Chris Pratley's Office Labs and OneNote Blog : 2003

OneNote PowerToys contest update

Chris_Pratley — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 05:57:00 GMT

Many people have been asking me about the PowerToys contest. We got over 1000 submissions, which was a little overwhelming and quite a bit more than we expected. We went through them all and selected 12 semi-finalists who we contacted. We have now received their PowerToys and are evaluating them. Evaluating a PowerToy is not like judging the best costume at a party though. We actually have to use the tool and explore how it works, determine its quality, etc. And of course we have our "real jobs" to do so this is going to take a little while. We'll have a winner in a few weeks and then after the requisite hoops of legal fire have been leapt through we can post the winners (and hopefully all the semi-finalists).

If you weren't contacted about your submission, you didn’t make it to the semi-finals. Sorry. But please feel free to post your PowerToy on your own site and I'd be glad to link to it from here. Send me a mail with the link and please provide an explanation at the linked page of what the tool does and how to use it.

If you did make it to the semi-finals, congratulations!

OneNote 2003 SP2 details

Chris_Pratley — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 08:49:00 GMT

Last week we released Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Office System 2003. This includes OneNote 2003. Although most OneNote users today started with "SP1", a few of you who got the original version of OneNote may remember that SP1 added a lot of functionality to the original release of OneNote and may have been expecting a similar bump in this Service Pack. If so, I apologize for the team for having set your expectations that way. FWIW, I and others have tried to be clear in online forums (our Community, TabletPC Buzz , etc) that SP1 was an anomaly. It was essentially our "second release" shipped as a Service Pack. I also tried to be clear that subsequent Service Packs would follow the usual pattern of critical bug fixes only.

Unfortunately, the knowledge base web site and here where the SP2 details are provided mentions "new features" in OneNote SP2. In fact this is an error - as far as I can tell that text was used for Office SP2 and simply copied for OneNote SP2 by the documentation people (in the second link they used OneNote 2003 Sp1 text). There are no new features in OneNote SP2 if you already have SP1. We made the decision during the SP1 work that SP1 would have the "easy stuff" and then we would work for a while longer on the "hard stuff" for OneNote 12. As you can tell from recent blog posts, taking the time to do the heavy lifting was worth it. Now, if you are one of the few people who somehow does not have SP1, then for you SP2 *does* have new features, since it contains all the bits for SP1 as well. So that is a kind of excuse for the talk of "features" on the detail pages I linked to, but only if you’re a weenie. :-)

I thought I would list the fixes that went into OneNote 2003 SP2 specifically. There are probably a few other fixes that went into shared Office code which affect us, but these are the ones our team did.

Bugs fixed in OneNote 2003 Sp2 (with descriptions from our very fine test and dev team members!):

Crash Caused By: ONMAIN.DLL!Jot::WISPWrap::GetStrokeCount. Create a highlighter stroke over a white space placeholder so that the stroke is totally contained within the area of the space blob. And we crash. This one was a top crash report via Watson for us. It was pretty easy to have happen if you make a small mark with a highlighter in front of some indented text or between two words that are far apart.
Crash Caused By: ONMAIN.DLL!Jot::InkEditor::UpdateSizeOnPlaceholderBlob. Watson bucket. We know user was creating some ink text that lead OneNote to create a new paragraph. Somewhere in the process we failed to insert placeholder blob and subsequent operation of adjusting the size of the blob caused a crash.
Crash Caused By: ONMAIN.DLL!MoveIntoOutlineCore. If paste mode is set to "keep text only" and a picture is selected from within OneNote and pasted in OneNote, we crash. Setting the paste mode to text only removes the picture and causes a null item to be pasted.
Wrong pane opens when stationery is downloaded. User downloads stationery from OfficeOnline. The user should be able to see where the downloaded template is in OneNote, so that they can apply it. They should see the OneNote pane that lists all the available stationery. In OneNote 2003 RTM the Office Online ActiveX download control used a command line flag to cause OneNote to open the “New” task pane, which contained the list of all available stationery. In SP1, the stationery was moved to another pane, so now users can’t find the stationery they just downloaded. We have heard many complaints and got some bad stationery ratings because of this. With this fix and corresponding fix to the ActiveX control, OneNote 2003 SP2 will open the Stationery pane and the users will be able to find downloaded stationery. OneNote 2003 SP1 or RTM will still work as they do today, because they will ignore the unknown flag.
There is already a command line param to force the new file taskpane to be opened on boot. The fix is to add code just like that except it will open the stationery taskpane instead. The command line arg is "/stationerytaskpane" and is completely independent from other command line args, including the one that opens the "new" taskpane. If both are specified both will execute and the last one will be the pane left standing.
.mht file with 0 byte size is created when publish across network using non-System Locale. Data loss: saving an MHTML file with a file name not in the system default code page (e.g. a Japanese file name on an English system) results in a zero-byte file. No problem when using standard languages for your system. Due to the way the MSO HTML exporter manages its files, the destination file needs to be opened with FILE_SHARE_DELETE permissions, because in certain cases the exporter will replace the destination file instead of writing directly to it.
DW: Crash Caused By: ONMAIN.DLL!Jot::CUndoStack::PushRedo. There are, apparently, cases were we can push a null undo record on the stack - we know this thanks to Watson. This will later result in a crash when we try to deref the record. Fixed.
DW: Crash Caused By: ONMAIN.DLL!Jot::CStationeryActor::OnExecuteAction. The exact cause is unknown, however, it's our 6th highest Watson bucket. We believe that the problem occurs when you create a new page and then either shutdown or switch to a page without a title or similar. Fixed.

Although it is just 7 fixes, these reduce your chance of crashing significantly since we fixed the top hits we received via the crash reporting dialogs you send to us. So, go get SP2! You can check if you have it by looking in Help/About, where you should see SP2 in the version number info. If you don’t see it, try Help/Check for updates. If I were you, I would sign up for automatic updates on Microsoft Update though. When I got home the day SP2 was released, my home machines were already updated...

Setting up your OneNote notebook

Chris_Pratley — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 10:04:00 GMT

A discussion I had today reminded me of a design conundrum we went through with OneNote when we were preparing it for first release. A guy I was talking to today said that he thought (for his web site storage product) it would be lame to put example folders on the site to try to show how to use it, since nearly everyone would actually want something different and unique to themselves. So he wanted to go with a generic, empty space and help text right there to explain that you can make folders as needed to suit your organizational needs.

Funnily enough, we had the same discussion for OneNote back in early 2003 - what should appear when you first start the application? In one camp were the purists who said that the simplest starter set of sections that nearly every user would need would be the best. To support this, they pointed to lots of anecdotes from users complaining that pre-populated spaces really bothered them, since they had to delete what was there. This wasn't just a hassle - some people had even said that they felt "their" space was violated - that a brand new product should not look like it had been used by someone else. The other camp said that if we just put a reasonable generic sample out there it would do more good than harm. We decided to test the theories.

Some data supporting the purists came when we experimented with instructional or example content for the proposed sample sections. For example, not only were we going to have a sample section called "Meeting", the sample "Meeting" section was going to have a first page that showed how you could take meeting notes in OneNote. We had the same for several other samples. In tests, people said this really bothered them since their notes seemed "polluted' by someone else's stuff - even if they knew it was instructions meant for them. Personally I had been a big fan of using the pages of the starting notebook to try to explain the product, but somehow we couldn’t get the instructions in there in a way that didn't freak out a significant fraction of users.

So we shipped the first release, with just two sample sections: General, and Meetings. We felt nearly everyone would need or at least accept "General". There were some who wanted to delete "Meetings", since some people (maybe students especially) don’t go to things called "meetings". But the rest of us felt that having two was important to show that you could have more than one (duh).

One of the top pieces of feedback we got from the initial release was people asking "How to I organize my notes with this?". Since we had provided no guidance, people started out all sorts of ways. Some people just added pages one after another in a single section and relied on subpages to get some structure. Others just added sections with only one maybe two pages, since each section was an event for them such as an interview. A handful started going nuts with folders. Still others decided to make a section for each week of the year, since they were used to daytimers. (aside: although organizing by time is familiar to paper users since it is more or less forced on you by the medium, it is actually one of the weakest ways to organize since as the amount of notes grow your ability to remember when you wrote something relative to something else goes way down. A calendar underneath helps but on a computer it is better to organize by topic or person or some other category - you can always view your notes by time using View/Page list if you need to find something that way and search is not working for you)

For our SP1 release we decided to be more bold. We couldn't do anything terribly slick such as let people choose from a set of notebooks due to limited development budget, but we resolved to be more aggressive with the sample notebook. Now when you start OneNote you get a set of sections with folders to show how you can organize projects, courses, your home stuff, as well as a place to store old things you don't want to see but don't want to delete. It is still generic, but at least it indicates how we intended you to use the product - what sort of thing sections should be used for and so on. etc. We also jammed in a "helpful tips" section (I insisted) because it seemed like we kept getting the same questions over and over again, and maybe providing these tips in the application itself would supplement our help web site. The sample notebook has really helped reduce confusion, although we can still get a lot better in this area. Sometimes too much flexibility can be a problem and people can use some guidance.

