For the past few months, the Office Labs group at Microsoft has been hard at work, prototyping a number of community-oriented projects. As of today, these projects are no longer shrouded in mystery. Head on over to the Office Labs site to check out what’s available!
Office Labs is headed by Chris Pratley, who is widely known as the father of OneNote. Chris describes his new assignment as “a group of designers and developers that collect ideas from all over Microsoft and build working prototypes of the most promising of these ideas to see if they work as well as we hope they might.”
To be clear, Office Labs isn’t a showcase of alpha or beta products or services. Instead, it’s a collection of current and ongoing experiments. “Concept testing is what this site is all about,” says Chris in his welcome post, which you can read here.
At the heart of these tests and experiments is the community of Microsoft Office customers, who are encouraged to participate and share ongoing insight and feedback with each other. There’s much to check out, but OneNote users may find the following two Office Labs projects of particular interest:
Community Clips
Find "how-to" videos about Microsoft Office products, made by people like you. You can download a free screen recording program to create and share your own demos and tutorials with other people in the community. The videos you share on the Community Clips site can help others learn and master their favorite Office programs and features (think YouTube for Office Help). To view the current catalog of clips and to download the free desktop recorder, visit the Office Labs home page and then follow the links.
InkSeine
If you happen to be using OneNote 2007 on a Tablet PC, check out how InkSeine tailors the Tablet PC interface to pen input and uniquely combines inking with searching. The tool fades into the background so that you can focus on capturing your ideas, sketches, and creative thoughts. To see how InkSeine complements OneNote on Tablet PCs, visit the Office Labs home page and then follow the links to the free download.
Projects on Office Labs will be updated and supplemented over time, as additional Microsoft team projects and experiments are deemed ready for their close-ups. Be sure to bookmark the Office Labs site, create an account, subscribe to the blog, and share your honest opinions and ideas with the creators and with the other participants of the Office Labs community.
For a bit of OneNote nostalgia, head on over to Chris Pratley’s OneNote blog, which debuted back in January of 2004 and still draws a large following despite Chris’ new focus. Chris (and OneNote) are also prominently featured in this news story on c|net today.
To some of you seasoned road warriors, this will be old news. Alas, I meet people each and every week who are blissfully unaware of a convenient option to take their Office documents and files on the road with them — without lugging around a laptop PC. If, like some of my co-workers and friends, you are still busy copying files onto USB drives to take work home, to catch up on reading specs and documents, and to fill out spreadsheets and rehearse PowerPoint presentations, consider the smartphone option.
As a member of the OneNote team, I was well aware of OneNote Mobile since it was released a few months ago. But I didn't own a smartphone and couldn’t really experience it for myself. I also hadn't looked at the other small-screen Office counterparts since I owned a first-generation Pocket PC some years ago. Happily, that’s all changed. In my April column on our Office Hours Web site, I’m documenting my own recent (re-)discovery of the Office Mobile programs in hopes of introducing more people to this wonderful option.
In the OneNote Mobile-specific section of the April column, I’ve linked to the “OneNote Mobile quick start guide” on Office Online for additional information. This guide was written prior to the advent of Windows Vista and Windows Mobile 6, and I've recently received lots of feedback from our site visitors asking for an updated version of the guide that addresses this newer configuration. I’m happy to announce that I’ll be publishing such an update within the next week or so, at which point I’ll change the link in the Office Hours column and I’ll announce the new guide here as well. I’d like to point out that this is another great example of how valuable your continued feedback about our documentation really is. It may not always seem like it, but the star ratings and comments that you leave for articles and other publications on Office Online don’t go into a black hole. They’re read by writers and editors like me, and we do our best to prioritize needs for updated and supplemental information in the online Help for our Office programs based on such feedback. So, if our articles, training courses, and video demos don’t quite hit the mark now and then, please tell us what you’d like to see. And, of course, whenever we’ve done our job well, positive feedback is always appreciated, too. ;-)
Below are the links to my current (and previous) column, as well as the other published Office Hours columns:
Office Hours: Use Office 2007 on your mobile phone (my April 2008 column)
Office Hours: How OneNote made friends in a corner office (my June 2007 column)
Office Hours (the official Web site and the full catalog of available columns)
PS I’ve just returned from vacation, so if you’ve recently written me and are waiting to hear back, please be patient while I catch up on messages. As always, thank you kindly for your interest in OneNote and in my blog — it’s always good to hear from our customers and my readers!
