Nota Bene: The OneNote Blog : Office Online

Head back to class with OneNote

Michael C. Oldenburg — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Over the years, a lot of students and teachers who already use OneNote have told us that they wish OneNote 2007 were standard issue in every classroom. The word about OneNote’s many benefits in school has traveled fast, but a lot of people in education still have no idea just how well OneNote is suited to daily use inside and outside of the classroom. Read my full blog post for a quick run-down of the free back-to-school resources that are currently available to students, teachers, and parents....(read more)

Download more free OneNote calendars for 2009 (and 2010)

Michael C. Oldenburg — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Back in January of this year, I provided shortcuts to the newest calendar templates for your OneNote 2007 notebooks. Since then, the Templates team at Office Online has been busy creating more free templates for you to download — including a full spectrum of customizable 2009 calendars and even a couple of early designs for next year. Check out this blog post for direct links to these free downloads....(read more)

Download the new “Green Living Ideas” notebook for OneNote

Michael C. Oldenburg — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:00:00 GMT

In celebration of Earth Day on April 22, I’ve put together a new “Green Living Ideas” notebook that you can download for free. Use it to list, organize, and keep track of a variety of “green living” ideas, options, and opportunities. This notebook contains five suggested sections, all of which you can customize by changing and deleting anything that doesn’t apply to your personal situation or preference and adding items as necessary. The result is a custom Green Living Ideas notebook that you can use and share with your family, friends, and co-workers — even the ones that don’t yet have OneNote. Read my full blog post for shortcuts to training and video demos that make notebook customization, note tags, and Web research with screen clippings a cinch — plus get your hands on a free PowerPoint deck that contains a OneNote 2007 training presentation you can use to persuade your office co-workers to go green with OneNote!...(read more)

Lost your job? Let OneNote and Office help!

Michael C. Oldenburg — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:00:00 GMT

My own experience with unemployment happened at a time when jobs in every industry were plentiful and when you would get an actual phone call or a polite letter informing you of the fate of your application. Those days are pretty much over. If you don’t sharpen the tools in your arsenal to keep up with the times, you may lose out. With so many people losing their jobs recently, the Office Online team has launched a brand-new Career Center to help Microsoft Office users with every step of a career or job search. We’ve even partnered with the experts over at Monster.com to make the whole process a snap. Also available is the new OneNote job application tracker. This free, template-based tool can be added to any section in your OneNote notebook to let you keep track of your applications, resume versions, contacts, follow-ups, and more. Read my full blog post to check it all out! ...(read more)

Learn from a pro: Real-world draft management in OneNote 2007

Michael C. Oldenburg — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 03:30:00 GMT

Some of the best computer tips out there aren't ever “in the manual.” They come from watching someone else work, letting us peek over their shoulder while they complete a real-world task with the software they’ve chosen, and then learning from their technique and style. Today, I'm pleased to announce the premiere episode of “A Writer’s Guide to Microsoft Office” — a new podcast series written and hosted by my teammate, Joannie Stangeland. In her first episode, Joannie shows us how she uses a variety of OneNote 2007 features to manage writing drafts that she prepares for submission to publishers. Joannie didn’t select OneNote as her tool of choice for draft management because she works for Microsoft during the day. She immediately realized its benefits back when OneNote 2003 had been released and few people (even within Microsoft) had heard of it. There was no book or Help topic to teach an aspiring writer how they might use OneNote to work with drafts and manuscripts. Joannie developed her own technique when the cumbersome clutter of paper and manila file folders quickly failed her....(read more)

Download free 2009 calendar templates (or make your own!)

Michael C. Oldenburg — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Happy New Year, everyone!

As any seasoned user of OneNote 2007 will tell you, the beauty of OneNote is the ability to keep everything together in one place. Calendars are no exception, whether you keep them with you for quick lookups or you link dates and events to specific pages in your notebook.

The Office Online Templates team has been hard at work to make the latest OneNote calendar templates for 2009 available, the first few of which you can now download for free:

2009 full-year calendar
2009 monthly calendar
2009 daily calendar (January)
2009 daily calendar (February)
2009 daily calendar (March)
2009 daily calendar (April)
2009 daily calendar (May)
2009 daily calendar (June)
View all available OneNote templates (by category)
The remaining months for the daily calendars will be posted soon.
Check the full templates catalog each month to see what’s new!