Another common topic related to this is the concept of "piler" vs. "filer". These are two poles of note management. A "piler" is someone who just puts everything they get into a big stack. They rely on memory of roughly how far down the stack something probably is when they go to find it. Finding things this way is not particularly efficient particularly as your stack gets big, but the upfront cost is nil which is appealing to many (including me). A "filer" is someone who puts notes away by category until everything is in its proper place. Assigning categories to everything is a chore and hard to remember to do consistently, but it pays off when you need to find things since it is easier to pull them out of a filed set of notes. We actually did some research on this to see where the general population is on this topic. As with most things concerning personal organization, things are spread: about 15% pile, 15% file, and a whopping 70% pile first and file later when they get a chance.

We wondered if this behaviour would change if notes were electronic and things like searching were super-quick. Result: not really. Search is rarely used among our users. 85% of people put things where they would go look for them later so they don’t report any trouble finding them, and no need for search. A few others (the heavy note taking pilers) do rely on search, but the nature of people is not changing (yet). Will it? Hard to say, since even with instant search it is faster to click a topic title (section) and then a page title than it is to type a search term, then wade through what might be several hits to get the one you want if your term was not unique to the page. Things are different when you are talking about your own notes vs. say, the entire internet.

So, how about some example ways to organize your notebook? I was going to write a lot on this topic, but I saw that our web site has beaten me to the punch. There is actually a whole set of example notebooks up there, organized by profession. Check it out. If you don't fit any category, just pick one that looks like it might be similar - the structure is probably a good match. You have to drill through a bit to get to the actual samples. Here's one for students for example.

For reference, I've discussed before how I use OneNote, and a lot of you responded with your own strategies: How do you use OneNote?

Ok, as usual - feedback shamelessly solicited.

Anticipation....

Chris_Pratley — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 11:04:00 GMT

It's a funny time of year. We're approaching our first beta of Office12 and OneNote12 in the next few months (no news here - just standard procedure). My mind is all full of this new release of software, but I am not able to speak about it publicly. That makes it pretty hard to blog on our current products since to me they are nearly prehistoric. They are of course still as great as they were when we shipped them, but now my head is filled with what is to come and I am bursting to talk about it with all the people who have been asking for updates and features and fixes to our current release.

So I thought I would share some of the pain with you all. I will tease you with the fact that I know what we are doing, and it rocks, and you won’t be able to know until later on. Nyah. OK, done. Now your expectations are sky-high and we'll never be able to meet them.

Last week we hosted a big event for a few hundred customers and partners to show them Office12 and get feedback on our plans and designs. Of course I can't talk about that event either, but a few attendees blogged a little about it despite their NDAs (non-disclosure agreements). They didn't say all that much in the blog posts, except to agree with us that Office12 will indeed rock. I heard lots of comments like "revolutionary", "amazing", "definitely interesting business value", and even "Office has finally caught up with the rest of the company" (ouch!). Anyway the fact that we were able to share our work with a few people even in secret was some relief to the anticipation, but now it is even harder not to talk about it for a little longer.

Just so there is some content value to this post, I thought I would mention a little applet called InkyBoard: http://www.cfcassidy.com/Inkyboard/

Among other things, Inkyboard is a way to get ink from Journal to OneNote without having it convert to an image. You can copy ink from Journal, paste it into InkyBoard, then use the Send to OneNote feature of InkyBoard to push the ink into OneNote. This preserves your ink as ink, since although OneNote doesn't accept Ink as a paste format, the import API we have does accept Ink. InkyBoard also has a few other nice features to recommend it - check it out. Note that if you run into a problem sending to OneNote, you may need to create the "C:\temp" directory on your machine if it does not currently exist since InkyBoard assumes it does.

I also thought I would put in a plug for my favourite "small" feature in OneNote: screen clipping. If you haven’t tried this yet, you are in for a treat. Find a web page you want to preserve, such as a travel itinerary. Right-click on the little OneNote icon in the system tray, and choose "Create Screen Clipping". The screen will fade somewhat to show you that you are in "capture mode". Drag out a rectangle that you want to keep. When you are done a screen capture of the rectangle you grabbed is dropped into OneNote (and also placed on the clipboard, so you can immediately paste it somewhere). You can also use Windows-S (thanks for the reminder Dan!).

There are some options you can set for screen clipping (also accessible via right-click on the system tray icon). Some power users like to switch the default to be "Copy to Clipboard Only" - that way they can paste the image exactly where they want and not have it appear in OneNote's side notes section. You can also use Screen Clipping from the Insert menu in OneNote. The advantage of that approach is that you can put yourself on the page you want to insert the clipping onto, then use the command (OneNote automatically hides itself so you can grab what's behind). When you clip from web pages shown in IE, IE provides us the URL of the page so if you are allowing OneNote to automatically paste the clipping into Side Notes, then we can also fetch the URL and paste it too.

Screen Clipping starts to become second nature once you begin using it. It is remarkable how often I just want to grab exactly what is on the screen, regardless of format: even UI of applications, which can’t be grabbed any other way.

One last mention: my boss's boss, Steven Sinofsky, the numero uno senior VP of the extended Office group has a blog now: http://blogs.msdn.com/techtalk/. He is really passionate about students and job hunting, so check it out if you are interested in his insights on that. And he really has good insights since he has been through a lot - he can explain why the press build up the "cool factor" of certain companies and help you spot the reality that lies behind a lot of the PR you get exposed to as companies try to woo you to work for them.

Using OneNote on two or more machines

Chris_Pratley — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 10:32:00 GMT

One question I hear pretty often is: "hey, I have two machines with OneNote - how do I keep my notes in sync?" There are a lot of ways to do this. In some ways it depends on what your needs are. After all, what doesn't?

First, be certain that you have Sp1 of OneNote. Use Help/Get Updates to check if you are not sure. SP1 has some adjustments to perform better when using files across multiple machines.

Next, decide if you want to sync all your notes or just have a portion of your notebook available on both machines.

Next decide if you need to have the notes accessible when you do not have access to your network.

Now, here are some typical ways:

Use Windows offline files

With this scheme, you will designate one machine as the "server". The other machine(s) will be the "clients" (there can be more than one client). If you have a laptop and a desktop, either one can be the server. They just have to be able to see each other on your network. When the client gets onto the same network as the server, it will connect and synchronize any files that are different between the two. While it is one the same network, OneNote on the client will work directly against the files on the server. The thing you must avoid with this setup is making changes to the same OneNote section on both the server and the client while the machines are not connected. If you do, there will be a conflict and you will have to manually resolve which file to keep.

On the server machine, make the portion of the notebook you want to share into a shared folder. For example, if you want to sync your entire notebook with a second machine, make the folder "My Notebook" a shared folder (right-click on the folder, choose sharing, etc. Note one gotcha is that you not only have to give yourself read/write access, you also have to give yourself security permissions to access this share. If you don’t know how to do this, consult Windows help.) I should note that of course you can also use an actual server for this, and make both machines clients of that server.

Now, on the "client" machine, connect to that share (e.g. \\mastercomputername\notebook). Now, make that folder available offline. If you don't know how to do this, first read this article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307853/. Now, read this article on how to set up OneNote using this method: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=831596. Keep in mind that this second article provides the most secure steps to avoid any trouble. Most of the time everything works fine without being religious about closing and manually syncing. Best to follow the steps in the link though if you plan to do this a lot and edit a lot on both machines.

If you have a different sort of setup, such as a desktop at work and at home, plus a laptop you carry between home and office, you can consider some options;

Make the laptop the server. I can't recommend this if you think the laptop will be offline most of the time, since the chance for conflicts gets greater if the time between syncs gets large - you will forget which sections you have modified on which machines. But if you mostly use the laptop, this should be fine
Share only a portion of your notes. For example, pick a folder to share on the laptop and be careful to only modify the notes in there on one machine before syncing. This is good for sections of notes with things like passwords or other rarely changing info.