The Office Online training team has just published Get to know OneNote 2007, a new training course that beginning users can take to learn OneNote 2007 and then test their skills. The training takes about 30-40 minutes to complete and it includes optional audio narration to accompany the step-by-step screens.
If you're still new to OneNote 2007, this is a great way to take a tour of the program, learn the basics, get some hands-on experience, and review what you’ve learned. After you have completed the training, be sure to check out our video demos that introduce you to a variety of other OneNote features and techniques.
As always, please be sure to leave feedback about our Office Online resources (you can leave feedback about this particular training course on its very last page). Direct feedback from folks like you is the most effective way to help us measure what’s useful to you and what isn’t. We review your feedback on a regular basis, so we can focus on creating more of the types of content that you most want.
The OneNote 2007 Help & How-to home page on Office Online received a much-needed facelift this week, based in part on numerous customer comments that we’ve received over the past few months. With these interface improvements in place, I hope you’ll find our great library of free OneNote articles, demos, training, templates, and other content to be more accessible than ever. A big thanks goes out to our site manager, Michelle Valeriano, for making these changes possible.
I’ve put together a quick animation to highlight the main areas of interest when you first arrive on the page.
(Depending on your connection, you may have to wait a few moments for the animation below to load and start.)
If you bookmark the OneNote 2007-specific “Help & How-to” home page, the Search box near the top of the page will default to OneNote 2007 content each time you open the page. You can also click the arrow next to the Search button and modify the search scope. Searching for OneNote content on this page will yield the best results (compared to searching for OneNote content from the Office Online home page, for example).
The “Top Articles” spotlight now has a tabbed interface. Instead of featuring only 3-4 featured articles, we can now draw your attention to more up-to-date and relevant content. Click through the tabs each time you visit the site to see what’s new.
The “Table of Contents” box for OneNote Help is now available near the top of the page. You no longer have to scroll to the end of the page to browse the categories. This is the most up-to-date collection of categorized articles in the OneNote 2007 Help system. You can also access this content from within OneNote 2007 when you press the F1 key while OneNote is running. You have to allow OneNote Help to connect to Office Online in order to see the same up-to-date content on the Web site. (If you’re disconnected from the Internet, you’ll see fewer categories and articles.)
Office Online has tons of free self-help resources for Office 2007 users, but some customers told us that they occasionally prefer to speak with a Support Technician to help them troubleshoot a particular issue. You’ll no longer have to comb through the entire Microsoft Web site to try and find these pages. Now you can click the prominent product support link in the center of the page to find out how to get more help with any Office product.
OneNote newsgroups and other community content are now featured in the “Community” module, which has been placed next to the collection of links to OneNote video demos, training, Webcasts, and similar content. Some of these links will be updated to cycle through our offerings, whereas others will remain as permanent shortcuts for your convenience.
Seasonally themed Office 2007 content is featured near the top right of the page (for example, this month’s theme is personal finance). Below that, we’ve retained the popular “Featured OneNote Template” box where we showcase useful templates that you might not have seen before. Click the other links in this box to jump to the complete catalog of free OneNote templates (notebooks, sections, and pages).
Our “Quick Links” and RSS feeds round out the new page design, so be sure to have a look around to see what’s available!
Site design on Office Online is an ongoing mission. If you have feedback about Office Online as a whole (or about a specific product subsite like the OneNote Help & How-to home page), please be sure to take the time and share your thoughts with us. We appreciate kudos when we get it right, but we also want to hear your ideas for making the site better and easier to use. You can post your feedback in a comment on my blog, drop me a line, or use the official Office Online Comments form.
Several other product sites on Office Online have undergone similar improvements. If you're using other Office 2007 programs besides OneNote, be sure to check out their new sites as well. To visit any Office program’s Help site, click here, and then select your product in the Browse Help and How-to by Product list.