Pre-designed page templates such as these calendars can save you lots of time, but remember that you're not forced to use any templates exactly as they are. If a particular template doesn't quite suit your needs, download it as a starting point, and then change the colors, fonts, and any other formatting to match your preferences. You can then save your changes as a new template and apply it to new pages in your notebook. You can even share your designs with other people.

To learn how to do this, watch our new video:

Watch now: Take the work out of note-taking with OneNote templates!

Aside from single page OneNote templates, you can also create section templates (a template of a section containing one or more pages) and notebook templates (a template of a notebook containing one or more sections) in OneNote. To do this, click the Save As command when you're all done with your design work, and then choose the “OneNote Single File Package (*.onepkg)” option as the file type.

Be sure to select the appropriate Page Range before saving the package (choose Current Section to save your selection as a section template or choose Current Notebook to save your selection as a notebook template).

The OneNote package file format lets you distribute selected notes to other OneNote users, but you can also use this feature to install your template creations on multiple computers, or to share your template designs with your friends, family, co-workers, or classmates. All a recipient has to do is double-click the OneNote package file to install the template it contains onto their own computer.

If you've personally created some useful OneNote templates that you'd like to share with other readers, feel free to post a link to your download location as a comment!

Take OneNote to class!

Michael C. Oldenburg — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 04:00:00 GMT

Here in the hallways at Microsoft, there’s a particular utterance that can be heard with ever-increasing frequency:

“Wow—I wish we’d have had something like OneNote back when I was in school...!”

I'm one of the many people who feel this way. Aside from laptop computers and the Internet, OneNote is the one innovation that could have changed my life back in the day.

While students and teachers have different roles to play, they share a need to capture, organize, find, present, and share information on a variety of subjects. In present-day schools, paper notebooks may suffice for jotting down information, but their value really ends there. If you wanted to find information again later (and, let's face it, isn't that the point of writing things down in the first place?), then you had better be incredibly organized or incredibly patient as you surrender to flipping and shuffling through endless stacks of paper. Worse, if your idea of sharing notes with classmates is making photocopies or — gasp! — retyping your notes word for word in an e-mail message, then you probably already know that you're not making the best use of your time.

In the customer feedback that we receive month after month from our Office Online Web site visitors, the question asked most often is some variation of “What is OneNote?” or “What can I do with OneNote?” We've published several written overviews and Getting Started materials, as well as a growing number of video demos about OneNote. I'm especially pleased to share with you the latest addition to the latter category — a new video aimed at students of all ages, as well as their teachers and parents. It was put together by Joannie Stangeland, a present colleague and former editor of mine. Joannie has long been a OneNote enthusiast and she's never too busy to show others how to use OneNote to its full potential — both in the workplace as well as at home.

As Joannie's kids have begun college life, she has seen first-hand the value and potential that OneNote offers in and out of the classroom. In this video, Joannie wanted to showcase some of the features in OneNote that hold special appeal for both students and teachers:

Watch now: Take OneNote to Class!

Unlike our more traditional how-to demos, Joannie's video doesn't overwhelm with details. It's meant as a quick “drive-by” of cool features that you may not have known about before. If you want to point fellow students, teachers, and parents to a better way of managing academic life, be sure to share this video link with them. Chances are, they'll love OneNote, too!

Conventional wisdom always told us, “If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Back when I was in school, my paper notebooks weren't broken — but they severely limited what I could do with my notes and how quickly I could recall the massive amounts of information that I committed to paper each day. With each new class or semester, with each new page added to the growing pile of paper, finding the stuff that I cared about became more and more difficult. With a program like OneNote, your notebooks literally grow with your life, your experiences, and your learning. You can be as organized or as random as you want to be, you can instantly recall anything and everything you need, and you can easily share it with all the world, if you choose to.

If you've never seen OneNote in action and Joannie's video has piqued your interest, be sure to download the free trial version of OneNote 2007 for a full 60-day test drive on your laptop or desktop PC. For help with learning OneNote during your trial period, you can follow the tips in the Guide notebook that's included with the program. For more info, check out Learn OneNote with the Guide notebook.

For more tips about using OneNote in the classroom, check out these links:

Microsoft Office at School: For Students
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/school/FX102783161033.aspx
Microsoft Office at School: For Teachers
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/school/FX102781621033.aspx
Microsoft Office at School: For Parents
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/school/FX102781641033.aspx

OneNote 2007 makes a perfect gift for the students on your holiday list. It's available as a standalone version or as part of the popular Microsoft Office Home & Student Edition:

Microsoft Office OneNote 2007 (Standalone Edition)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000HCZ8EY/
Microsoft Office Home & Student Edition (OneNote 2007, Word 2007, PowerPoint 2007, and Excel 2007)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000HCZ8EO/

It's that time of year again...

