Daniel Escapa's OneNote Blog

Mike Tholfsen joins the blogsphere with a OneNote & Education blog

Looks like Mike, the OneNote Test Manager, and of blog round-up fame has started his own blog.  You can see it here: OneNote and Education.  This is his description of the site:

A blog to have a dialog about OneNote and education, including sharing ideas, resources, and building community with teachers, students and faculty.

Mike has been working with many customers seeing how OneNote can be used for training, for corporate learning and in schools.  He has gotten many contacts and his blog will be focusing on these topics.  I have added it to Google Reader and I look forward to future posts of his!  Welcome Mike!

InstantNavigator for OneNote

Artem Larin sent me a note over the weekend announcing his new OneNote addin called InstantNavigator this is what Artmen says about it:

InstantNavigator is an add-in for Microsoft OneNote that instantly brings you to the notes you want, as just you are typing their titles.
Scenario:

1. Click the "Go" tool button
2. Type any part of a note title you wish to go to
3. As you type, the list is being updated with matched elements
4. Choose desired note using the UP/DOWN cursor keys
5. Press ENTER

Don't think WHERE is the note you want to go to, just think WHICH is the note.

You can check it out yourself here: http://i-navigator.hut2.ru/.  Looks like the beta is available right now and I hope that more work continues on the project!  Thanks for the note Artem!

What do you all think of this?

Blog round-up for April/May 2008

Wow it is amazing how many people are talking about OneNote, thanks for the comments/suggestions/feedback/etc.  Thanks Mike!

Love and Affection

• "Take the Office creators, especially the OneNote team, give them a gigantic raise and have them train others at MS on how to do things really right, and do it right almost the first time out the door."
• "I started making full use of One Note. I find it to be one of the most usefully applications I have ever used. "
• It’s OneNote 2007. Dude, that’s an awesome piece of software on the earth. It makes Windows distinguish from others indeed, at least for me. That’s only a few programs that are not cross-platform I use but now I can’t live without it.
• How the heck did I survive without OneNote up until now? It is amazing!
• my OneNote program, which I think has to be the greatest invention ever. When I do sit down to write, I usually put on the soundtrack I’ve made for the book. And yes, at first it’s only a few songs over and over again, LOL.
• If you don't know I am a HUGE OneNote fan and have converted countless people from using Notepad, Notepad2, Word, paper, you name
• I came across Microsoft OneNote and it’s a pretty slick product. Has a lot of the features of a typical word processor but really helps to keep things organized, in the form of notebooks and pages.
• The machine comes with Microsoft’s OneNote, it makes the tablet ROCK!
• I have to say that OneNote is an awesome program and that the LE1600 is a wonderful tool for lecturing on math.  The kids love it, I love it.  Frankly, it’s awesome.  I will go into detail later.  But it’s very easy to use and very intuitive–almost organic.  I really can’t say enough good about it.
• Product Review - Microsoft OneNote 2007 - Good for GTD Application
• PS  I love OneNote, I have never loved any software the way that I love this thing
• OneNote: a hidden Microsoft Office gem: Last week I discovered Microsoft OneNote 2007, and I am (honestly) impressed. Actually, the first time I ever heard of OneNote was when I read the FAQ of InkSeine.

Don't Dig MS, But Dig OneNote

• You may become quite attached to a Windows application or two and decide that Apple doesn't have a comparable equivalent. Apple is well known for creating user-friendly applications, but for Keanini, Microsoft has a lead with at least one program: OneNote