Not all that long ago, I was one of those people who clung to their trusty Filofax (and later a Day-Timer) to keep their daily work life organized. It worked well enough, but the limitations of paper were pretty evident even back then. You could move pages around, but not ink. Keeping one’s work and personal life separate (but still in one place) was difficult if not outright impossible. The more notes you took, the more your binder began to resemble George Costanza’s wallet. Once you committed to a categorization system, you were pretty much stuck with it. Automatic backups? Forget it. And if you ever spilled a drink on important pages or forgot the whole binder at the coffee shop, you could probably kiss all that information goodbye.
The cool thing about OneNote, of course, is that it solves these problems. Still, even when the advantages of a paperless personal notebook are clear, some people remain skittish about trying out a program like OneNote. When you first talk to them, few offer specific reasons for their reluctance. A lot has to do with preconceived notions and assumptions. To be fair, sorting through marketing hype has become harder and harder for us ordinary consumers. Everything is supposedly “better” and “more powerful” than everything that came before. I know I’ve become tone-deaf to the same old promises and claims for every product under the sun. But why resist something so easy to use — something with such obvious benefits? After some prodding, some folks would admit that they just weren't sure how to take notes the “right” way. I'm sure we’ve all had flashbacks to our grade school days at one time or another, when our own version of Miss Thistlebottom would impress upon our young minds the dos and don’ts of the English language and the rest of our schoolwork. But language evolves over the years, as do the tools we use to get our work done.
The best thing about OneNote is that it adapts to your own style — whatever it may be. There is simply no right or wrong way to use OneNote. If you’re so inclined, you can follow every last rule you learned in school about note-taking and research. Or you can scribble thoughts and idea on the pages the same way you would on a cocktail napkin in a bar while on a business trip. Still, this flexibility has made it difficult for some folks to get started with the program. One thing that everyone agrees on is that OneNote is quite different from the other Office programs. We purposely don’t give you a flashing cursor that prompts you for input, nor do we provide a filled-in template of dummy text. We also don’t force you to learn a specific note-taking system, and we don’t constrain your ideas and thoughts within repetitive lines of text or the rectangles of a spreadsheet grid. The canvas is yours to fill however you please.
Here at Microsoft, the internal adoption of OneNote has skyrocketed since our little product’s humble beginnings. High visibility and public endorsements by some of Microsoft’s top brass have certainly helped to tell the world about the benefits of OneNote. But it’s really the word-of-mouth from friends, family members, and trusted co-workers that have propelled OneNote’s success. While the computer industry is still looking around for that elusive, next-generation “killer app,” some of us have already found it.
It’s easy and safe to stick with what you know. A lot of people don’t like change, even when they can clearly see that a new way of doing things would save them time. I’ve been an early adopter of many products and technologies over the years, but even I have my limits. I don’t purchase things just because they're new, unless they offer some benefit or improvement over the status quo. If you’ve heard about OneNote and you have a hunch that it might make your life easier, try it out for yourself. You can do this for free by downloading a fully-functioning trial version. If you’re not quite sure how to get started, browse through some of the older posts in this blog or use the links to the free OneNote video demos and templates that I’ve provided in the left margin. If you get stuck, drop me a line and I’ll do my best to point you to guides that will help you get up to speed.
Dealing with the frenzy that is all around us during the holiday season can be a challenge for anyone. Regardless of our diverse, individual backgrounds and beliefs, chances are that most of us have some amount of holiday shopping to do. Even if gift-giving isn’t on your radar, holiday gatherings with family and friends will likely require planning of some sort — whether it’s for a dinner party or a trip back home to visit the family.
If you’re frantically scribbling lists on Post-It® notes everywhere you go — stop! Put the pen down and take a quick look at the following tips. I’ve provided some ideas for making sense of all of your holiday-themed tasks, including gift-giving, event planning, and trip planning.
A notebook for all seasons
The original version of OneNote came with only one notebook, so you had to rely on the sections within to keep information separate and grouped by project, event, or subject. Although you can create as many sections and pages within a notebook as you want, scrolling through dozens or hundreds of them can quickly became tedious.
OneNote 2007 has the ability to create multiple notebooks, so you can better manage all of the information that you gather and collect. Once you’ve created a notebook dedicated to a specific subject, project, or seasonal event, you can then use notebook sections to further categorize the information within that notebook.