Use a file syncing program

There are lots of utilities that will sync files between two machines. You can use these to make two folders have identical content when the machines reconnect with each other. This is similar to Windows offline folders. These tools have the same limitations in that you cannot modify the same files (sections) in two places without syncing first. Some of these tools let you pick which file types to synchronize. You can opt to not synchronize the hidden *.onetoc files which OneNote creates in each folder and which hold the information on which sections are open or closed in that folder. If you do not sync those, you can have a different set of sections open on each machine even though the set of *.one files is the same.

Use a "real" server

You can place a single section, multiple sections, or an entire folder (with subfolders) onto a UNC server share (i.e. normal file share using the \\server\share syntax) or multiple sections onto an http:// location that supports WebDAV (http://www.webdav.org/other/faq.html) Typical servers that support WebDAV you might be familiar with are MSN Groups and Windows SharePoint Services, as well as any of the "hard drive in the sky" websites.

For example, I keep one section on my personal website (my hosting service supports WebDAV), and all my machines and my wife's machines point to it. I set this up just by saving the file to the web site (Use File/Save As, then paste the URL of your web site into the Save dialog). This adds to your set of sections a "Shortcut section" tab to the section file which is now on the web site. You can go ahead and delete the original now. Then from every other machine I just did a File/Open and navigated to the web site, and opened the file. Of course each machine needs to have read/write access to the location where the section lives.

The difference with this system over the offline files or file sync approach is that the data always lives on the server. If you cannot see the server, you cannot see the data. Conversely, there is no conflict danger since only one person can change the file at a time. This is a good solution for desktops that are always connected to the internet or your internal network.

Create a shared notebook

What I call a shared notebook here is just a folder share that is accessed from many machines (yours or other people too). It works only with UNC shares. First, set up a share like \\servername\sharednotebook. Now, use File/Open Folder, and open that folder share. That's it. Tell everyone you want to work with to do the same. Do it from all your machines. Now you have a shared OneNote "notebook" that shows up as a folder in your own notebook. You can't take it with you since it lives on the server, but you can work on any section, create new sections, etc and every user sees the same stuff on their machines (in addition to their private notes in other folders). While you work on a section you prevent others from editing it, but after a minute or so of inactivity others will be able to work on it. If you want to hurry that up, you can always right click on the section tab and choose "Allow others to edit".

Let me know how it goes!

OneNote PowerToys Redux

Chris_Pratley — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 12:01:00 GMT

Ok, I've posted about OneNote PowerToys before, back when we released SP1 which made PowerToys possible. Now the marketing folks have started up a contest to see who can make the coolest PowerToy. You can win a new Tablet PC from Toshiba (and you don't even have to write a PowerToy...)

Listed below are all the PowerToys I personally know about. If you have one that is available and not on the list, feel free to leave a comment to let us all know about it.

PowerToys are little programs that automate OneNote to do things that are useful. By their definition, they are not supported code, so you use them at your own risk. If they don't work, you are at the good graces of the author to get them working. Fortunately, most of the tools people use are "supported" by the OneNote newsgroup.

So, what PowerToys are missing? I'd love to see some PowerToys for the following:

System Hotkey to send any selection anywhere to OneNote. Even better if I get the option to then hit another key to put the selection in any of 30+ predefined sections I choose.
Send IM conversation to OneNote.
Edit <object> (e.g. equation) in OneNote
- You might ask how this could be done if there's no OLE support or Export capability for OneNote's SP1 extensibility. The way to do this is use a different program to make the equation, then insert it into OneNote as an image while also saving it in some location the equation editing app can find it again. Include a link below the inserted image saying "To edit this equation, click here", and the link points at the equation file, which then launches the equation editing app (or points at the app and includes a command line param - not quite sure that is possible). The equation editing app needs to remember the GUID of the page and the object it inserted originally so that when you finish editing the equation the second time, you just click done and the image of the equation is re-imported in the same place (i.e it is updated with your changes). The same technique can be used for any object such as a photo, org chart, diagram, Organic Chemistry diagram, etc.
Send to OneNote from any Office app
Send to OneNote from classroom tools like Blackboard

I'm pretty interested to see what comes out of the contest and people's creativity.

Ok, here's what I know of today. (I will update this list as people let me know of new tools)

PowerToys

AnalogReality (Darron Devlin) Major bummer, but Darron has gone AWOL and taken his site with him. These two are no longer available!

Darron wrote two of the first non-MS PowerToys, and the first is the #1 PowerToy you should get. Read this page for some info onthe PowerToys he has written.

OneNoteImageWriter (Print anything to OneNote). The **MUST-HAVE** PowerToy. Although this is missing, you can get "Send to OneNote" here if you have a Tablet PC (sorry to everyone else!)

WebPageToOnenote (sends an image of a web page to OneNote)

Microsoft employees

So far we're only allowed to post links to PowerToys that MS Employees have made on the "official page" here, but we're hoping to fix that.

IE2Onenote (send selected text and images from IE to OneNote). By David Rasmussen

Outlook2OneNote (send items from Outlook to OneNote). By Omar Shahine.

Note that many people have trouble installing this one. Some tips:

Not only do you need the .net framework you see in Add/Remove programs (and that you probably got from Windows Update), you need to install the "Outlook support for .net add-ins". This is in Office2003 setup - go to advanced customization, then in the tree that shows up, open Outlook, and choose the first thing (.net programmability support)

If you get an error saying some *.msi file cannot be found, open up the ZIP file that you downloaded, save the included *.msi on your hard drive, and point the installer at that.

Even with these tips, if you have other Outlook Add-ins installed you may still have some trouble getting it working. Sorry. Is it Ok to say it is not a OneNote problem?

Joshua Allen

OPML to OneNote (send outlines in OPML format to OneNote so they appear as outlines in OneNote)

Fejes Balazs

Palm to OneNote (Sync your Palm desktop notes to OneNote. Note this tool is not supported at all according to Fejes).

Jeff Borlik

PP2ON (Send full color slides from a PPT file into OneNote)

Omar Shahine

RSS2OneNote (Send contents of an RSS feed into OneNote.)

Stuart Radcliffe

OneNoteInsertHyperlink (insert a friendly hyperlink name for a nasty URL)

Direct download (requires .net framework 1.1)

torsten

Send to Onenote from RSS bandit

"GMX Lee"

Send to OneNote from FireFox

Clyx Studios

Omea Reader / Omea Pro to OneNote

Casey Chestnut

Journal Importer - Import your Journal notes into OneNote!

Transcribe Audio notes to text. Scroll down as this tool is second on the page. As Casey notes this is a tough job given the requirement for really high quality recoridngs, but it's better than nothing!

Products

Here are some products that use OneNote extensibility. These are NOT Powertoys

EMR Toolkit

Pegasus PC-Notetaker

Inkyboard - great for sending ink-annotated documets or Journal ink to OneNote

If you want to integrate OneNote into your product or solution, you can learn more about how to do that here.

Tablet Education Pack - includes the Send to Onenote printer driver - much like the OneNote ImageWriter above, but with different options. Tablet-only.

Tablet Enhancement Pack - also includes the Send to Onenote printer driver - much like the OneNote ImageWriter above, but with different options. Tablet-only.

Some other resources

Official SDK documentation
Andrew May's Blog (loads of good examples here, especially if you are writing managed code)
Kathy Jacobs and Bill Jelen's Book "Life On OneNote", Chapter 17. Here they discuss very effectively how to write VBA macros in Office apps that use OneNote's extensibility. More details here.
Trigeminal software (Mich Kaplan) code samples for generating GUIDs from VB - critical to get OneNote integration working if you are writing VBA macros
Donovan Lange's blog (the dev who works on extensibility for OneNote)
AdminID has a website hosting additional PowerToys.

Getting organized using OneNote note flags

Chris_Pratley — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:00:00 GMT

I've written recently about some of the more exotic capabilities of OneNote, but I thought I would spend a little time on Note Flags. Note Flags are one of the fundamental features of OneNote that makes the power of having an electronic notebook apparent. Oddly, although we consider Note Flags one of the fundamental features of OneNote that everyone should be using, I still meet people who either never use them, or have not discovered the awesome power of Note Flags Summary. And they are still using OneNote - go figure :-)

You can apply a note flag to any text or ink or picture on the OneNote page. A flag can be anything you want - its a way to tag some information. Where note flags get powerful is when you start to use Note Flags Summary which is a query which you can run across all or part of your notebook to roll up all the flags you have made so you can follow up on them later. More on that farther down.