Michael C. Oldenburg — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 03:00:00 GMT

This month’s collection of tips on the Microsoft At Work Web site (shown below) gives a shout-out to one of my previous blog posts, in which I shared some tips about using OneNote for holiday and event planning.

If you missed my original blog post, you can still read it here:

Survive the holidays with OneNote 2007
http://blogs.msdn.com/michael_oldenburg/archive/2007/12/16/6686183.aspx

All of the links in the article are still valid (for example, the pointers to the various editions of Microsoft Office that include OneNote). The new 2009 OneNote calendar templates are still being posted on the Office Online Web site, but you can start grabbing the first ones here.

Be sure to check out the Templates site on Office Online for new calendars in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, you can download a ton of other templates there — all free of charge.

To receive free monthly tips and tricks about a variety of Office programs and technologies, including OneNote, consider bookmarking the Microsoft At Work and the Microsoft At Home Web sites. There’s always something new to learn and check out!

Free download: Office 2007 Help updates (including OneNote!)

Michael C. Oldenburg — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 04:00:00 GMT

When we mention “Help” in the software publishing world, we don't mean technical support or maintenance (that's generally called “Support”). Instead, the collective term “Help” refers to the free published content that ships with most commercial or professional software programs. This content can serve as a reference (like the printed manuals that used to be included in the box) or it can provide training, step-by-step tutorials, and overviews to help you learn a new software program and master its many features over time.

You probably know that pressing F1 in any Office 2007 program opens the Help viewer, which lets you browse that program's Help content by clicking through a Table of Contents or by searching for keywords and feature names. Clicking the appropriate link on the Help menu will do the same thing, although this interface style has gone out of fashion in programs with the new Fluent (a.k.a. Ribbon) interface, such as Word 2007 and Excel 2007.

What you may not have noticed before is that, regardless of the interface, the programs in the Office 2007 suites have two very different Help experiences. When your computer is connected to the Internet, and if you (or your system administrator) have given permission, the Help viewer will fetch and display the most up-to-date and complete content for the Office 2007 Help in each program. This experience is preferred because, in this so-called “connected state,” you're sure to always see the latest and greatest Help content that's available for your program(s). In this scenario, the Help viewer bypasses the Help files that were originally installed with each program because such disk-based content cannot be automatically updated and thus becomes outdated rather quickly.

If you yank the network cable from your computer or otherwise disconnect from the Internet for any reason, the Help viewer reverts to the offline Help files on your hard drive — outdated as they may be. All of the Help and How-to content that has been published since the launch of the product is then no longer fetched from the Office Online Web site. This is problematic when you need to look up procedure steps for a program task or feature and the corresponding Help topic exists only online. For example, imagine you're traveling on business and finishing your big PowerPoint presentation on the plane. Your boss told you to insert an animation or video, but you don't remember how to do this. If a specific article with the solution to your issue was not published as part of the original "offline Help" files on your Office CD or DVD, you'll have to wait until you can next connect to the Web.

Sitting on planes isn't the only situation where offline Help files may suddenly become important. In many companies, employees are not permitted to connect to the Internet for security reasons or due to corporate policies. For these customers, keeping our offline Help files as up-to-date as possible is very important. Larger companies typically have an IT staff that keeps cached versions of new Help content available in-house for searching. But for smaller businesses, no such luxury exists.

Whatever your situation, I recommend grabbing our newest Office 2007 Help updates and installing them on your computer.

If you have configured your version of Windows Update (Windows XP or Windows Vista) to include updates for all Microsoft software, these new offline Help file updates will show up in the “Office 2007” category of your “Recommended” updates (see screenshot). Depending on how your Windows Update is configured, you may already have these updates, or you may need to manually check for them. You may not see exactly the same items on your screen as are shown in this screenshot. The number of Help updates depends on whatever individual Office 2007 programs you have installed (separately or as part of any of the suites).

By the way, if you don't have Office 2007 updates integrated with your version of Windows Update (or if you don't want to for some reason), you can go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=40747 to check for all available Office 2007 updates for your computer. This is the same link that the Office programs go to when you click Check for updates from the Office interface.