Keeping multiple notebooks has a few hidden benefits. You can use a completely different way of organizing specific notes without messing up your usual note-taking system in your main notebook. Also, when searching notes, you can specify which notebook OneNote should search for information, which can be considerably faster than searching everything all at once. And, in the case of seasonal notes, you can easily pick up where you left off in the previous year.
Try it! To start your own holiday planning with OneNote, create a new notebook.
- In OneNote 2007, click File
New Notebook.
- In the Name field, type “Holiday 2007” and then click Next.
- Under Who will use this notebook?, click I will use it on this computer, and then click Next.
- On the next screen, click Create.
OneNote creates the new notebook and then places a shortcut to it on the Navigation Bar.
Creating separate notebooks isn’t just useful around the holidays. Use them to collect, organize, and refer to information during other seasonal events (for example, at tax time or during a summer vacation). You can click and drag your open notebooks to position them anywhere on the Navigation Bar. When you’re done with a notebook, you can right-click it and close it. And don’t worry: Notebooks aren’t deleted when you close them; you can re-open them again at any time.
Use sections and pages to organize your notebook
Running out of time to plan and shop? Put things in order quickly by using sections for categories and pages for people:
You can right-click section tabs to create additional sections, rename them, change their color, and more. You can also click and drag section and page tabs to put them in any order you want. If you’re planning an event (for example, a holiday dinner party), you can use a similar approach to keep track of dietary preferences and seating arrangements for every person on your guest list. For larger, catered events, you can even add sketches or drawings of the venue and of the individual tables.
Bring everyone’s wish lists into your notebook
Once your holiday notebook is set up with the names of your family members and friends, you can import each person’s wish list in any of the following ways:
Copy and paste There’s nothing wrong with a low-tech approach if it does the trick! If you received someone’s short-and-sweet wish list in a plain e-mail message, simply copy and paste the text into OneNote.
Send to OneNote If you’re using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 as your e-mail program, getting information into OneNote is even easier: Right-click a message in your Inbox, and then click Send to OneNote on the shortcut menu. Alternately, you can open the message, and then click Send to OneNote on the Ribbon toolbar.
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Send to OneNote menu command
(right-click a message in your Outlook Inbox) |
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Send to OneNote button
(open a message from your Outlook Inbox) |
Print to OneNote OneNote 2007 comes with a special print driver which, instead of printing items to an actual printer, lets you “print” documents and other files directly to OneNote’s electronic pages. For example, if your friends’ and family’s wish lists arrived in Microsoft Word documents, open the file(s) in Word and click the Print command. In the Print dialog box, select Send to OneNote 2007 as the printer’s Name (as shown below).
Scanned images Importing scans of paper notes and drawings is useful when you want to keep everything together in OneNote. If you own a scanner and you’ve received a handwritten wish list that you want to preserve in its original format (for example, a child’s handwritten note to Santa or the scribbles on a cocktail napkin), consider scanning it right into OneNote. Click Insert Pictures From Scanner or Camera. Next, follow the steps in the wizard to complete the scan.
Audio Clips Did someone leave you their wish list in a voicemail message? Not a problem! In OneNote, click Insert Audio Recording. Point your computer’s microphone at your phone and record the message to OneNote. Click the Stop button in OneNote when you’re done. If you want spoken words in audio clips to be included in your notebook searches like typed text, you can turn on Audio Search. Click Tools Options Audio and Video. Under Audio Search, click the Enable searching audio and video recordings for words checkbox.
Research and compare items, prices, and locations
Looking to buy gift items, researching the availability of holiday venues, or planning a trip? Until it’s time to buy, all you need is OneNote, your Web browser, and your favorite armchair!
Insert hyperlinks The easiest way to find Web pages with important information again is to paste their Web address (also called URL) into a list. Hyperlinks pasted into OneNote are automatically clickable, so you can easily refer back to the pages you’ve visited. You can add a description to any link by typing text next to it. Or, you can change the link text to something more meaningful. Right-clicking a pasted hyperlink, and then click Edit Hyperlink on the shortcut menu. In the Hyperlink dialog box, type anything you want into the Text to Display box (leave the Address box alone), and then click OK.
Send to OneNote If you’re using Windows Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP or Windows Vista, you can use the handy Send to OneNote feature. Bring up any Web page that holds information that you want to save for later (for example, a side-by-side comparison of two products), and then click the Send to OneNote button on the Internet Explorer toolbar (located just below the Search box near the top right side of the browser window). Pages that you copy in this way are automatically placed in the Unfiled Notes section on OneNote, from where you can move or copy the page to another place in your notebook.