First, the two main buttons for Note Flags are on the Standard toolbar and they look like this (if you haven't used them yet):

The one on the left is a drop down control that shows you the default set of note flags. The one on the right is the all-powerful Note Flags Summary. Pay attention to that one.

Here's the default set of Note Flags OneNote ships with:

These are pretty limited because we expect people to customize them (using the "Customize My Note Flags..." command you see there). You can customize them for whatever you want since everyone has different needs. For example, here's what my list looks like:

As I mentioned, you can apply a note flag to any text or ink or picture on the OneNote page. So a sample note page might look like this:

All the formatting you see came as part of the note flag definition (you get to choose an optional icon, color for text, and optional highlight color). I applied these flags just by using the hotkeys Ctrl-4, (Action item) Ctrl-7 (Meeting to Set up) and the dropdown for the last one (Tel. Number). As shown above, the first 9 flags get hotkeys using Ctrl- and a number. The others you have to use the button for. You can "tear off" the list of flags and make them a toolbar for easy application (or just View/Toolbars/Note Flags) - this is great for Tablet users who can't access the hotkeys in Tablet mode.

Note Flags Summary: your life has just changed

Where this really gets powerful is when you use Note Flags Summary. Here, I have clicked the note flag summary button and have the "scope" set to the current folder. The pane shows upon the right:

You can see below in the detail shot that the summary has picked up all the flags on this page plus those on all the other pages in this section and other sections in this folder. It has pulled them here together so I can see them all in one place. On paper, this would require me to flip through several pages and sections of a notebook and recopy my "flagged items" onto a new page - a huge time sink. As it is, I see four new tel numbers, which I will add to my contacts. I see three meetings to set up, which I will set up using Outlook. I also see a lot of things to do:

If I forget the context of some of these other items, it turns out each thing in the list is actually a hyperlink to the page it came from, so it is easy to remind myself what the context was for "Clear out dead files from server" for example. I can just click through the list and the page will be shown on the left in the main OneNote window.

It gets better. What if I want to zero in on the remaining things I still have to do? Here I have checked the box to "show only unchecked items". Things that are not actions (not "checkable") and actions I have already done and checked off are filtered out. Now I have my ToDo list:

If I like, I can use the "Create Summary Page" button to create a new page for these, perhaps to print them out and stick them in my wallet.

Note that by default creating a summary page copies all the shown note flags to a new page, leaving the original flags where they are for context. This is useful when you just want to make a temporary summary page for printing or emailing which you can then delete to keep all your flags in context. In Tools/Options/Note Flags you can change this so that in effect the flags are moved to this page (they remain where they were originally but "dimmed" so as to not interfere with Summaries) if you prefer to manage these centrally and don't care where they came from.

Its worth noting that you can adjust the scope of the summary quite easily. This makes Note Flag Summary a very powerful way to gather up random thoughts and information you have flagged all over your notebook. You can mine your "information database" for interesting nuggets and make it much more valuable than simply an electronic analog to your paper notes. Adjusting the scope:

I know people who copy loads of information from the web and flag it with various flags to organize their research (e.g. topic A, topic B), then when they want to see what they have collected on topic A, they just do a note flag summary and limit the list to the note flag for topic A. That's a really fast way to sort through the information you have collected. You can even get clever and apply more than one note flag to a piece of text - that way it will show up in more than one category.

It's also worth mentioning that you can sort your note flags in various ways - if you divide your projects so that each one has its own OneNote section you can group your flags that way too:

Which gets you this view, in case you need to see how things break out by project. Of course you can also change the scope to just see the current section in case you want to narrow things down to the project (or client) you are working with at the moment. As with most things in OneNote there is more than one way to get what you want.

Happy flagging. I know from talking with many of you that there are as many ways to use note flags as there are users. Please share any novel uses you might have.

OneNote for Audio and Video Notes

Chris_Pratley — Sat, 09 Apr 2005 13:25:00 GMT

I thought I would share with you some of the more interesting things people are doing with OneNote - especially with media. In the course of my job I get to interact with all sorts of OneNote users, and some of them do some pretty interesting things. People are using OneNote media recording for all sorts of things: interviews, focus groups, training, theatre rehearsal, conference calls, financial analyst briefings, meetings, brainstorming sessions, lectures, court proceedings, inspections, house-hunting, baby diaries, audio journals, you name it.

As you may know, OneNote can record both Audio and Video if you have the correct hardware (you need SP1 to be able to record video). What many people are not aware of though is that in addition to plain recording, if you also type or write notes while you record the recording is linked to what you put on the page. So in a way your notes are like a table of contents for the audio or video. You can later click on an icon that appears next to each line of what you wrote and cause the audio or video to jump to the moment in the recording when you were taking those particular notes.

If you want to try these features out it's pretty easy - especially for audio. Nearly any laptop (and any Tablet PC) has a built-in microphone. It is probably a little hole (or several (holes) in the case of the machine in an inconspicuous spot. If you have a desktop computer you may have received a microphone with it. If not, any machine will accept a plug in microphone. For video, you will want a standard USB webcam, or if you want to use a "real" video camera, use one that supports USB streaming (my Sony unit does), or Firewire (IEEE1394).

Let's say you are recording an interview with someone. First, get a new page and title it "audio test". Now start the recording using the toolbar button with a microphone on it, or use Tools/Audio and Video Recording/Record Audio Only. You'll see a notice placed on the page like this:

"Audio recording started: 11:14 PM Friday, April 08, 2005".

Now, ask the person you are interviewing your first question, such as "what do you do for a living?". After you ask, you can type something like "Q1", "Living?", or the full question if you are a fast typist. All you need here is something to label the audio so you will remember later what it means. Let the person answer. Take more little notes if you like - the shorter the better since the audio is capturing all the details for you. The great thing about audio recording is that for critical events it captures everything, allowing you to focus on the event and your participation in it, rather than waste time trying to capture everything that was said. Ask your second question and continue this way. Now stop the recording.

Move your mouse or pen to hover over one of the notes you took. You'll see a "speaker and film" icon appear to the left of what you wrote. Click that.

If your speakers are turned up, you should hear the audio start playing back from the point in the interview when you took that note. You'll also see the time shown on the audio gauge in the "Audio and Video Recording" Toolbar jump to the right point. You can listen for a bit, and click the icon again to hear it again, or on the icon that appears next to anything else you wrote to hear that. There is no "tape" so the audio jumps immediately to the right spot, backwards or forwards.

Actually, the audio jumps to a spot a few seconds before the moment you started taking that note, since we know that people have a brief reaction time before they think to take a note on what they are hearing. You can adjust this delay to match your style in Tools/Options/Audio and Video.

You might be concerned that a long recording will use up too much disk space. You might be surprised to know that a 60min audio recording will take up only about 5MB on your disk. A 60min video recording is only 60MB. This means on a typical machine that has just 10GB of free hard disk space (mine has 50GB), you could record for 8hrs/day for every working day of the year. Even with video and 15GB free you could record 1hr every working day for a year. These days we lose track of just how much storage there is on our hard disks, and how good compression of media has become. I should point out that these values are what you will experience with the default settings, which use the Windows Media encoding codecs (encoder/decoders) for voice and webcam video respectively. You need to have at least Windows Media 9 installed to get this working. You can adjust what codec you use in Tools/Options/Audio and Video to get different quality (all the way up to CD quality audio - but that takes more disk space). If you like, you can even up the video recording to record broadcast quality video (from a real video camera), but then you are going to eat up disk space pretty quickly.

So, I promised some details on what people are doing. I can't tell you the names of some of them since I don't have their permission but where I can I will give you links to more info.

I mentioned in my last post that BYU law school is using OneNote video recording to help students critique each other as they deliver arguments. The students pair off and one presents an argument while the other listens. Their old system required students to take notes as the other spoke, and when they delivered their critique, they'd have to say things like "remember when you said that thing about X, you kind of fidgeted and did this thing you do that makes you seem like you're not sure of yourself". They would sometimes use a video camera to record, but finding the right spot in the video to show the other person what they meant was time consuming and difficult. With the new system, they have OneNote on a laptop with a webcam, and they just record the other student. As they go, they take notes in OneNote. To review, they just show the notes to the other student and click through the notes, showing the snippet of video that goes along with each critique. According to them, they get about 10 times as many critiques delivered more effectively as a result.
Check out the details here.