Once updated, the offline Help files on your hard drive will contain a new, up-to-the-moment snapshot of the Help libraries which we keep current on the Office Online Web site every month. So, even if you're not planning to ever disconnect from the Internet, offline Help files on your hard drive might just get you out of a bind the next time you find yourself up against a deadline and in need of finding that elusive, secret handshake for mastering a particular task or feature.

To make sure your Office 2007 Help viewer is configured to fetch the latest online content whenever you're connected to the Internet, click the button in the lower right corner of the Help viewer window (in OneNote 2007 or any other Office 2007 program, press F1) and then choose Show content from Office Online from the popup menu. “Connected to Office Online” means that your Office program will automatically include the latest online content in the Help Table of Contents and in the Search results.

By the way, to quickly find all OneNote-specific Help & How-to content that's currently available on Office Online, click the links in the left margin of my blog (under the OneNote Links heading).

With shared notebooks, collaboration is not just a buzzword

Michael C. Oldenburg — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Wikipedia defines “collaboration” as follows:

“Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people work together toward an intersection of common goals — for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature — by sharing knowledge, learning, and building consensus.”

Back in the 1980s, IBM may well have dubbed their revolutionary new machines “Personal Computers,” but these days, if you use your PC in an office or at school, you probably already spend at least as much of your time collaborating with others as you do on your personal projects.

At first glance, collaboration seems like a no-brainer. Each day, we meet people face to face, talk with them on the phone, and exchange all the free e-mail we want. Instant messaging is another great way to chat or exchange files, especially if you and your teammates share similar hours near a computer. And yet, things quickly get a lot more complicated when you’re trying to keep more than a few people on the same page.

Work hours and locations are more diverse than ever. Information overload is everywhere. Our inboxes are full of “Look at me now!” requests and unscheduled tasks that are becoming increasingly difficult to process, let alone manage. How are we supposed to update each other on news and status without adding to the existing e-mail hell? Nobody wants more meetings just to talk about all of the work that has to get done.

We want our computers and tools to help us, but choosing the right tools for collaboration can be tricky. Most people will admit that they tend to gravitate towards what they know (or what’s been set up for them), and not necessarily what will help them collaborate in the smartest, most efficient ways. So, how do you try a better way when you don’t know that there is one waiting in the wings? First, assess honestly how well your tried-and-true methods and tools have served you in the past and then keep an open mind while you do some research on your own.

In my newest Office Hours column, I'm outlining how OneNote 2007 offers smarter ways to share information with a team or workgroup. Even if you already know how indispensible OneNote can be for management of your personal information, you might not yet have discovered its built-in collaboration features. Aside from the “how to” steps in the article, I’m offering some best practices that you may find useful — such as adding a hyperlinked Table of Contents that points to the pages and sections in your shared notebook, or including a reference section to keep important information at everyone’s fingertips.

As always, I’m interested in your feedback. Please tell me if you find such articles useful or if you’d rather see this type of information covered in a different way (the more specific your feedback, the better!). You can leave feedback by submitting comments directly at the end of the column (or any other Office Online article), or by commenting here on my blog. If you prefer, feel free to drop me a line directly.

In case you haven’t seen them, here are my previous Office Hours columns about Office and OneNote:

OneNote: A smarter way to share information with your team
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA102750221033.aspx
Use Office 2007 on your mobile phone
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA102402571033.aspx
How OneNote made friends in a corner office
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA102282211033.aspx

You can view all articles (including those by my fellow Office columnists) by checking out the Office Hours home page!

What do you want to see in a OneNote 2007 book?

Michael C. Oldenburg — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 02:00:00 GMT

Over the past few months, I’ve been asked by some of my readers if I can recommend any good books about OneNote.

In short, the answer is a reluctant “No.”

If you do a quick search in Amazon.com’s Books section for “OneNote 2007” (include the quote marks in your search), you’ll see that the results will be underwhelming. You may remember that the previous offering for OneNote 2003 a few years ago was much more generous. So, why the sudden dearth of choices now?

While I don’t have any official data on this, I suspect that it’s just another case of everyone tightening their belts these days. Just as companies of all sizes in nearly every industry have radically consolidated their businesses and narrowed their scope to save costs, so have book publishers who used to pump out a gazillion books each year. It’s not hard to imagine why those books that are dedicated to version-specific, software-related subjects would be most affected by this. They almost always have a very limited shelf-life because of their specific focus.