Capture screen clippings Some Web pages contain complex scripts that make them unsuitable for exporting to other programs. This often happens on search results pages, shopping sites, and with information that rapidly changes (for example, flight availability and prices). If the Send to OneNote feature doesn’t work well for a particular Web page, or if you want more control about the information you want to save, try creating a screen clipping instead. From your Web browser, switch to OneNote. Click Insert Screen Clipping. When OneNote minimizes and the Web page appears dimmed, click and draw a rectangle around the part of your screen that you want to capture. When you let go of the mouse button, the clipping is placed on the current page in OneNote. Although you can’t overtype the text in a screen clipping image, you can annotate it by clicking and typing over the picture. You can also easily replace an outdated screen clipping with a new one.
Screen clippings in OneNote aren’t limited to your Web browser or a single program window. Whatever you can display it on your computer screen, you can capture it all with OneNote. For example, to see how you can research and capture flight information from competing airlines using side-by-side windows, check out the video demo, “OneNote 2007 — An Executive’s Best Practices.” The example about screen clippings begins at around 3:30 minutes into the demo.
Bringing it all together
When you’ve done all of your research and consolidated your shopping and planning lists, it’s time to do something with them!
Holiday shopping If your primary goal was to research and gather ideas for your holiday shopping, you should be all set. For things you need to get at the mall, print out your master list or download it to your mobile phone. For things you prefer to purchase online, refer back to your product and price comparisons and click the links in your notebook to recall and order the items you’ve decided on.
Event planning If you used OneNote to plan a holiday dinner party or similar event, you can easily share any part of your notes (for example, the menu, seating arrangement diagrams, maps with driving directions, etc.) with your guests. To send the information via Microsoft Outlook e-mails, create a summary page in your holiday notebook with the information you want to share, and then click File E-mail. Fill out the message envelope, and then click Send a Copy. You can also save a copy of any notebook page as a Web page by clicking File Save As, and selecting the Single File Web Page format from the Save as type drop-down menu. And if you’re printing invitations in Microsoft Word, you can export any page in your notebook by click File Send to Microsoft Office Word.
Trip planning If holiday travel was your subject, review your screen clippings of flight/hotel/car rental information and go back to the sites that offered the best rates. Because this type of information changes rapidly online over even a few hours, be sure to verify the availability and final prices by performing new live searches before you book a flight or a hotel. When you receive your confirmations and itinerary in e-mail, bring it all into OneNote to keep everything together in one place. If you can’t take OneNote with you (for example, on a laptop computer), you can e-mail your notes to your Hotmail account and refer to the information from hotels and local Internet cafés wherever you go.
Give the gift of OneNote
Need a last-minute gift idea this holiday? If you’re already using OneNote 2007 for yourself, you know it’s the perfect companion for the computer users on your list. It’s available as a standalone program and as part of two versions of Microsoft Office 2007. Use the links below for more information:
OneNote 2007 (standalone version for Windows XP or Vista)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000HCZ8EY/
Microsoft Office 2007 Home & Student Edition (includes OneNote 2007)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000HCZ8EO/
Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate Edition (includes OneNote 2007)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000HCTY26/ (full version for PCs without any version of Microsoft Office)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000HCTY2G/ (upgrade version for PCs with an earlier version of Office)
And if that special someone on your list is lucky enough to get a brand-new computer, choose one that comes with OneNote 2007 pre-installed!
By the way, if you think you need a portable computer to use OneNote, think again. Sure, laptop and Tablet PC owners love OneNote because of its mobility and handwriting support. But OneNote 2007 works great on any PC — including the one sitting on your desktop!
Plan ahead for the New Year
If all you have left to do is to begin planning for the New Year ahead, you can download the newest OneNote calendar templates for 2008 (they’re free). See http://blogs.msdn.com/templates/archive/2007/12/05/new-onenote-and-word-calendars-for-2008.aspx for more information.
Got some time-saving tips of your own for the holiday season? Please post a comment here to share your tips with other readers. Thanks!
I’ll be back in January and hope to see you then. Happy holidays and a Happy New Year to you and yours.
