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Ben's Technology Blog (and The SchorrTech Store is now open!)
Q: How do I demote a page to be a subpage?
A: Select the page you want to demote, hold down CTRL and select the page you want it to be a subpage of. Right-click them and choose "Group."
OneNote is a new application for free-form note taking on your computer. It accepts typed or handwritten (if you have a digitizer) input as well as things you copy/paste from other applications. It also supports audio recordings and does some advanced searching across the notes to make it easy for you to find notes you've composed.
Well, they are very similar, to be sure, but OneNote is a more full-featured product than Journal. Eventually it is likely that OneNote will be a superset of Journal; i.e. have all of the features of Journal plus some, but as of version 1 it's not quite there yet. Here are a few of the differences between OneNote and Journal (as far as I know):
Worth noting that Journal has the "Lasso" selection feature which OneNote does not.
A good analogy I heard is that OneNote is to Journal as Word is to Wordpad.
Yes, it works fine. You can use OneNote with a desktop or laptop - just type your notes in where you want them. You will need to have the same level of hardware that you need for the Microsoft Office suite, however, and it requires Windows 2000 SP3, Windows XP or later.
No, OneNote is only being sold as a separate product - much as Visio or Project are currently. It doesn't require the Office suite, though features like "Create an Outlook Task" obviously won't work if you don't have Outlook 2003.
Retail price is $99. There sometimes are rebate offers for people who own or buy Office that can reduce that price.
Yes, though it is optimized for use with Office 2003. It will work fine with Office XP with the caveat that some of the Outlook-specific features like e-mailing notes from within OneNote require Outlook 2003.
There are no firm plans for one currently. I've discussed that very subject with some of the OneNote team and there are some thoughts along that line being kicked around but as of now there are no specific plans to port a version of OneNote to the Pocket PC platform.
No, I'm afraid not. It does support AutoCorrect and dynamic spell checking, however.
No, at this time there is no exposed object model.
No, OneNote is more like a legal pad than a "post-it" type program. If you require "sticky notes" see the Post-It Software program.
No, not in version 1. It's being considered for version 2.
No, no native support for either in the current version. You can, of course, use third-party disk encryption or even OS-level encryption to encrypt the files on the disk.
Not in version 1. If color coding your notes is important you might be able to get by just setting the color of the text, or using the highlighter tool to highlight the text with a certain color. Or perhaps come combination of both.
Not really - you can drag an individual PowerPoint slide into OneNote and draw on it. If you have a Tablet PC, though, you can annotate directly in PowerPoint and don't need to use OneNote.
Quick Notes is actually the old name for Side Notes (I preferred "Quick Notes" personally). They are really just a small window on the OneNote program so that you can quickly take a note or drag/drop some web content into a note without having the entire OneNote interface open. If you maximize the Side Note window you'll discover that you're actually working in the full OneNote application, just not being presented the full interface.
No, not in this version. It's a popular feature request, though, so I'm sure the OneNote team is strongly considering ways to implement such a thing in a future release.
WMV.
In OneNote go to Help | About. 11.6360.6408 SP1 is the most recent, publicly available, version.
Insert | New Section
A. Click the page tab once. Then click it a second time. Then drag and drop it up or down where you want it.
B. "Grab" the page tab with your mouse, drag it to one side or the other (as if pulling a card from the deck) then drag it up or down where you want it.
Tools | Options | Editing...
View | Titles in Page Tabs.
The page names are taken from the page title at the top of each page. Change the page title and it will change on the page tab.
The old fashioned way - Copy & Paste.
Just click File | E-mail or press CTRL+SHIFT+E. If you change your mind and decide not to send the e-mail message don't close the window, you'll close OneNote too. Just click the "e-mail" icon on the toolbar or click File | E-mail to revert back to the standard OneNote window without sending the message. Be aware that this feature only works with Outlook 2003.
Not the color, but the shade. Go to Tools | Options and look at the handwriting section. You can set the shade of the Writing Guides there. You can turn them off, if you're using Ink on a Tablet PC, by going to View | Writing Guides and unchecking it.
No, you can only rename custom folders that you add. The default folder is "untouchable" in that manner. You can't delete or rename it.
Insert | New Folder or ALT+I, F. You can create as many of them as you want. Yes, you can have as many folder layers as you want.
