would lose logs (among other problems).

Fortunately, procmon has command line support (documented in its help file) for redirecting the log file. I changed our startup batch file to include the new location (Windows TEMP folder), like this:

start %PM% /LoadConfig \\servername\filterfilelocation\procmon\onenote.pmc /Backingfile %TEMP%\onenote.pml /quiet /minimized

In a file that had already defined %PM% to point to the procmon executable.

I was not quite done, though. At the end of the automation run, I had a prompt to the user to remind her where the logs were stored that needed to be updated (just change a string to mention the logs were in the TEMP folder now). I also changed one other tool to use the Environment variable that points to the TEMP folder so it could find the new location for the procmon logs:

string pathToTemp = System.IO.Path.GetTempPath();
var fileList = from file in

Directory.EnumerateFiles(@"c:\", "onenote*.pml")
Directory.EnumerateFiles(pathToTemp, "onenote*.pml")
select file;

Which is used to do some post processing of the files.

A quick code review later and this is now checked in.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John

Fighting with video cables, monitor stands and power supplies

John Guin — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 17:55:40 GMT

Last week I was given a couple of machines to set up for a new tester who starts tomorrow. (She's not a new tester - she was our intern last summer, but I digress).

Problems I faced:

The monitor had no stand. We managed to get some hand me down monitors from a lab, with the catch that we had to order stands separately. This was fairly easily overcome - we received the monitor stands, bolted them together and it worked well. The one feature we lost is that the monitor cannot be adjusted up or down without loosening bolts. Please note the bag taped to the back of the monitor. It holds the Allen wrenches (plural) needed to adjust the monitor. Or, you can throw some paper under the stand to raise it.

I got a junction box to hook the PS2 mouse and keyboards to each CPU so they can be shared.
Sadly, the keyboard and mouse I received were USB.
I got USB to PS2 converters! But,
They don't work with the junction box. The box has a power supply inlet, but no power supply has been found for it. I'm hoping if I can find a 7.5V power supply, the devices can be shared.
One machine only has HDMI output.
The junction box only supports VGA.
Here's the set of cables I had to work around this problem:

For what it is worth, the HDMI is getting converted to VGA for now. Once she starts, we can check to see if the monitor native resolution is supported. Might need to re-cable this, or get a new junction box.
I got a second monitor and a power cable for it. There was no power cable connector for this monitor - it needed a separate, external power supply. Sigh - off to spare parts room to dig up a power supply.

Despite all this, I got the machines hooked up and ready for our new tester. I hope she appreciate the effort :)

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Digging through email this week

John Guin — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:51:23 GMT

I don't know if my blog got re-indexed by google, Bing and the other search sites or what, but I am getting a large number of emails this week. I've been devoting most of my spare cycles to workign through the pile-up. If I seem slow, it is just due to the volume.

While it may be a little challenging to have this much email, I also love the interaction! It's great to hear from everyone and (at least for now) I will get to all the mail I have.

Thanks for reading my blog and using OneNote everybody!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John