— Michael
Since the release of OneNote 2007 earlier this year, “Top Tips for OneNote 2007” has been one of our most popular articles on Office Online. Many of our readers have written to tell us that they like this easy-to-scan format, which lets them learn a few quick tips and tricks about OneNote that they might not have discovered on their own.
Without direct feedback from users like you, we might have never experimented with this format, as most of these tips don't warrant their own Help topic. So, whether you're happy (or unhappy) with the Help & How-to content for any of the programs in the Microsoft Office suite, be sure to talk to us and let us know what you think. Whenever you read an article on Office Online, take a free training course, download a template or some clip art, or view a demo, tell us what you like about it and how it helped you in your work, and let us know where and how we can improve the content. While our feedback system currently doesn't provide personal replies, my fellow writers and editors spend a lot of time reading your feedback and responding to it by improving our content on an ongoing basis.
To those of you who already frequently submit content feedback on Office Online, my thanks to you. And to those of you who have previously kept your thoughts to yourself, I'd like to invite you to share your feedback in the future. Feedback from Office users just like you is the #1 driving factor for ongoing content updates, corrections, and revisions that make our Help & How-to content throughout Office Online even more helpful and relevant in the future.
While the regular feedback system on Office Online is the best way to provide feedback about specific content for a particular program, let me extend an invitation to my readers here to participate in the next update to the “Top Tips for OneNote 2007” article. If you've got a great timesaver, a proven task shortcut, or an undocumented tip to share with other OneNote 2007 users, please post it here as a comment! Your best submissions may be included in the next version of this article, which means that many other (and future) OneNote users could benefit from your shared knowledge!
David Salaguinto, one of my Office Online colleagues and a fellow writer in my workgroup, has just launched his own blog. It’s called Office Offline and features a series of Web comics about technology and information work.
Today’s comic is dedicated to OneNote:
No marketing brochure could have said it better. ;) Thanks for helping to spread the word about our favorite program, David.
You can check out all of David’s comics on his site (and don’t forget to subscribe to his RSS updates).
On her team blog, Content Project Manager Nancy Crowell has just given a ringing endorsement of OneNote 2007: An Executive's Best Practices — the video demo I recently put together for the Office Online Web site. (To get the backstory about how this demo was created, see my previous entry, “OneNote has friends in high places” or the related Office Hours column, “How OneNote made friends in a corner office.”)
Nancy writes, “I had taken a few notes in OneNote in the past, but I did not fully grasp what was possible until I ran across this demo. I soon began to apply what I had learned — forwarding meeting appointments from my calendar to OneNote and then jotting my notes from the meeting right there. I started marking tasks from within OneNote so they would appear on my calendar as reminders for me. I highlighted important things I needed to remember, inserted links to documents and turned OneNote into my catch-all for all meetings. Then I started to tell people about OneNote.“
It's really great to see how spreading the word about OneNote and presenting some proven techniques for using it can help people in all kinds of situations. To read how Nancy became an unsuspecting OneNote evangelist as a result, check out the rest of her blog post!
Microsoft Senior Program Manager Janet Galore gives a prominent shout-out to OneNote 2007 in her new Office Hours column, Stir up your best ideas with a group SharePoint blog. The column focuses on tips for using SharePoint to create a sense of community for various teams within an organization.
One of Janet's blogging tips focuses on OneNote's convenient ability to export content right from the page tabs in your notebook:
Be sure to check out the entire article. Even if you don't yet use SharePoint in your company, Janet's tips are good food for thought all around.
And if you haven't already, be sure to also check out the other OneNote columns on the Office Hours site (and please consider leaving some reader feedback for each).
If you've been looking for a well-rounded introduction to OneNote 2007 or have wanted to get a closer look at its many personal productivity and group collaboration features, look no further. Grab a sandwich and spend your lunch break with Mike Tholfsen, Senior Test Manager on the OneNote product team. Mike is the host of our latest on-demand Webcast, OneNote 2007 Tips and Tricks: Personal Usage and Collaboration.
The presentation is free to download and runs for about 55 minutes. You can watch it via LiveMeeting, or you can download the entire Webcast to your hard drive, where you can freely navigate its contents and skip to the parts that interest you.