Computer books are not everyone’s cup of tea. A lot of people never crack one open and prefer to read Help content online. But I’ve met a lot of people (customers, colleagues, friends, and acquaintances) who have told me that they much prefer learning about computer programs by keeping a book next to their computer, in which they can follow along in an overview of the software or in tutorial lessons that teach them about the software’s many features. In terms of training, books almost always succeed with their target audience because the information they contain is presented in a linear, sequential fashion. Help topics are meant to get you out of a bind when you’re in the middle of doing something and you don’t know how to use a certain feature.

When I started at Microsoft twelve years ago, it was still common practice for software companies to fully document a product — right down to the last toolbar button and dialog box. At Microsoft, we didn’t yet have Office Online at that point (or anything like it) and customers were unable to tell us what they thought about the usefulness of our documentation. We had no way of measuring which features (and associated Help topics) were the most popular, or which features created the biggest pain points and needed more explanation. As a result, literally everything was documented, just in case our users needed to read up on it someday. For better or for worse, those days are long gone.

One thing hasn’t changed. Companies continue to give their employees software programs to use at work, but little (if any) training is made available to help them master these tools. These days, if you can’t demonstrate a good grasp of Office software, your résumé may well be passed over. So, where’s an ordinary person supposed to get reasonably-priced, comprehensive training to get up to speed on software? Back when so-called “day one” software documentation was beginning to narrow more and more, a new industry sprung up to fill the sudden void. Technical self-help books like the Dummies series were being published to help novice users who had trouble ramping up with a software program.

Love them or hate them, these types of books have done very well in sales over the past several years. But despite their popularity, even these publications seem to have downsized their catalogs as of late. For example, to cover the various new Microsoft Office programs, book publishers seem to have combined everything into a single “Office 2007 for Dummies” or similar book in which the individual programs are discussed in much shorter fashion. That may work well for established and ubiquitous programs like Microsoft Word. But even though it may not seem like it, OneNote 2007 is only a Version 2.0 program that happens to have done incredibly well as a standalone product. Surely it deserves more comprehensive training coverage than this?

If you happen to belong to the group of people who love computer books, and you would like to finally see one dedicated to OneNote 2007, I have good news! Kathy Jacobs, one of OneNote’s most dedicated and vocal fans (who just happens to be a prominent Microsoft MVP) is planning to write a book of her own and she wants your input. In a recent blog post, Kathy outlines some of her plans for this title. Rather than copying the same repetitive approach of previously published tech books, she wants to create a book that speaks more to home users and students instead of only corporate users.

Personally, I think this is a great idea. If you can learn to master OneNote 2007 in a more natural and less formal setting and get comfortable with its features, you can easily apply those skills when using OneNote at work. By contrast, I think the opposite isn’t always true. It can be much harder to learn OneNote if you’ve only seen it discussed in work scenarios and not every home user or student can necessarily identify with these.

So, here’s your call to action. If you’ve been a consumer of technical self-help and training books and you’ve always wanted to give someone an earful about what you liked and disliked about these types of books, let Kathy know. Do you want step-by-step tutorials or broader overviews with specific case studies and scenarios? Should it cover only basic features or describe advanced techniques from expert users? Is a bound and printed book best or would you prefer a downloadable, electronic version instead?

You can share your ideas and requests for a OneNote 2007 book by leaving a comment here on my blog, by dropping me a line, or by responding directly to Kathy’s original blog post. As fellow content producers, Kathy and I will both be very interested to read your thoughts and responses!

Learning OneNote 2007 right out of the box

Michael C. Oldenburg — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:00:00 GMT

In recent weeks, page hit counts for our introductory content about OneNote on Microsoft’s Office Online site have been steadily rising. As the worldwide adoption of Microsoft Office 2007 keeps increasing, so does awareness about OneNote 2007.

As much as we in the OneNote user community have already come to rely on this great program — the veritable Swiss Army knife of the Office family — we know all too well that OneNote’s simplicity can often hide its true power from new users who are taking their first test drive.

Some users have told us that they’re having trouble getting started, or that they assume that there’s a specific note-taking system to learn before they can reap the benefits of keeping all of their stuff in OneNote (see my previous post, “Taking notes the ‘right’ way,” about this common misconception).

Others expect OneNote to be some sort of new-age word processor in which they’re still confined to the same invisible boundaries of traditional documents. Even those who have already come to appreciate the flexibility of the OneNote canvas are sometimes still unsure about how best to manage electronic notebooks in efficient ways.