I hear all the time from journalists and others who do interviews for a living that the audio notes feature is a winner. Actually one of the first groups to use OneNote this way was Globo Online, a news organization in Brazil. They would go to events like soccer games, interview the players or coaches in halftime, and then email the audio, their story notes and some digital pics to the head office. Then snippets of this audio and the photos would be posted on the web with the story even while the game was still going on. There's a whole write-up of these folks here.

Focus groups are a kind of market research where a group of people are invited to come to a meeting room where they are shown a presentation on a new product, or asked to discuss a topic. The focus group researcher tries to note down anything interesting they say as the conversation is guided along over the course of 1-2hrs. This is pretty brutal work, and regular typed or written notes miss the expressions on people's faces, gestures, and the tone of their voices - not to mention the exact wording they used as well as anything at all the times when the person taking notes was too busy to capture something. You can record focus groups with a video camera of course, but it is a pain to review the focus group later this way if you just want to see the highlights (and often there are multiple focus groups). Video notes with OneNote solves this nicely, since it is easy to mark any interesting comment or moment with a brief pen mark or typed word, and it is easy to click on the notes and jump to the point in the focus group where the interesting comment was made. Since the client is often not present for the focus groups, this becomes a great way to present the summary of highlights to them.

I've heard from people who write training courses in OneNote with video attached, then use these pages for training. People can click on the questions to hear the answers or see a procedure.

A teacher directing a school play used OneNote video recording and a "real" video camera to record rehearsal and take notes in OneNote. After the rehearsal, it was easy to click on the notes and show the players where their acting, timing, or position was off.

A lot of people connect their desktop or portable machine to their phone line to record phone calls directly into OneNote. To do this, you either need to put your laptop next to your speakerphone, or buy a standard device that plugs into the phone and has a "line out" plug on it you can connect to your PC. There are several devices that can do this. Radio Shack has a cheap one that works OK, but I found it introduces a buzzing sound if you record until you unplug the power cord for your laptop (and it never worked with my desktop). A much better one is the Dynametrix TLP-102 or another option is the Plantronics MX-10. Now, when you record any conversation, you have to let the other people know they are being recorded and get their consent (laws on this vary by state in the US, but it is also just polite). Once you do this, you have a very powerful tool. You can take notes on the conference call (or presentation, or interview, or analyst call) and have the entire call recorded for later reference, of course linked to any notes you took. This is really useful for calls that are information-dense that you know you will need to review later.

Financial analysts have started using OneNote audio to record the briefing calls that companies due to announce their quarterly results (or their predictions). This is called "guidance". These calls are information packed, so there is a strong need to review what was said later on.

You can record regular meetings using audio notes of course. This is a pretty common usage of audio notes. Despite the limitations of the built-in microphones, I use my Toshiba M200 to record meetings with around 8 people in a medium sized room and it gets nearly everything (except the really quiet people). This saved me once with a magazine reviewer. I was doing a press tour for OneNote and office2003, and I had been showing OneNote along with its recording capability. After I finished, the next guy went and talked about another office product, and I kept recording. A week later the reviewer sent some comments to us about this other product, but we didn’t understand the comments. I was able to play back the recording and catch the moment where we covered that feature, and from the exact words the reviewer used during the demonstration was able to understand where he was coming from. We were able to respond in a much better way than we would have otherwise.

Brain-storming sessions are a special kind of meeting where people are throwing out idea after idea. If you try to record these ideas normally, you risk not being able to participate in the brainstorming yourself. But with OneNote recording, you can just hit any key and then Enter to mark the point in a discussion where someone had a great idea, and come back to it later. We've used this on the OneNote team with good results.

Students recording lectures is a tempting thing to try to do with OneNote. It is tougher due to the distance you sit from the speaker and the number of other people in the room making random noises, but a boom (directional) mic can solve this nicely. Some lecture halls also let you plug into the audio directly if the speaker is using a microphone.

I am aware of at least a few lawyers who record court proceedings, depositions, discovery, testimony, etc along with their annotations in OneNote for later review (one by plugging into the court audio system, since all participants are mic'd). This is also great for patent lawyers trying to recall exactly what an inventor was saying, or for lawyers trying to determine what part of a deposition to use. One lawyer uses OneNote in the courtroom to instantly retrieve supporting material from the evidence or testimony (which has all been entered into OneNote). This lets them respond instantly to any argument opposing counsel might make.

A construction and maintenance firm told me they use video notes for site inspections. They walk around the site with a webcam strapped to a tablet, aim at something they want to comment on, then record audio as well as jot some notes on the issue. Reviewing the inspection notes later is really easy of course.

I have a co-worker who used video notes in a similar way to the inspector above, but for house-hunting. They recorded every walkthrough in every open house, making a mark with a pen on their tablet whenever a new room was entered, or they saw something worth pointing out to their spouse (who was out of state and unable to go on the trips). Imagine how easy it is to say "show me the kitchen again", and click next to the word "kitchen" to do that.

Another co-worker recorded video into OneNote of their baby, so they could keep track of the various things their baby did as they got older. Ok, this is going further than I would be comfortable with, but hey.

You don't have to always link audio to notes - I know of many people who simply record voice snippets as a form of short note - just a few seconds long. One person I know keeps an audio diary, with different recordings per page. You can record your diary entries while doodling with your tablet, or writing a journal. Kind of a multimedia diary. Some people have even experimented with audio blogs using OneNote.

You have a challenge if you are using the microphone built-in to your laptop for all these scenarios that involve other people - you’re often better off getting a mic you can plug in and place on the table, or a direct connection to the phone as I mentioned. The mics built into portable machines are usually little 29-cent things that have poor quality. And they are also placed to capture your own voice rather than others, which means they also record key taps on your laptop and pen strokes on your tablet. All these issues go away with even a cheap external mic plugged into the PC.

As usual, I’d love feedback from all of you on this topic or another.

The best ways to show OneNote to others

Chris_Pratley — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 08:38:00 GMT

I often hear from fans of OneNote that they are frustrated because they can't explain to others what it is they love about it. they explain for a few minutes and then their friend just says they can’t see why it is better than Word, or Notepad. (Notepad!)

It is tough with a new product in a new category because people have no frame of reference. They are used to asking "which is the best word processor/browser/OS?"', but with an information management tool, most people have no experience so they can't do the comparison. They just see the part that looks like a word processor and they think that is all there is.

For those who are frustrated trying to explain to others what makes OneNote different and exciting in a concise, coherent way, let me share a few ideas since obviously we end up doing that a lot ourselves.

Demo using your own notes

My first tip is to try to demo the product using your own notes if at all possible. Talking about it is very difficult, but using your own notes makes it immediately obvious to people the huge variety of things it is useful for - things they didn’t think there was software available for (like trip planning, or research, or password management, or any of the many other things OneNote does). So save your breath and open the product to show them.

Show them how you are effective with it - this is much more successful than talking about how they can be effective with it. I showed a lot of people my wife's hand-drawn plan of our back yard, with loads of little pictures of plants she copied off of various web sites as she planned our landscaping (shade garden!). She had all the links back to the sites next to the images so she could read more about the plants. The main part was that she had a visual of the garden to try various arrangements of plants by color, etc. It's hard to think of other software that makes garden arranging easy (!). She also has a great section on research for baby paraphernalia. And lots of people can relate to that one. I have a similar section for that car I keep hoping to buy...

I also show how I plan trips - links, itineraries, maps, phone #s, etc. Copying pictures of places you want to go with links back to the source is useful. You can keep all this in a page group with a set of subpages, one for each destination. This is especially effective for showing someone else (such as your spouse or friend) what you plan to do. Having all the random things like hotel reservation confirmation numbers, flight times, trains, tel #s, etc. in one place makes you feel good. It's also worth pointing out that you use OneNote in an ongoing way. You work on something, drift way, come back, etc. With a word processor you lose your place when you close the file, plus you’re forced to have everything in "story" format, rather than tabs, which makes it hard to randomly access any part of your trip notes.

Of course I also show meeting notes, but to many people these just look like simple Word documents so they won't get excited at first. So if you show meeting notes, show how you can search all of them easily, and how you can use note flag summaries to see all the important items, or the To-Dos, etc. Show how you can file them in meaningful sections with meaningful titles. Show how you can suck in meeting details from Outlook.

I also show people my Blog section, where all my previous posts and posts I am still working on are kept. This really shows off how a OneNote section is like a project, and can hold many different things in it in various states of completion. I can jump to any post topic immediately, without having to scroll way down in a document, or open and close files.