Personas and Scenarios

Education

• Here’s my list of five tools and techniques that I foresee going the way of the slide rule (in order of obsolescence):  School Supplies: Tools like OneNote mean no more finger-pinching binders, colored tab dividers, tattered notebooks, or missing pens, pencils, or highlighters. If it’s digital, it goes into the electronic organizer.
• OneNote Cross Border Curriculum Sharing Project - It is the intention of the project for 1 school in Northern Ireland and 1 school in the Republic of Ireland to deliver the same curriculum content at the same time to the same age group of students. One class in each school will deliver the coursework using Microsoft OneNote on a mix of laptops and UMPCs.
• "Microsoft’s School’s Technology Innovation Centre Manager Tom Jackson added, ”When I was considering what school I wanted to approach to participate in this Microsoft OneNote project.  The feedback from teachers and students (at Wallace School) alike shows that Microsoft OneNote is a powerful and important learning tool.”"
• Do I think we will ever truly be paperless? Probably not, but our Tablet students will utilize OneNote and several electronic texts. They will have one small three-ring binder for any/all resources that are not digitized.
• I read most of my class materials in PDF. I use Microsoft OneNote to record my thoughts while reading, my thoughts from class. I have folders on my desktop for each of my courses and each of my projects. My academic life essentially happens on this screen.
• I’ve been meaning to write my thoughts on OneNote for a few months now. I’ve been using OneNote to keep myself organized through a hectic semester at UMass Lowell, and it has been a God-send... OneNote’s use of notebooks, subjects and pages is very effective because we have all used the paper forms of these instruments.
• As the course progresses I realize that there are two half of the semesters are generally different. So in the beginning I start off with no section groups, and then midway I create a section group to classify the different halves of the semester.
• Microsoft Office 2007, which is now available for faculty and staff, comes with a new program called OneNote. OneNote is a versatile note taking program that integrates with other office programs. While it is most often associated with Tablet PCs, it can also be used on a regular pc. However, you will not be able to use the inking features without a tablet.
• All High School students are given the same tools whether they are at home or school, allowing them to work anywhere.  Less paper needed now that we have switched to a tablet program, taking advantage of Microsoft OneNote and digital submissions.
• "History teacher Neil Armstrong went on, “Our AS History students have had the opportunity to use the latest Ultra Mobile Personal Computers (UMPC), supplied by Intel and Samsung, to facilitate their learning through the Microsoft OneNote Program"

Productivity

• "One thing that significantly enhances the usability and experience of the X60 is OneNote 07.  This program is a godsend for people in meetings.  "
• There used to be a problem here at work. We didn't managed to share documents properly. We tried lots of methods, till we finally checked OneNote. You can easily tag information, and search for this quickly, and can even insert printouts into notebooks.
• Five Applications That Will Make Your Business Plan More Useful: Microsoft OneNote
• MultiTaskingMama: "I keep mentioning how I use Microsoft OneNote to people, and they keep asking about it. I use this program for personal, business and school. I have recipes from blogs, and the blogs noted. Any sewing ideas or blog ideas have their own little spot in my notebooks.

Healthcare

• The abletFactory is pleased to announce the release of its latest product, OneNote2007 EMR Suite.  Benefits:Streamline patient visit, Better patient communication, Increase the accuracy of documentation, Improves medication management, Enhance patient care, Reduce transcription costs, Reduces chart pulls, Reduce pharmacy callbacks

Car Racing

• OneNote is a true "killer application", especially for driving enthusiasts. Look over my prior Microsoft blog postings, or especially at this one where OneNote and a TabletPC is used to record track tips right on a map of the track.

Church

• New King James Version for OneNote 2007 Available: Each book in the Bible is a separate OneNote section, with each chapter in the book belonging to a page within that section. Using the built-in functionality of OneNote 2007, you can insert your own ink notes,view the Bible text

Room for Improvement

• I would like to request three features for future releases of OneNote:
  • It would help to be able to select and copy specific text within an image rather than being forced to copy all of the text on a page.
  • The program badly needs a find/replace function;
  • Along the same lines, a batch-hyperlinking command would be very useful to enable the user to associate a specific URL with each instance of (or selected instances of) a search term without having to manually find each term and hyperlink it; and

• Why not just give it the same view/sort functionality that's in Outlook 2007? that works reasonably well and would be a great help in OneNote.
• sharing unintuitive and requires firewall setting adjustments.  268Mb download footprint
• When I copy the information it all goes into one cell, like a nested table within a cell, instead of inserting three new rows as part of the same table with the data from above.  Does anyone know how to accomplish what should be a simple task?

Misc

Snap for Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 (JeffCar): The Microsoft Dynamics Snap for Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 integrates the Microsoft Dynamics CRM system with the note-taking capabilities of OneNote 2007. In today’s business world, collecting customer information is essential to building customer relationships and a sales pipeline. CRM2OneNote provides sales representatives with a streamlined process for capturing, storing, and finding relevant customer notes which can contain images, audio recordings, embedded files, and other rich information.