Actually, the Quick Note IS OneNote, just in a very small window. If you maximize the Quick Note you'll see that it's actually just a view of OneNote and any notes you type into the Quick Note window are saved in OneNote in a section called "Quick Notes." If you are in OneNote and you shrink the window down at some point (usually around 1/4th of the screen or a little smaller) the view will change and you'll see the Quick Note view.
Yes. WindowsKey + N pops up a Quick Note. To get the full OneNote window try WindowsKey + SHIFT + N.
The standard answer is that you have to cut or copy and paste. You can't easily drag & drop between pages however there is a workaround. If you open two OneNote windows (Window | New Window) and set one of the windows to be your source page and the other to be the page you wish to move the container to, you can drag and drop from one to the other.
Not at this time. It's something they are considering for future versions. Naturally you can use your pen (or mouse if you're really talented) to freehand draw any shapes that you like.
You can't currently. Your best course is to send the task to Outlook, which does support reminders.
Go to File | New and look towards the bottom of the new page task pane.
Yes, just set up the page the way you want it, then click File | New and on the bottom of the File | New taskpane you should should see the stationery section including a choice to "Add Current Page to Stationery."
It's a hidden folder called "C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates".
(Thanks to Diane Poremsky for this info)
In File | Print change the print range to "All."
Check View | Page Title and make sure it hasn't been turned off.
Manually. There isn't any automatic sort feature in the current version. You'll need to use your mouse and grab the tab, drag to the right and then up or down to reorder the tabs in whatever order you like (including alphabetical).
You don't have to. OneNote automatically saves the notes every 30 seconds, or whenever you close the application or a section. You can configure how often you want OneNote to save by going to Tools | Options | Open and Save.
If you really want to save immediately, though, you can just press CTRL+S to force a save.
Yes. If the computers connect to a network you can create a custom folder and place it in a shared location. Keep in mind that sections are locked so two computers cannot edit the same page, or two pages within the same section, at the same time. But you can use them at different times or two of you can work in different sections of the same folder at the same time.
If you need to transport notes between two computers that are not connected your options are a bit more limited. You can place your shared folder on a removable drive or CDRW and transport the media back and forth -- but that presumes that you have a CD-burner on both machines. Your best bet in this case might be one of those USB mini-drives. Keep in mind that if you start OneNote without that removable media available to it you'll get an error message telling you that it can't find the shared notebook and asking if you want to keep it as a notebook it should try to open by default.
1) File | E-mail and e-mail the OneNote file as an HTML document. This requires you to have Outlook 2003, but it only requires the other person to have a mail client that supports HTML (such as Outlook 2000 or Outlook XP).
2) File | Publish to publish the OneNote file as an HTML file; then you can share that HTML file with the other person and they can view it in any browser.
To enable that pane you have to save a note file to the SharePoint server either by Save As, Publish or you can just copy it over there in the file system.
There isn't any archive feature in the user interface, but you can do it at the file system level by simply archiving the .ONE files in your notebook folders. Likewise you can do a backup of the .ONE files and OneNote includes an automatic backup feature that will make copies of your .ONE files as you go in order to significantly reduce the chances that a .ONE file could get corrupted or destroyed in an unrecoverable manner.
Yes, in fact that's a good idea. Just go to Tools | Options | Open & Save and set the backup location to be the network or removable drive. Keep in mind that this works much better, of course, with machines that are always connected to that network or removable drive.
It's probably not necessary. OneNote automatically backs up, by default, every 1 day. If you're a heavy user you might want to set that to be a little more frequent or if you have a particularly slow machine you might consider setting it to be a little less frequent.
I've never needed to resort to my OneNote backup. Yet.
International & American English, French, German, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese and Korean.
Sort of. If you have a digitizer like the Wacom unit shown at 9.20 below you can do pen input. A digitizer is a device that attaches to your computer and accepts input from a pen-like device. Digitizers are built into the screens of tablet PCs and most PDAs. It's worth pointing out that the digitizers on Tablet PCs are generally much better than the ones you attach to a desktop computer - the sample rate is much higher so the quality of the writing recognition should be much better.