How is OneNote different from a word processor?

This is a common question, and fortunately the answer is pretty easy if you don't get caught comparing which features each program has, which is a mental trap since that way you end up describing OneNote as a document creation tool, and not as an information database.

One way to think of OneNote is that it is a place to put all the stuff you want to keep track of but don’t have a good place for in your computer. Then you can find it again later when you need it. It is the software equivalent to the stack of paper on your desk, a scrapbook, the post-its on your monitor, the stuff in your head you keep trying not to forget, your favorites in your browser. Each factoid you have can be dumped on its own page in OneNote or grouped together on a single page as a kind of dashboard, and you can keep all those factoids organized as you might in a three ring binder with colored tabbed sections and so on. Nothing gets lost. With a word processor, all this stuff has to go in a column from top to bottom, or you have to split it across several files which makes it really hard to search and browse. A phrase I often use is to say that OneNote lets you do a "web search", but across all your own stuff.

Another difference is that OneNote has this two-dimensional page surface, so if you think two lists make more sense side by side, just drag one beside the other. If you have a main thread of content on the left, click over in the right to add annotations to remind you of what thoughts you have about the stuff on the left. This is all so easy in OneNote and so restricted in a word processor.

What if I already have a way of managing notes that I like?

There are lots of ways people try to organize with a computer, with the most common being a bunch of folders with text files or documents in them. These people usually say they are fine with this system. But there are several weaknesses they often aren't thinking about. For example, searching that stuff is hard. Even with the new desktop search tools coming out, you don't have an easy way to browse from hit to hit and to view the hits in context. You also can't flip through pages like you can in OneNote - trying to open all the files and closing them one after another looking for the right one is tough. Often people are reduced to developing some cryptic code for filenames to try to get the right file the first time - but there is no way to recognize a page of notes visually like you can when you browse in OneNote.

Moving from this sort of system to OneNote isn't all that hard either. It does require sitting down and doing a bunch of copying and pasting, but it gives you a chance to re-organize which most people want anyway. If people have PDFs or PPTs or other docs, show them how they can drag/drop those files onto note pages and get a link back to the original. Also tell them how to use the OneNoteImageWriter powertoy to print documents into their notes to easily browse them all together without having to open different apps. If they don't want change the folder structure, they can also just create a OneNote section in every folder they already have - that will cause OneNote to reflect their same folder structure in their notebook.

I just need scraps of text - not a fancy program

Often people say they just need plain text and that's it. But show them how search works. Show them how note flags work to help them find that text, group it into categories using the note flag summary, etc. Also dropping in pictures and HTML from the web is great (screen clipping from the system tray icon alone sells a lot of people), and can't be done with plain text only tools. Show the highlighter (text or ink) and highlight text in copied web pages, or circle the interesting bits of a web clipping to highlight why you copied it.

Qualitatively different

One of the hardest things to communicate is that OneNote just feels different. To many people it is a very personal thing, "my OneNote" if you will. People don’t feel that way about their Word documents in folders. Why is this? I think it is because the nature of the program lets you express your own thought patterns and work/organization methods. If you think hierarchically, you'll organize your notebook with hierarchy. If you think in projects you'll have a different section for each project. Your stuff gets laid out the way you think about it, not the way the program wants you to organize. Another difference is that OneNote seems very tolerant of incompleteness and work-in-progress. That lets people relax and be comfortable with dropping more stuff into their research section without having to make sense of it until later, or to have a lot of half-written stuff they'll get back to later. This ability to have multiple ongoing projects is what draws a lot of people into relying heavily on the application.

Another qualitative difference is that OneNote allows new ways to work. I posted earlier about shared sessions - with this OneNote is doing something totally different from being an information mgmt tool - it is a communications tool - and after you finish the shared session, because it is also an information management tool you already have a record of what went on and it is in yours and everyone else's notes. Same thing with shared notebooks, such as a folder on a file share that multiple people have opened into their notes. Working with a small team and having a repository where you can all share and see what others have added or see how they have organized the research makes OneNote into is a new kind of lightweight team project tool.

Recording audio and video is another OneNote thing that blows people's minds. Many people think they don't have a reason to use these features because they think of traditional recording and how it has to be for "official" things. But they might be surprised since with nearly infinite audio recording capacity there is no cost to simply recording a lot of normal stuff. Record brainstorming sessions, focus groups, team meetings, etc. and play back later to see how much you missed. You can also do entirely new things with recording that you didn't consider before. For example, BYU law school decided to use video notes in OneNote to record law students doing presentations, with a person taking critique notes (synced to the video of course). Then in review, they can click on each note and the video will jump to the point where the presenter was making the "error'. Makes showing people how to improve much easier than verbally trying to coach them, or trying to fast forward and rewind video tape. Check out the details here.

I'd love to hear about your success stories with convincing other people of the value of OneNote. What worked for you?

OneNote Shared Sessions

Chris_Pratley — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 07:55:00 GMT

It's been awhile since I have had time to update my blog, but it looks like I may be able to spend a little time on it for the next little while. I thought I'd try to do a series of posts on good or clever or original ways to use OneNote. Please feel free to share your stories with me - I LOVE hearing about how people use the product, and I will share the best ones with the team.

In my opinion, one of the cooler features of OneNote 2003 is "Shared Sessions" (this requires you to have Sp1 installed, as I know most of you have done already.)

A shared session is a peer-to-peer shared note-taking experience. "peer-to-peer" means you don't need some fancy server or web site. You just have to have a network where your machine can connect to other machines running OneNote.

You can set up a shared session with as many other people as you want - we have tried over 70 in our testing, but most people do it with 10 or less. It works best on an intranet, but you can also run a shared session over the internet or through firewalls, provided your firewall allows such connections.

The experience is kind of freaky at first - anyone can type or write or paste stuff onto the page(s) being shared, without waiting for other people to save or "pass the baton" or whatever. You just do what you want, and so does everyone else. It is a little like IM, except that instead of a conversation where everything goes one after the other with two or more discussions being jumbled together and the comments disappearing off the top of the screen, you can use the whole page and people can work on their own stuff. It is a little like a giant whiteboard that everyone can stand at and write stuff on, since just like a whiteboard, you spend more time reading what other people write than writing yourself. Plus rather than just handwriting or diagrams, you can type, paste in pictures, charts, graphs, etc. You can also add additional pages at any time, for supporting material, etc.

At first you may think this is just a trick that isn’t really useful, but you have to explore it to see the possibilities. For example, on the OneNote team every week we have a status meeting where development, testing, program management, marketing, user assistance (help, documentation), localization, support, planning, etc. come together to update each other on what is going on. In the "old" days, we'd all sit at a table and go around the room, with each representative saying their bit for 5min or so. The meeting usually took the full scheduled hour, and we often didn't have time for the important discussion after the status where we wanted to talk about what we were going to do. Some people never got to give their status since we got stuck on one topic.

In the "new" world with shared sessions, things are very different. First, one of us sends out a shared session invitation via email. This is easy enough - you just use File/Share with others, then choose to "Start a session…", which offers to share the current page. Click "Start Shared Session", then Invite Participants..., and send that invitation. Within a minute or so, people have joined.

Now, it is good to start with a template of some kind to provide structure. In our case, we have the team logo at the top, then we have sections like this:

Agenda

Dev Status

Test Status

PM Status

Etc.

The meeting organizer can fill in some meeting agenda items that he wants to make sure we discuss. So can others - at any time. This is great to start the meeting with, since everyone can see that there is this set of topics that we need to cover. That helps with pacing the meeting - how many meetings have you been to that ended with the time running out and people saying "But I wanted to talk about X…"?

At the same time, anyone can start to fill in the relevant section for their team. So right before your eyes, all 8 or 10 sections start filling themselves out, like some kind of magic book from Harry Potter. In 3 minutes or so, the entire team status has been entered, and you can read it all there, without waiting for people to verbally repeat all of it. This is so much faster than the old way that even with questions and people clarifying what they have written, the status part of the meeting is usually over in 20min instead of the 60+ min of the old way. In our meeting, the test team brings a whole set of charts such as our bug trends over time, support issues, stability trend, etc. They add a second page for these, and dump them all in there, ready made (copy/Paste from Excel). Each person can read those at their leisure, zoom in, etc. Way better than handouts (Color! Zoom!), and you have a permanent record.

If we adjourned there, we'd have saved time and it would be worth it. But what we find is that we can now use the rest of our shared time to talk strategy, or project management plan, or whatever other burning question that actually needs to be resolved. This makes the whole meeting much more valuable than in the past, since rather than just reporting information we are actually making decisions.