Office Communicator 2007 + OneNote 2007

One of my favourite programs is Office Communicator which I use at work all of the time and I wanted to blog about how Communicator will allow you to quickly take notes in OneNote.  Say you get a phone call from someone and you need to write a note down (I do this quite often) you can just click a big button in OC and it will create a new meeting notes page in OneNote for you, see here:

I worked with Marc Boyer on the Communicator team to make this happen and you can read about it more here:  It’s History and this is what Marc has to say about it:

OneNote joins the party: Communicator and your phone have never been closer; in fact, for some, they are one and the same. Since no phone is ever far from a notepad, we integrated Communicator with Microsoft Office OneNote. If you have OneNote installed on your computer, you can launch it from any conversation; the conversation context will be automatically stamped into the note page, and the notes you take will be linked to the conversation. If you later restart this conversation, click the OneNote button to find your notes, which you can review or update. Similarly, if you open a previous conversation from the Conversation History folder in Outlook, click the OneNote button in the toolbar to open the notes for this conversation. 

I just wanted to point this out to those people who are using Communicator with OneNote.  Great stuff!

Mac Messenger 7.0

I just wanted to blog about another new product announcement:

Mac Messenger 7.0.  I have been beta testing this and I love it, so congrats to the team!  I use it with Office Communicator at work a bunch, I really love that application and it works with my phone and I have the full unified communications dream (my phone and IM are all together and my phone is voip, you can call my desk and it goes to my desk & the mobile and more, really I love it).  So now with Mac Messenger I can use my Mac to connect with my work colleagues and I can call them from my Mac and I can receive calls to on my Mac.  There is something pretty cool about being at home on my wifi on my Mac and if someone calls my desk phone I can answer it at home.

Mac Messenger also works for Live Messenger folks as well, both corporate and personal all in one app.  Nice job Mac Messenger team!

Popfly Game Creator

I saw this demo a few weeks ago and I was eagerly awaiting the release date so I could blog about it.  Today the Popfly team released the Popfly Game Creator.  I really like the interface, the slickness of the UI and the fact that it works with Silverlight (so I can use it on my Mac at home).  Check out the quick tutorial video:

Nice job Popfly team!

OneNote doesn’t open a shared notebook on SharePoint on Windows Server 2008

I just saw this message on our internal bug reporting listserv and I wanted to share.  The user was having trouble opening a notebook on SharePoint, the user was getting an error saying “OneNote cannot open the specified location”.

The reason for the error was because the WebClient service is not enabled; which OneNote needs enabled for file-locks. Vista Server 2008 does not have this service enabled by default and if you are running Windows Server 2008 (2k8) you might have this problem.  To enable the service, go to Control Panel => Administrative tools => Services => WebClient and click Start (and probably make it automatic).

A workaround for no x64 SendToOneNote Print Driver

I just got this from Bruce on the OneNote Test team:

It's not optimal, but it does work. I use it here at Microsoft on my Vista x64 machine.

1. Install one of the many converter programs that will allow you to output images files when you “Print”. For example, I’ve played with http://www.print-driver.com/howto/msn_pdf_to_jpg.html 
2. Open your file in the native application (ie Adobe Reader, PowerPoint, etc)
3. Print to the new printer, outputting to TIFF (multipage color)(the defaults for the example program above work just fine)
4. Boot OneNote
5. Insert | Picture and choose the TIFF image file

Done! You can now take notes over your inserted images. I should note that we won’t OCR the images (it uses the same print driver that doesn’t install under x64), so you won’t be able to search for words in the images or copy–and-paste their content. You will be able to take notes over them, view them, and so on.

Bruce

As David wrote we are aware of this problem and there will be no fix for OneNote 2007 and we plan to address this in the next version of OneNote.  I just wanted to share this with everyone!

Another OneNote blogger: Jeff Cardon's OneNote Tips & Tricks

Looks like Jeff Cardon is jumping into the fray with his own blog: OneNote Tips & Tricks.  As he writes on his site:

My name is Jeff Cardon. I'm a member of the Microsoft OneNote team and I'd like to share some of the tips and tricks that are available in this fantastic product. This blog is intended to showcase the simple, and sometimes not completely obvious, features that make it such a useful software application. I hope you enjoy it.