To get Digital Ink, however, you'll also need to install the Tablet PC version of Windows XP on your machine. It's a superset of WindowsXP and seems to like alternate input devices much better. Easy to install, but rather hard to get your hands on. The hitch here is that the Tablet PC Operating System isn't available at retail. You either have to buy a Tablet PC or get it via an MSDN subscription. If you want an MSDN subscription you can order one through Amazon.com -- see section 9.30 below.
One thing that can help is to make sure that the rule lines you're using are appropriate for your particular handwriting. See View | Rule lines to adjust them. If you tend to write big you'll want larger rule lines, and vice-versa.
There are a few things to check.
1. Make sure you're not accidentally pressing the button on your stylus.
2. If you have a Toshiba tablet try disabling the "Symbol Commander" which tries to guess what you're trying to do based upon gestures.
3. Try going to Tools | Options | Handwriting and uncheck the box for automatically selecting Pen or Selection tool.
Just drag and drop the Outlook note where you want it in OneNote and it will be there.
Use your mouse (or keyboard) select the text you want to copy over from your browser, then drag it to the OneNote window and drop it on the note page where you want it. If OneNote is minimized just drag to the taskbar, pause over the OneNote tab on the Taskbar until OneNote opens then drag to where you want it on the OneNote page and drop.
You can only drop it on the current OneNote page. There isn't any way to navigate to other pages, folders or sections while you're dragging. If you want it to appear on a different section or page you'll need to drop it on the current page, then cut/copy and paste it on the page/section where you want it.
No, not in version 1. That level of integration is being considered for version 2.
Nope - it requires Outlook 2003. You can still attach your .ONE files to an e-mail message, like any other file, using Eudora, earlier versions of Outlook or any other mail client that supports file attachments, of course.
(Thanks to Lori Birtley for this!) The Logitech software has a button to send the page to OneNote. One thing to be aware of is that it sends the page as an image and you cannot convert the hand written text to type written text (or search across the handwritten text since OneNote sees the page as a big image).
The software that has the OneNote button is new and available to download from the Logitech site: http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/page=downloads/software&CRID=1808&contentid=7165&countryid=19&languageid=1
If you're running SP1 you can do it with Insert | Date & Time or by pressing ALT+SHIFT+F
Yes, as a matter of fact you can. Press CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+= and it will zoom in for you. Keep pressing it to zoom in more and more. CTRL+ALT+- (the minus sign from the numeric keypad) will zoom back out again.
If you want to have a Zoom button on the toolbar you can add it. Click View | Toolbars | Customize, go to the All Commands category and at the very bottom of the command list you'll find Zoom. Drag and drop it to your toolbar where you want it.
If you can hook up your audio source to the mic jack on your computer you can record easily that way. Most audio devices will be able to connect that way -- usually with a simple audio cable connected from the "Headphones" or "Speaker" jack on the audio device to the mic jack on the computer.
It removes skipped outline levels. For example if you have an outline that looks like this:
I. This is my first level.
1. This is my
second level, but it's actually on the third level.
It moves the second level item up to the real second level. So it will look like this:
I. This is my first level.
A. This is my second level, now on
the second level.
Click the toolbar icon to open a new side note, then click the back arrow button from the toolbar that appears at the bottom to switch to your previous side note.
Best trick is to create a custom note flag called "Audio" (or whatever you would like to call it) and assign that note flag every time you're recording an audio note. Then the Note Flags Summary will be able to show you an aggregate of all your audio notes.
Click the page you want to be the main page, then hold down CTRL and click the page that you want to be the subpage. Right-click either page and select "Group Pages." Keep in mind that whichever page tab is higher will be the page that becomes the main page.
Right-click the page tab and select "Ungroup Pages."
1. The correct way is to move the "my stationery.one" out of the templates
folder and into your My Notebook folder, then delete the page you want to
remove, close the section and move it back to templates. To delete all custom
pages, just delete the file from templates.
Templates is a hidden folder here: C:\Documents and
Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\
(Thanks to MVP Diane Poremsky for this answer)
2. If you're running the SP1 preview you can now from within OneNote. Choose Format->Stationery, then click on the plus next to "My Stationery" so you can see your custom stationery pages. Then right-click on the >one you want to delete and pick "Delete".
(Thanks Owen!)
Create your custom template, then save it as a new stationery by opening the New taskpane and clicking the "Save Current Page as Stationery" link at the bottom of the task pane.
You have a couple of options, actually.