If you don't want to register for LiveMeeting to view the Webcast, do the following:
- Open this page, type in your first name, and then click View Recording.
- Enter your e-mail address and company name (if applicable), and then click View Recording once more.
- On the “View Recording Info” page that opens, find the link titled For alternate download, right click here and then click Save Target As and then do just that to save the file “placeware.wmv” to your hard drive.
- When the file “placeware.wmv” has completely finished downloading, rename it to “OneNote 2007 Webcast” and then double-click the file to launch it in Windows Media Player.
If you own one or more Microsoft Office products, the Office Online Web site is your friend. It serves as a huge (and free) repository of all kinds of information for all of the programs in the Office 2007 product suites. The site also features archived information for older Office programs that are still officially supported by Microsoft.
With that many software programs to write about, even the best navigation system and search engine will require at least some user interaction to successfully lead site visitors to the information they most care about. Our busy site managers work continuously to improve navigation and search, but global updates to a site this large naturally require much forethought and planning before they can be rolled out. I often hear from people that they can't seem to find their way past the marketing pages or that they're not quite sure if they're in the right place for updated Help content. Over the next few days, I'll share some tips that might help you navigate our site better and find more of what you're looking for.
I'm splitting these tips up into a few parts to make this information a bit easier to digest. For today, let's look at how to reach the OneNote-specific product pages.
Two portals for every Office product on Office Online
To effectively use Office Online, understanding where you are on the site can help a great deal. In most cases, each individual Office program (such as OneNote 2007) has two separate portals (or sub-sites) available for site visitors — a pre-sales site, and a post-sales site.
The pre-sales site for a single Office program is the main portal to product marketing information. The primary audience for this information is anyone who has not yet purchased that particular software program and wants to learn more about it — including features, benefits, pricing, availability, licensing, and compatibility. Whether you're thinking of making a brand new purchase or you're considering an upgrade to a newer version of an Office program, the pre-sales site has everything you need.
The post-sales site for a single Office program is the main portal to the Help & How-to documentation that we have available for people who are using that program. This is the side of things that writers like me feed every day with new and updated content. When you want to read online Help and How-to articles, walk through tutorials, take training courses, view video demos, download templates, and get other free stuff, the post-sales site has everything you need.
Let's look at how to access each of these portals for OneNote 2007.
Getting to the OneNote product information portal (pre-sales site)
If you or your colleagues, friends, or family members don't yet have OneNote and are interested in learning more about OneNote or want to download the trial version to take OneNote for a spin, the OneNote 2007 product information portal is the best place to start:
- Open a new Web browser window (or tab) and go to http://office.microsoft.com/.
- On the Office Online home page, click the Products tab.
- In the Products list in the left margin, click OneNote.
- The OneNote 2007 product information portal opens.
Although the contents of this page are built on the fly each time you visit this page, the URL won't change over time. You can safely add it to your Favorites list for easy access. You can also reach this page simply typing http://office.microsoft.com/onenote/ into your Web browser, which will automatically redirect you to the OneNote 2007 product information portal.
Getting to the OneNote Help & How-to home page (post-sales site)
If you already have OneNote 2007 installed (either the full version or the trial version) and you want to find Help & How-to articles, training, video demos, tutorials, templates, and other useful information, the OneNote 2007 Help & How-to home page is the best place to start:
- Open a new Web browser window (or tab) and go to http://office.microsoft.com/.
- On the Office Online home page, click the Help and How-to tab.
- Near the center of the page, in the Browse Help and How-to by Product box, click the 2007 Office System tab, and then click OneNote 2007 in the list.
- The OneNote 2007 Help & How-to home page opens.
Although the contents of this page are built on the fly each time you visit this page, the URL won't change over time. You can safely add it to your Favorites list for easy access.
A closer look at the OneNote Help & How-to home page
Unlike the product information (pre-sales) portals for the individual Office programs, each of the Help & How-to home pages are updated at least once a month with new featured content. This means that the pages are going to look slightly different each time you visit them, much like the home pages on news and magazine Web sites. We do this to showcase new and updated content when it becomes available. Based on feedback from site visitors like you, we also cycle through highly rated content that users have previously rated as permanently useful. In addition, we occasionally promote seasonal content (for example, at tax time or during holidays) to point out content and templates that may be useful during such times.