Jeff has been a Tester on OneNote since the beginning so he will be able to share some great tips to everyone in the community.  Some of you might recall Jeff's name as the author of many powertoys: OneNote Printout Manager, OneNote 2007 Word Count and others.

I like his first post: Introduction to OneNote Tips (plus Screen Clipping tip), has a good pointer about the screen clipping defaults.  This is something I setup on any new install of OneNote and it works great.  This is a screenshot showing what he is talking about:

I have already added this to Google Reader and I will look forward to new posts of his; welcome to the blogsphere Jeff!

Update @ 2008-04-29: Looked like Jeff changed his blog to a new location: http://blogs.msdn.com/onenotetips/

Microsoft Office Labs

Many of you who know about OneNote probably read Chris Pratley's blog from time to time as he used to work on the team and blog about OneNote.  Well I wanted to point out something that Chris has been working on: Microsoft Office Labs.  What is Office Labs?  Well from their site:

"Welcome to Microsoft Office Labs." It's great to be able to say that. For quite some time the Office Labs team has been exploring ideas internally at Microsoft. Now we'd like to show you some of our ideas and ask you to give them a whirl.

We're a group of designers and developers that collect ideas from all over Microsoft (but mostly from Office and other products related to 'getting stuff done' - what we call 'productivity'). We build working prototypes of the most promising of these ideas to see if they work as well as we hope they might.

They do concept testing and prototyping of new ideas.  Thankfully they will be releasing some of the ideas that they had so that everyone can check them out.  A couple of cool ones include: Search Commands (used to be called Scout) which allows you to search through the available commands in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.  Also Community Clips which will be an interesting way for people in the community to share tips, I hope to use this site more once I have more time to blog tips and tricks.  In any event check out Office Labs and try out the prototypes!

OneNote Dell XT Tablet fix

I heard reports that if you had the new Dell XT Tablet some things in OneNote were not clickable and you were probably having a hard time using OneNote.  Whenever you tried to click on something it would end up being a drag action.  Well some Devs on the team took a new Dell XT Tablet and debugged it and found out what was going on.  The problem is with the NTrig applet which is installed by Dell  and during the first couple logons, it sets a bunch of default registry values which causes problems.  They have posted a way to fix this, but it modifies the system registry so please take caution before messing with the registry.

1. Click Start, Run, type regedit, and click ok (acknowledge the Vista UAC prompt if it comes up).
2. In the registry editor, navigate to "Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop"
3. Locate the DragHeight and DragWidth values in the right hand pane
4. Select the DragHeight value, click the Edit menu, and select Modify (you can double click as well to modify)
5. In the Value Data field, type 4 and click ok. IMPORTANT! You need to do this step even if the registry editor already shows the value as 4!
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 with the DragWidth field.
7. Logoff or reboot your computer.

If these steps don’t work for you please let us know in the comments and we will get in touch with you (or just email).  Also note that with time a new user is created on the system this tool will run again and you will have to repeat these steps for that profile.  We I understand we (Microsoft, not OneNote) is in touch with Dell regarding this issue.

Thanks a bunch Jerry, Jason & Ilya…and I hope this works for everyone else out there!  Enjoy the nice new Tablets :)

March 2008 blog round-up

Mike sends this out and I thought I would post it here, does anyone like these posts?  I think this one might be my last blog round-up posting unless you all want me to continue posting them, just let me know in the comments.