1. You can drag and drop the file to your OneNote page. That will create a link and create a copy of the file in your My Notebook folder. Keep in mind that if you edit the file from OneNote that the changes will NOT be reflected in your original source file. Conversely any subsequent changes in your original source file will not be reflected in the copy linked in OneNote.
2. You can create a file link in OneNote that points at the original file. The link format is like this:
<file://C:\my documents\important file.txt>
Where you use the correct path and filename to the document you want to link. There is a nifty freeware tool to make this easier, it's called Clipname and you can find it here.
You probably have "Snap to Grid" turned on. Go to Edit | Snap to Grid to turn it off.
Yes, but not only the arrow keys. If you right-click the brown header on the text container and select "Move" you can then use the arrow keys to move the container up, down, left or right. So you do need the mouse to start the process, then you can use the keyboard.
View | Page List then sort it by date.
You have to have Windows Media Player 8 or greater and DirectX 8.1 installed in order for the playback of audio recordings to work. If you don't have them go to Windows Update where you should be able to download and install them.
If you downloaded DirectX 9.0 from Windows Update you may find that you have other problems; 9.0a is now available for download through Windows Update and seems to resolve the problem.
You have to type a note while recording so that there is a note for the audio recording to be associated with. The icon for the Audio Recording will appear just to the left of the note. If you don't want to type a note, just start a new note that simply says "Audio" while it's recording. That's sufficient to get the icon.
One user reported similar symptoms being caused by running SETI@Home. If you're running SETI you might try turning it off, at least temporarily, and see if the problem goes away.
1) Do you have Outlook 2003 installed?
2) Go to Internet Explorer, Tools | Internet Options | Programs and make sure Outlook is configured to be your default mail client.
Some people have reported that result if they have McAfee SpamKiller running. Try turning it off and see what happens.
Try copying the installation files from the CD to your hard drive and try installing again. That has worked for some people.
Check your video display properties (Start | Settings | Control Panel) and make sure you're set to 32-bit color and not 16-bit color.
OneNote 2003 doesn't support printing rule or grid lines on the page.
Make sure you don't have your backup folder isn't set to the same directory as your My Notebook folder. Tools | Options | Open & Save.
See 7.01. Same fix.
Yes, that's a known issue.
Create a new text file using Notepad (or the text editor of your choice) and paste everything between the ====s into it.
============
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\OneNote]
"FirstBoot"= -
============
Name that file: ontray.reg and save it somewhere like the desktop where you can easily find it. Close OneNote and Double-click the Ontray.reg file to add the relevant line to your registry. Restart your computer and it should work fine.
You can download the file, already made, here. Please note - this file is provided without warranty or guarantee. Please make sure you have a known-good backup of your system before you add/edit anythingto your registry.
First thing I'd do is see if you can restore from a backup version of your data file. If that doesn't work, try starting OneNote with the /ForceRepair switch. (Start | Run | onenote /forcerepair)
If that doesn't work there is one more thing you can do (NOTE: THIS IS NOT SUPPORTED - DO IT AT YOUR OWN RISK)
A1: Send an e-mail to mswish@microsoft.com and put "OneNote" in the subject.
A2: Post it in the microsoft.public.onenote newsgroup. Members of the OneNote team do monitor that group from time to time and if I see a particularly valuable feature suggestion I always try to forward it along to the proper team members.
With the advent of SP1 OneNote now has a limited API and already we're starting to see some utilities come available for OneNote. (Note: I have not tested each and every one of these so I can't vouch for their quality)
Perhaps the most popular request is to allow for linking within OneNote between notes. For example you have Note A on one page and Note B on another page (maybe even in a different section) and you want to create some kind of hyperlink on Note B that will take you to Note A.
Another popular request is the ability to use a +/- button to show/hide subpages. For pages with a large number of subpages this would greatly simplify and clean up the display. To vote on this suggestion click here.
You can create tasks in Outlook from OneNote but when you mark the task complete in either program it doesn't mark the same task complete in the other program. Popular feature request is to link the two tasks so that if it is marked complete in one, the other will show that status as well. To vote on this suggestion click here.
One area OneNote is weak in for students is that it doesn't natively support an equation editor for inserting mathematical equations. This suggestion is to add support for this capability. To vote on this suggestion click here.