But it gets better. Sometimes one of us is late to the meeting, since they are stuck in some other activity. They arrive, having missed the first 20min. They open the email invitation to the shared session, and in seconds they have all the notes written so far. A quick scan and they are up to speed - now they didn't miss much at all, especially of the status reporting part. Even cooler, a few times I have not been able to make the meeting since I was stuck in some other meeting or conference call where my full attention was not required, so I opened the invitation in that meeting and was able to see what was going on. I was even able to ask questions by typing them on the shared page, even though I wasn't in the room, and was in fact attending a different meeting. "Freaky deaky!", you’re saying.

Now, this bit about not having to be in the room but still being able to see the shared notes, diagrams, charts, etc is key. We sometimes have people attending remotely, from California or Japan. In the old way, these people had to listen to speakerphone. If you've ever done this, you know that it is very hard to listen to a meeting this way, since the people physically in the room forget about you, speak quietly, draw on the whiteboard, etc and you can't follow. Now, with a shared session, you see everything they are drawing, and you also see the summary notes that someone (or multiple people) are capturing in real-time so it is much easier to follow. You can also draw a diagram yourself if necessary or just highlight part of a chart so you are not stuck having to explain your concept in words over the phone.

Ever had the experience of attending a meeting and then finding out later that all the things you discussed and decided were remembered differently by the other people in the room? Another great effect of shared notes is that you have a live record of the meeting that you can verify is accurate and even edit yourself before the meeting ends. That way things are very clear about what was decided, and you don't have to get some "minutes-taker" to understand a clarification you want to make to the notes - just edit it yourself. At the end of the meeting it is easy for everyone to review the written record of decisions made, so there is no confusion.

Wait, it gets even slicker. Sometimes you are in a meeting where you have "sides" (as in Group A is negotiating with Group B). During the meeting, it is really hard for the members of each group to stay in sync regarding their position, since they can't read each others' minds to determine how the others are reacting to new information unveiled at the meeting. But with shared notes you can set up a session just for your "side" of the meeting, and each of you can contribute. If any of you are taking notes, rather than have all five of your team take the same notes just take shared notes so more of you can listen at a time. You are going to have more complete notes with more time to participate yourself. You can also type things like "be sure to ask about X", or "let's be careful not to mention Y" or "what do we think of their plan?" (and get responses). That way you can manage your side's strategy much more effectively. If you are a consultancy, sometimes your client can ask you point blank for your opinions immediately after presenting their situation, and if you disagree with each other in your answers you're going to look silly. Well, just write down your thoughts in the shared notes as the client is presenting their situation to you, and you can be sure to know what all the members of your consultant team are thinking before any of you have to open your mouths.

So those are a few examples of using shared sessions. How are you all using it?

New Pricing for OneNote

Chris_Pratley — Tue, 03 Aug 2004 05:55:00 GMT

Today (Monday) Microsoft announced that we are going to a unified price worldwide for OneNote 2003. Until today, OneNote was $99.95 in Japan, and USD$199.95 everywhere else. In the US and Canada there was a rebate coupon for USD$100 off (CDN$150), which effectively made the price $99.95, but you had to deal with the rebate.

The new price is a simple $99.95 worldwide, which means the rest of the world (e.g. Europe) can get the lower price currently being enjoyed in Japan and the US.

With a new product you have to experiment a bit to see where the pricing sweet spot is, and $99 seems to be it based on the amazing response we are getting in Japan in particular, which had the lower price from the start. Keep in mind that although the price change is effective immediately, not every brick and mortar retail store will jump up and change the price tags on the boxes so you may not see the new price if you run to the store tomorrow morning - as I am sure you will do after reading this :-)

Academic pricing is still $49, and if you plan to buy in large quantities you can get a volume license ("large" means 5 or more). From comments I hear it sounds like a lot of people don't realize that you can get discounts if you are buying OneNote for a small office or workgroup. For details see this page.

Jeremy Wagstaff picked up the price change. You can read his comments here. He also wrote a very nice article about OneNote in the Wall Street Journal and the Far Eastern Economic review. These are premium content but if you subscribe you can read them. Here's a link to the FEER article (http://feer.com/articles/2004/0408_05/p036innov.html)

New PowerToys for OneNote 2003 SP1

Chris_Pratley — Wed, 28 Jul 2004 10:36:00 GMT

Better sooner than later - the first PowerToys are already here and available for download. Bear in mind that “PowerToy = hobby project”, so these are not necessarily the same robustly designed and high quality things you should expect in the main product, but that said, many of us use them all the time at work and they have been worked over plenty by our internal user group, so they're good to go.

You can check out the PowerToys page (may not be up just yet if you're reading this post July 27-28):

http://www.microsoft.com/office/onenote/powertoys

Or go directly to these download pages to get the first two PowerToys:

IE to OneNote. This PowerToy adds a button to IE that lets you send any page or a selection on a page to OneNote. You get the same results as a copy/paste would give you, but you can do it all in one click. It also nicely puts the clippings in a single section so you can browse and clip, browse and clip. Then review your research later, complete with links back to the source pages. Link:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=a9872a17-2d0c-47f0-9b4d-026e94a8ef1c&displaylang=en

Outlook to OneNote. This PowerToy adds a button to Outlook so that you can send any email message (or group of email messages if you multi-select) to OneNote to keep them together with notes and other docs. Very handy if you like to have a “project folder” section in OneNote that keeps all your stuff together in an easy to flip through and modify/reuse format.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=87c661e3-178d-46f0-979e-0fdd96327928&displaylang=en

More to come in the next weeks...I love extensibility.

-----------
Note: I have an updated post here on PowerToys that I maintain as I find out about new PowerToys.

Final bits of OneNote 2003 SP1 are now available

Chris_Pratley — Tue, 27 Jul 2004 19:56:00 GMT

Here's just a quick note to say that the final bits of OneNote 2003 SP1 (discussed in my last post) have now been released as a patch available here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=07408348-26C9-43BB-9E7E-6151CF15D415&displaylang=en

If you have not seen or heard of SP1 or have avoided installing the preview, wait no longer - bliss awaits you.

If you installed the SP1 preview, first of all THANK YOU! since you helped make the product better if you reported any crashes to us, or gave us feedback in the newsgroups.

Second, if do you have the preview, as explained on the page I linked to, you do need to uninstall it and reinstall your original OneNote from the disks you have (you do have them right? We tried to be very clear that the final SP1 patch would require them).

The final SP1 is not a full install like the preview - it is a patch and must be applied to a properly licensed and activated full version of OneNote 2003.

Unlike with typical Service Packs, SP1 will become the “baseline“ shipping version over time as boxes in stores and other inventory are depleted, so people purchasing OneNote in the future may already have SP1 on their machine.

One last point: several PowerToys will be released soon that work with SP1 - those are going to be awesome. More on that in a few days.

OneNote 2003 SP1 has wrapped

Chris_Pratley — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 09:42:00 GMT

Today we had our ship party for OneNote 2003 SP1 down at Sammamish State Park (at the south end of Lake Sammamish in Issaquah for those who might know the greater Seattle area). Although we have signed off on the code, the process of building a patch, verifying it, and creating international versions continues so you won't see the final SP1 bits for a few more weeks.