• yes, I have sold my soul to Bill Gates -- but OneNote is really fantastic
• Even people who hate Office love OneNote. In fact, the word love kept reappearing in the recommendations for this hard-to-describe program.
• Just use OneNote.  Use it, Love it.
• OneNote Add good to your life: If you have a OneNote and you want to collaborate with more professionals then you have to connect.
• A few weeks ago Matt Putnam sent me some notes in a Microsoft OneNote 2007 file and I've been hooked ever since.
• A friend told me I should try out Microsoft OneNote 2007 - I think his exact words were, “Dude, I don’t know how I lived without it!”
• I love OneNote.   When I first started working for Tim he asked me to sign up with a lot of things online, and start using different programs that I'd never even heard of before. One of those programs was 'OneNote'.
• Its Friday morning and I am feeling peppy. Haven't slept too long. Up late fooling around with my new toy - Microsoft OneNote. Incredible piece of software, a story of its own.
• OneNote is one of the best pieces of software available for use with Windows. No other software on any platform can match what OneNote can do.
• AMAZING!! OneNote 2007. A Great Tool!
• Microsoft Office OneNote is not a one-trick pony. True, Microsoft has had its share of software “misses,” so it is easy to overlook the useful software that Microsoft does produce. OneNote 2007 is definitely one such gem amongst the chaff, and it is quietly gaining a place in many lawyers’ software toolboxes.
• Another must-have for me is OneNote. This is a relatively new Microsoft application, which they haven’t yet ported to the Mac. I kept a ton of information in OneNote on the PC, and I want that information available on the Mac.
• I love Microsoft OneNote 2007! I never thought I’d express actually express love for Microsoft product, but then here I am raving about One Note like it saved my life! I love that program, If you can get Microsoft office, check it out
• I don’t like Microsoft much, but I have to say OneNote is a wonderful product, its flexibility is remarkable as a note taking tool for I am still using it…
• Having switched to a Mac, my biggest loss has been OneNote.  I have found nothing for the Mac that is as intuitive, as powerful, and as easy to use as OneNote.  Microsoft so rarely hits a home run, but that little note-taking application designed for tablets was great for class notes.
• And for the Mac followers who are cringing at this picture of a Microsoft program... please hear me out. I complain a lot about Microsoft's products. This is the first one that I have found to be absolutely perfect for what I need it to do.
• "I seriously seriously seriously gave thought to and deeply investigated converting to a Mac. I really wanted to switch, but it doesn't support two of my "I've gotta have 'em" applications... OneNote and MindManager. Can't break the addiction.
• The amazing thing about Office OneNote is that you can blog stuff written directly in OneNote into any blog on Blogger... If this isn't an incentive to blog more frequently, I don't know what is
• Blog Toolbox - MS OneNote: Being an  avid blog researcher, who takes copious notes, as well  being self-employed with lots of different  projects on the go, I need to be organised. Having  tried various methods for note taking that were lacking in some way, I am now a  firm fan of Microsoft OneNote.   I originally used it for my blogging research notes but, having got to know the  program better, I now keep all sorts of details and information in there.
• The Great Potential of Microsoft OneNote 2007: The more I learn about this tool, the more potential use I see for CEI team collaborations as well as for CRM projects.
• A goals list which is viewed when I Review OneNote Goals (W, M, Q). W=Weekly, M=Monthly and Q=Quarterly in case you were wondering. OneNote is a Microsoft product that is really cool! Click the link to check it out
• In class yesterday I saw one of my classmate's using Microsoft's OneNote. It was pretty impressive: he had a nice set of tabs for each of our modules and each tab linked to different pages with all the info for assignments, seminar times etc.

Do you miss tab in OneNote?

One of my favourite features in OneNote 2007 is that when you hit tab it auto inserts a table for you, I have found this to be the best way to start making tables.  I have only once wanted to enter an old fashion tab in OneNote and I did it by copying and pasting from Notebook/Windows Run dialog.  Anyhow it looks like Olya Veselova, OneNote PM, has blogged something new: Workaround for "turning off" the TAB key creating a table instead of a regular TAB in OneNote.  Here is her tip:

Create an Auto-correct rule that turns your chosen character sequence (e.g. "\t") into a regular TAB:

1. Open Notepad and type one TAB. Select it and copy it.
2. Go to OneNote and click Tools > Auto-correct Options...
3. In the dialog, put your desired sequence of characters (e.g. \t, or \tab, or TAB, or <t>, or whatever you like) into the "Replace:" field.
4. Paste the TAB that you copied from Notepad into the "With:" filed. Click Add.

Now, any \t followed by a SPACE will be replaced by a regular TAB.

Check out the full post here: Workaround for "turning off" the TAB key creating a table instead of a regular TAB in OneNote. Nice post Olya!

OneNote Side-by-Side

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clip to OneNote with Firefox 3

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

Install Clip to OneNote Extension In Firefox 3 and OneNote 2007

This is great Amit, thanks for sharing!