While the featured content on the OneNote Help & How-to home page changes every month, the basic layout of this page remains consistent. The animation below shows how OneNote 2007 content is generally organized on this page:
Aside from the product information portal and the Help & How-to home page, you can use the navigation links on the Office Online site to reach other OneNote-specific pages and information (for example, archived OneNote 2003 content).
Feel free to explore Office Online on your own, or simply add the following URLs to your Favorites list:
I should point out that there are several ways of finding the same thing on Office Online. The steps I've outlined in this post are just one way to reach each of these pages. Most of my friends and colleagues prefer sites that let them read information without first having to log on with a username or password, so I've written these tips with that preference in mind. That said, if you own several Office products and you frequently read content on the Office Online site, you may want to consider registering on the site. When you're logged in with your personal Office Online ID, you can enjoy additional site functionality that you may find useful. If you don't want to create an account but you like the idea of having Office Online automatically customize content for the programs you own, go to this page. Either way, feel free to explore the resources on our site in the way that makes the most sense to you.
I hope you found this overview helpful. Check back soon for part 2 of “Finding OneNote on Office Online.”
OneNote continues to be a favorite on the new Office Hours site. Yesterday, programming writer Eliot Graff published his new OneNote column, Synchronizing voice and video in OneNote, in which he showcases how to synchronize audio and video clips with written notes. This is one of the key benefits of electronic note-taking in OneNote 2007 over traditional pen and paper.
If you haven't already, be sure to also check out the other OneNote columns on the Office Hours site (and please consider leaving some reader feedback for each).
Microsoft Office Online columnist Annik Stahl (a.k.a. The Crabby Office Lady) is a big fan of OneNote. She is currently writing a series of columns to help demystify Office terminology so that end-users have an easier time understanding some of the names and terms that we've attached to Office features.
In her July column, Crabby demystifies OneNote terms, Annik is identifying and defining some of the names that we've given various OneNote features and interface elements. Internally, we deal with this terminology every day and we tend to take it for granted. In the real world, however, this sort of information can be very beneficial to new users. (For more on OneNote, see also Crabby sings the praises of OneNote 2007.)
When you're comfortable with the basic terminology in OneNote, check out Find your way around OneNote — a quick, visual tutorial that introduces other important OneNote 2007 interface elements and navigation features!
I recently had the very cool opportunity to meet Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division. No, this isn't some lame attempt at name-dropping. It's just that when you work in the trenches like I do, meeting a well-respected member of the senior leadership team at a company of our size is kind of neat. It certainly doesn't happen every day.
My colleague Mike Tholfsen (a Senior Test Manager on the OneNote product team) and I were hoping to get a first-hand look at how Jeff uses OneNote 2007 as part of his daily work. Jeff was an early and vocal supporter of OneNote 2003, and we were curious about what he thought of OneNote 2007, now that it's been on the market for a few months. What I had mainly hoped to get out of the session was to to walk away with some idea of how a busy executive works with notes and important information, and then distill at least some of that knowledge into a few actionable best practices that we could potentially share with other users.
Jeff is a very personable guy and his enthusiasm for OneNote is both genuine and infectious. Because the traditional format for video demos on our Office Online site follows a "just the facts" kind of narrative, much of Jeff's wisdom and observations had to be cut from my first draft of the script. Fortunately, it was right around this time that Annik Stahl (a.k.a. the Crabby Office Lady) launched her new series of columns on Office Online, called “Office Hours.” I had already volunteered to author a column for this site, scheduled for publication in late August. Unhappy at the prospect of having to leave so many of Jeff's insights on the cutting room floor while producing the new demo, I switched publication dates with a fellow writer and decided to document the meeting with Jeff in my Office Hours column. The column was published in the last week of June and the accompanying video demo was published in the first week of July:
Office Hours: How OneNote made friends in a corner office
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/HA102282211033.aspx
Demo: Jeff Raikes — An Executive’s Best Practices
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/HA102342001033.aspx
The demo page contains several links to other articles, showing some of the features and techniques that Jeff used during the meeting.
Reader feedback for the column and the demo has been extremely positive so far. If you have a chance to read the column and view the demo, I hope you'll find Jeff's best practices useful. Please consider leaving feedback on the Office Online site to tell us what you think!