Some highlights of SP1 for me (allow me to sing our own praises on this one day, please):

It is super rock solid stable. The original version of OneNote was pretty darn stable, but for SP1 we have had the chance to collect Watson data for the last 9 months or so and have been able to fix a large % of the crashes and hangs people have seen. We measure "mean time to failure" for OneNote and we are now averaging about 900 hours of execution time between crashes for the original version. That means if you add up all the time that we are running for all users and divide by the number of crashes logged, we get a pretty big number. The numbers for SP1 are still coming in but they are way ahead of the original release for the same pre-ship period, so we should be able to beat 900hours no problem. We are pretty happy with how stable we are - people expect version 1 of an application to be weak in this area and we have not fallen victim to that - quite the opposite.
We were able to address most of the top user requests - as I have written before, we couldn't do everything, but we did a lot. It is fun to hear people who have not yet used the preview ask for improvements and be able to tell many of them that *everything* they have asked for is already in Sp1.
Breakthrough experiences, like real-time note sharing. If you're the only person you know who has OneNote, then this is not of much use to you, but if you work with others, such as in a team, it is very powerful. We do our status meetings using this. One of us invites the others to a shared session, then everyone joins and adds their status to the status page - all at the same time. It is freaky to watch, since the whole page is filled in after about 2 min, with text and diagrams appearing all over the place. Then the whole meeting is way faster because you can read the status and not wait for each person to say all of it. Once I had to be at home and had to miss the meeting, and decided to join a shared session that was going on at work. I could see everything everyone else could see who was actually in the room, and could even add comments and ask questions silently by typing them into the shared note surface. Wow - try doing that over just the phone.
Focus on end users, corporate team scenarios. We took the feedback we got from people not just on bugs but on how they wanted to use the product and tried to make their scenarios work. In particular, we worked with several corporate customers to help make OneNote work as a group collaboration tool, and it shows in the SP. Shared folders, SharePoint integration, real-time sharing, etc are all inspired by working with our “rapid adopter“ corporate customers. Some of these were questioning the value of OneNote to their organizations at first, but now they are enthusiasically embracing it thanks to SP1.
Big focus on reducing annoyances. Some things are hard to work with such as the “offline files” system in Windows. It is just flaky, and bites OneNote especially hard because we do our constant-save thing. SP1 has improved on this experience tremendously due to the extreme dedication of a few people on the team to tracking down issues and working hard to get clear reproducible steps so the bug can get resolved or a workaroudn devised. Although we couldn’t do a radical overhaul of our ink user experience, the same sort of attention to detail went into tracking down obscure and annoying bugs that users would occasionally report (such as ink jumbling on a page for no apparent reason). We think we’ve managed to exorcise these problems due to a lot of hard work by a couple of people. Similarly, our already solid anti-file corruption code has been tweaked and tuned to the point where we're starting to feel like the Maytag repairman...
FEATURES FEATURES FEATURES:

Insert Document as Picture (Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Pictures)
Shared Sessions – real-time peer-to-peer multi-user sessions (we had over 70 people once)
Share With Others Pane – e-mail/SharePoint/file share/real-time
Shared Folders for collaboration with others
Much better performance with SharePoint
Password Protection of sections
Send to/Save as/Publish as Word
New stationery pane – new stationery too!
Insert Screen Clipping
Insert Outlook Meeting Details
Create Outlook Contact & Appointment
Insert Date/Time (Ctrl-Shift-F)
Change date/time on page header
Names for subpages (they take the first text on the subpage)
Resizable page tabs (drag page edge)
Video Recording & linked notes
Copy text/ink/voice notes from Pocket PC/SmartPhone
Updated default notebook with out-of-the-box useful structure and "Helpful Tips" section
Updated online and offline help with top requests (thanks for the on-line feedback!)
You can specify scope of search before running it (drop-down next to green "go" button)
Better default notebook structure
Skip slow sections & folders during search
10x perf fixes for Navigation drop-down and clicking on section & folders tabs are all faster
More note flags (25) and additional symbols
Tablet improvements

Added support for scratch-out gesture
New erasers (including point erase, like a pencil would do)
Erasing a word in a sentence and rewriting it puts the new word in the right place after converting the sentence to text
Customizable pens (color, thickness, name, etc)
You can now double-space your notes without getting a lot of separate containers
Better ink performance and responsiveness
Selection tool allows you to grab individual strokes in ink drawings

Can mark pictures as "background" for use in stationery
Improved sync support for offline files/Intellimirror
Can associate different default stationery with each section, create new pages from stationery using split new page button
Drag/drop files onto OneNote page allows link/copy-and-link/insert as picture
And loads more little tweaks and nasty things removed...

Now, on to the next version...

How do you use OneNote?

Chris_Pratley — Wed, 16 Jun 2004 09:21:00 GMT

Although we have several different ways to collect information about how OneNote is used, I am always interested to hear how people use it. And this forum provides an opportunity for a dialog that our other data collection systems don’t really provide. So, let's hear it. How do you use OneNote? How is your notebook organized? What do you do with it? Would you prefer a different type of organization, or even a different concept for OneNote besides a tabbed notebook?

As a starter, I'll go first. I use OneNote for the following activities:

Internet research - drag/drop or copy paste web page content into OneNote. I do this for personal reasons e.g. shopping, to compare prices or specs or models of something I want to buy - DVD player, car, lighting systems, window blinds, etc. Other things are just stuff I don’t want to forget - passwords, how to make my TiVo skip 30sec, how long does breast milk keep, etc. I also use it for work, where I collect snippets of things I read from email or the web to keep little scrapbooks about different topics (each scrapbook is a section). This is about 40-50% of what I use OneNote for, and mostly this is on a desktop PC (at home or work)
Blogging - I keep my blog entries (past, present, future) in a blog section of OneNote (one entry per page), where I work on them over time. I am not the type of blogger who puts two sentences up every few hours - I am more like a columnist, keeping many different story ideas percolating until one is ready, or more usually I get excited about one and finish it, as I am doing with this one right now. (about 10% of usage). This is on my desktop PC at home.
Idea scrapbook. This is a little different from web research, although I often include a snippet with the idea or thought I want to keep. I just put the idea into OneNote. This sort of thing goes into an "Inbox" section (described in a moment) since I don’t have a category/section for them when I write them. (about 10%). I do this on all machines (I have a tablet as well)
Meeting notes: my dirty secret is that I am a terribly lazy note taker - so I only write down the occasional fact or action item from meetings. For a long period last year I would do a lot of demos of pre-release OneNote (internally or externally), and if I saw a bug, I'd quickly jot the bug down (typed or written), and flag it with the note flag "bug". Later I would pull up the note flag summary for "bug", and enter these bugs into our tracking database, then check off the "bug" flag as "done" (i.e. moved to database). I also occasionally video record some meetings (e.g. focus groups) that I go to so others on my team can see what they were like and listen to the audio if they want. This is all on my tablet, although I usually use that as a laptop since I don't like my handwriting, and typing is faster. About 10-20%, changes with project "season".
Review notes other send me. I receive notes via email attachment, and also in our group we have many OneNote sections stored on file shares, in shared folders, and SharePoint doc libraries. Other people on the team are periodically adding research, thoughts, etc to these sections, which include OneNote usage scenarios, feature design thoughts, usage data, etc. (about 20%). This is on my desktop.

So overall, I use OneNote on my desktop about 80-90% of the time, and on my tablet 10-20%. Because I am lazy, I also rely heavily on others who use OneNote and send me notes from meetings/brainstorming sessions I attend (or did not attend)

My notebook looks basically like this:

Inbox (section where most stuff goes when I first write it, to be categorized within a week or too when I get around to it)

Side notes (section where my side notes go - to be categorized within a week or too when I get around to it)

Work (folder)

Word (folder)

Status meeting (section for recurring meeting notes)

Analysts (section for notes on what industry analysts have said about Word)

Word archive (folder with old sections from Word2003 project)

Publisher (folder holding sections related to the Publisher team)

etc

OneNote (folder holding sections related to the OneNote team)

Scenarios (shared folder on a server holding many sections authored by team members collaborating on defining user scenarios)

SQM data (shared folder holding sections that contain research from the service quality monitor/customer experience improvement program, etc

RAP (shared folder holding many sections relating to the customers in our rapid adoption program, and what issues they are facing)

OneNote ideas (section with random ideas for OneNote features that I've had)

Analysts (section for notes on what industry analysts have said about OneNote)

Etc.

OneNote Archive (folder that holds old sections from the first release or others sections that I don’t need to see these days)

Text Services (folder)

etc

People (section with pages that hold things I need to raise with my direct reports or others when I meet with them)

Etc.

Personal (folder)

Blog (section for past and future blog entries)

House (section to hold shopping research, punch list for remodel, etc.)

Seiko (shared section via my personal web site with my wife's two machines, work and home, and my three machines - two work, one home)

Etc.

Notes emailed to Me (folder that OneNote creates to hold random stuff I get emailed)

Other notes I've Seen (folder OneNote creates to hold random stuff I open off of file shares, etc)

Stuff I don't like about my organization and the experience of using it:

My inbox section keeps filling up with scraps of info that have no category, but it seems lame to clean it out and put them in a "random facts" section, so it just grows and grows.
I can't easily see more than one page at a time - sort of like if I had to have all the papers on my desk in a pile at all times even when I was using them (FYI, although I am not a hard-core "paperless" guy, I actually have NO paper on my desk - I never print stuff and I throw out anything I get on paper because I never refer to it later- too hard/I'm too lazy to organize for retrieval)
I can’t have items show up in two places at once without duplicating them.
Can't link between items.

Hmm, I could go on but I want to hear what you folks have to say.