I Heart OneNote

Oh, so that

Default — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:21:12 GMT

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Office Outlook 2007 CU: Hurry-Up-&-Wait Demon of Delay Begone!

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 18:04:29 GMT

It's a beautiful day. For years now the been hurry-up-&-wait icon has plagued our productivity; the

re: I Heart OneNote

Craig Burley — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:24:29 GMT

#8 isn't working well for me at all. I've taken several screenshots (Windows-S to use OneNote's feature), pasted them into my Personal notebook, then right-clicked and chose Copy Text From Picture, but gotten...nothing, nothing that pastes into either NotePad or OneNote.

But I tried Copy Text From Picture on an existing graphic (already in OneNote, in its built-in stuff), and it kinda sorta worked, resulting in some gobbledygook that vaguely resembles the original text in certain places when pasted into NotePad.

Nice to see a writeup of the other cool features OneNote offers. I was happy to discover the ScreenShot (Windows-S) feature, since I need that but can't run whatever I was using on Vista after upgrading to W2K8 x64 with Desktop Experience (so I can run Hyper-V).

re: I Heart OneNote

Chris Pratley (MS) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 21:35:30 GMT

Hi Craig. The "Copy text from picture" feature is optimized for two types of text: 1) screen resolution text at normal font sizes with solid color (ideally whitish) backgrounds and 2) scanned images at higher resolution (e.g. 200dpi). So if your text is embedded in advertisements or multicolored backgrounds it may not work well. If it is small and poxellated it may also have accuracy problems. As a test, I took a screen capture of the first part of this page: http://www.officelabs.com/projects/chartadvisor/Pages/default.aspx

The text that came out:

Chart Advisor

Ever Struggled to find just the right chart for your data? Chart Advisor Was Created as a concept test to explore new

ways Excel users can Create graphs quickly and effectively. Based on the data in your spreadsheet, it identifies, ranks,

and displays an array of charts most relevant to you so you Can make the most Out of your presentation.

As you can see there are a few capitilization issues. That said, it will be less accurate with some other screen clipped text. The main purpose of this feature was to enable you to search for pictures by the text which appears in them - that is going to be more successful since it doesn't require 100% conversion accuracy for every word.

re: I Heart OneNote

Luis Franco — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:29:32 GMT

I really like OneNote and it is the application I use most, by far.

I have some issues tough, I don't know if they will be "fixed" or "included" in next versions.

1. Regarding to your tips in this page. #13 works more or less fine: When I do a "Create Linked page", it actually works, but it doesn't show any indication that the word is a link. Is it a configuration issue? The link works, but you don't know it is a link.

2. This would be great to make OneNote behave a bit more like a wiki, but it actually doesn't, suppose as your example you create a linked page out of the phrase "Grandma's cookies", despite what I said in #1, it works fine...

In another page (or paragraph) you create a linked page to the phrase "Grandma's cookies" and it will create ANOTHER "Grandma's cookies" page, instead of linking to the first one. What is wierder is, if you delete this newly created page (the second one), the link will take you to the FIRST page, instead of telling you're trying to go to a non existant page.

3. TAGS. Tags are lame in ON. Yeah it is cool to have small icons... but its quite unuseful... why not having a tag system like anyother blog system in the network, so you can attach "global" tags to your pages instead of applying them to paragraphs? why not having both? why not adding a tag cloud page?

4. Talking about TAGS... one thing I really dislike about ON is, if you use two or more computers (as I do), I have to manually configure each one to mimic the CTRL1-9, the figures, meanings and colors of the tags. Wouldn't it be nice if you add an "import/export configuration" or something like that?

Just few ideas...

re: I Heart OneNote

Chris Pratley (MS) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:10:32 GMT

Luis,

1. that's odd. When I create a linked page, the link is created with the usual blue text with underline right on the word I created. Do you by any chance have Windows set to a high contrast setting or similar?

2. you're right that the second linked page you create will be a new one - you will need to right click on that page and "copy hyperlink" for future references to it. The deletion case is a side effect of OneNote attempting to make links robust against being moved around. If you move that grandma's cookies page to another section the link will still work - that's because the link is first to the page uniquely, but if it is missing OneNote will search for a page with the same title.

3. why not indeed? who's to say that won't happen? Our use of tags kind of predated the web tag phenom, and they are more about marking up notes visually than a semantic labeling system. That said, it is easy enough yo make your own page level tags - just type the tags you want on the page somewhere (i prefix with xx to ensure uniqueness, like this "xxJapan" so I can later search on xxjapan and not confuse with normal references toJapan)

4. great suggestion and a common one. maybe in the future.

re: I Heart OneNote

DG — Sun, 03 May 2009 07:16:18 GMT

Hi Chris - just catching up to this post. You mention in the tips that you can synch notebooks across multiple machines with Mesh. Do you know if that would work for a shared notebook for two users? I'm trying to find the best way to enable a shared notebook with someone in another company. He has Groove, but I'm not sure how to do that or if it would work so I'm looking for the 'best' (least worst) answer.

re: I Heart OneNote

Chris_Pratley — Sun, 03 May 2009 07:30:59 GMT

Hi DG. Yes Mesh works with multiple users. I do that with my wife.

re: I Heart OneNote

Ken Murray — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:40:58 GMT

It would be grand if the formatting abilities of MS Word were present in onenote! This is the one major weakness in OneNote! I often like to collect information in my notes and have to make presentation quality documents. If I could just make them presentation quality in OneNote I would be all set.

It would be great if a note on a page could be a word doc, powerpoint, excel sheet, etc..

I've noticed a lot of comments are about formatting issues in OneNote. If a note could just be a word document the problem would be solved.

re: I Heart OneNote

Marcus — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:44:29 GMT

If you love OneNote, you are really going to like the new OneNote video - check it out at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxoYHG69imE