All of these things considered, I wanted to dedicate this entry to something that some of you may have overlooked when first booting up the program: the OneNote 2007 Guide.

What’s the OneNote Guide?

When OneNote 2003 first debuted in the marketplace a few years ago, it included a Flash-based tour to give users an overview of the program. While such self-running tours can serve as an effective introduction, they usually offer little or no interactivity. Worse, you can't try things out for yourself if all you have is a blank screen and no content with which to experiment.

For OneNote 2007, we decided to do something different by including an actual OneNote notebook — called the “OneNote 2007 Guide” — with the product. OneNote users can read its pages to learn about OneNote’s capabilities and features, and then experiment with the pages and sections first-hand by trying out the various techniques right there on the program’s canvas.

Sounds cool, but where is it?

To view the OneNote 2007 Guide, click the “OneNote 2007 Guide” notebook icon on the Navigation Bar (on the far left of your screen).

When the Guide notebook opens, click either of its two section tabs (near the top of your screen) and then browse through the pages in any order you want by clicking the page tabs in the page list (near the right side of your screen).

If the OneNote 2007 Guide isn’t shown on your Navigation Bar, you can easily reopen it by doing the following:

On the File menu, point to Open, and then click Notebook.
In your Documents folder (on Windows Vista) or your My Documents folder (on Windows XP), double-click the OneNote Notebooks folder.
In the OneNote Notebooks folder, click to select the OneNote 2007 Guide folder, and then click Open.

If you’re sharing your computer with co-workers or family members and you still don’t see the Guide notebook in your notebooks folder, it’s possible that someone else might have deleted it. In that case, keep reading — I’m sharing the necessary steps for restoring the Guide from its original file later in this post.

Annotate it, play with it, mess it up!

Aside from teaching you the basics about OneNote, the OneNote 2007 Guide also serves as a hands-on training ground, so don’t be afraid of “messing it up” — that’s what it’s there for. It’s not like you’re wasting any paper!

You can try out all of the things that the Guide pages mention. Experiment by moving stuff around on the page, change the font, size, and color of text. Add some new pages to an existing section and then create a couple of new sections. Rearrange section and page tabs by dragging them. Draw some shapes with the drawing tools. Insert some pictures or Web clippings and import some of your Office documents and files to see how they show up in OneNote. Send yourself a notes page in e-mail to see how it appears in your Inbox. Experiment with tables, note tags, and hyperlinks, and then try out the cool search features.

No need to get overwhelmed — just go at your own pace and search the OneNote 2007 Web site for Help whenever you want to learn more about a particular feature before moving on to the next.

Remove or reset the OneNote Guide

When you’re done messing around and trying stuff out, you can either delete the OneNote 2007 Guide from your hard drive for good, or you can restore it to its original glory and keep it as a handy reference manual.

In either case, do the following:

On the Navigation Bar, right-click the OneNote 2007 Guide notebook tile, and then click Close this Notebook.

In Windows Explorer, navigate to your Documents folder (on Windows Vista) or your My Documents folder (on Windows XP), and then double-click the OneNote Notebooks folder.

In the OneNote Notebooks folder, right-click the OneNote 2007 Guide folder and then click Delete on the shortcut menu.

If you now want to restore the OneNote 2007 Guide to the way it was when you first installed OneNote 2007, follow these additional steps:

Close OneNote 2007 if it is running.

In Windows Explorer, navigate to the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\1033 folder on your computer’s hard drive. If you installed OneNote in a different location, navigate to it instead.

Locate and then double-click the file ONGuide.onepkg.

In the Unpack Notebook dialog box, change the Name to “OneNote 2007 Guide” and then click Next.

Under Who will use this notebook?, leave the default settings, and then click Next.

Under Confirm notebook location, leave the default path, and then click the Create button.

If you’re using a version of OneNote 2007 other than U.S. English, substitute the “1033” code in the file path mentioned in Step 2 above with the correct locale identifier (LCID) code for your edition of OneNote or Office 2007. To learn more about LCID codes and software localization considerations, you may find the information in this Wikipedia article useful.

Meet the “Mini-Me” counterparts of Office 2007

Michael C. Oldenburg — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:00:00 GMT

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!

New OneNote 2007 training course for beginners

Michael C. Oldenburg — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

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.

Meet the new OneNote 2007 “Help & How-to” home page

Michael C. Oldenburg — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 02:00:00 GMT

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.