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Dedication Kathy Jacobs: To Michelle Johlas, who believed I could do two books in 18 months Bill Jelen: To Robert F. Jelen who bought my first PC back in 1982.
iii
About the Author
K
athy Jacobs fell in love with OneNote while writing Kathy Jacobs on PowerPoint. Using OneNote to organize her life, she persuaded Bill Jelen to let her put together a book on this awesome product. Since starting the book, Kathy has also started a OneNote Website: www.OneNoteAnswers.com, where you can find new stationary files, articles, and other OneNote related information. Kathy posts frequently to the OneNote newsgroup. Kathy has been a Microsoft MVP in PowerPoint since the spring of 2003. In the Spring of 2004, she became a OneNote MVP. Bill Jelen is the principal behind MrExcel.com. A long-time keeper of paper To Do lists, he began using OneNote as soon as the preview was released in 2003. After using OneNote to organize and co-author VBA & Macros for Microsoft Excel, he knew that this was the best product to have come out of Microsoft in years. Jelen has shown OneNote on TechTV’s Call for Help, talked it up on the Dave Graveline radio show, discussed the benefits of OneNote in eCommerceTimes and TechNewsWorld. He is a crusader in trying to convince people that they need OneNote even though they don’t have a tablet PC.
iv
Acknowledgements
K
athy Jacobs wishes to thank Bruce Jacobs, TechSmith, Microsoft, Chris Pratley and Bill Jelen.
Bill Jelen: Thank you to Michael Kaplan for being the one guy on the planet who knew how to generate a GUID from VBA. Thanks to Roan Kang for introducing me to the product, Kathy Jacobs for saying “We should write a book on this!”, Andrew May and Donovan Lange for the VB.Net examples on the API. My apologies to Joe Phillips, Tom Greene and every bookseller everywhere who we inconvenienced by holding the publication in order to report on SP1. Thanks to my family – Mary Ellen, Josh & Zeke Jelen - for putting up with me writing another book – I am sorry to say that another book is coming right after this one, so I will again be stuck in the office for too long. Thanks to my mom for instilling the obsessive tendencies that make me a perfect candidate for using OneNote. Thanks to my sister Barb Jelen for running the accounting and order processing division at MrExcel. Thanks to Tracy Syrstad for running MrExcel Consulting while I was working on this project. Thanks to Amber MacArthur, Andy Walker and Leo LaPorte for hosting the best Tech TV show on the planet. Thanks to Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston for inventing the spreadsheet in 1979 – without you – the entire computer revolution never would have happened.
v
vi
Contents 1.
WHAT’S ONENOTE? ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾
2.
3 5 6 10
THE ONENOTE INTERFACE ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾
3.
The Obvious Uses The Not-So-Obvious Uses How did OneNote come to be? Where Does OneNote Store Things?
1
Adding notes to pages Deleting Notes, Pages, and Sections Flagging Notes Date Stamps Searching for Notes Moving Content Around Customizing OneNote Pages Stationery Security
13 15 24 25 30 31 35 38 39 41
USING ONENOTE WITH YOUR TABLET PC 47 ¾ What’s the Difference Between a TabletPC and a Tablet? ¾ Screen Orientation ¾ Choosing a Pen vii
50 51 53
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CONTENTS
¾ Textual Inked Notes ¾ Drawn Inked Notes
4.
ONENOTE AUDIO AND VIDEO ¾ Configuring Audio and Video ¾ OneNote and Audio ¾ OneNote and Video Audio and Video Limitations
5.
72 73 74 76 77
79 81 87 90
SHARING NOTES ¾ Common Pages ¾ Sharing Via Email ¾ Sharing Via Remote Storage ¾Sharing Interactively
8.
59 66 68 69
SAVING ONENOTE CONTENT ¾ Why No Save Option? ¾ Saving as MHT ¾What Else is in the “My NoteBook” Folder?
7.
57
SIDE NOTES ¾ Side Note Basics ¾ Moving Side Notes to Your Notebook ¾ Side Note Use: Side Thoughts ¾Side Note Use: Phone Messages
6.
54 55
93 96 97 99 100
CREATE YOUR OWN STATIONARY ¾Designing Stationery ¾Adapting Default Stationery ¾Other Stationery Tasks
109 112 118 119
CONTENTS
9.
USING ONENOTE WITH OUTLOOK 2003 121 ¾Creating Appointments ¾Creating Contacts ¾Creating Tasks ¾Sending Notes as Email ¾Importing Meeting Details
10.
135 137 148 149
153 156 157 167 168 170 171
USING ONENOTE WITH POWERPOINT ¾Designing Presentations ¾Reviewing Presentations ¾Taking Notes During Presentations
13.
133
USING ONENOTE FOR RESEARCH ¾Planning Your Research ¾Collecting Information ¾Track Research from Print Books and Journals ¾Record an audio interview or lecture ¾Send to Microsoft Word ¾Research Task Pane
12.
124 125 126 127 129
TO DO LISTS IN ONENOTE ¾Old Methods of To Do Lists ¾Basic OneNote To Do List ¾Advanced OneNote To Do List ¾Built-in Methods for OneNote To Do Lists
11.
ix
175 179 183
USING ONENOTE WITH WORD ¾Sending General Notes to Word ¾Sending Lists and Outlines to Word ¾Sending Word Documents to OneNote
173
185 188 191 193
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14.
CONTENTS
USING ONENOTE WITH EXCEL ¾OneNote and Tabular Data ¾Excel Using Copy & Paste ¾Insert Excel Document as Picture ¾Bring Excel Data To Onenote Using A Screen Clipping
15.
210
213 215 221 222 225
USING ONENOTE AT HOME ¾Grocery & Meal Planning ¾Monthly Bill Minder ¾Emergency Number Vault ¾Travel Planning ¾Garden Journal
17.
199 201 208
ONENOTE IN THE CLASSROOM ¾Lesson Planning Tools ¾Precreated Assignment and Test Material ¾Other Classroom Management Tools ¾Student Uses
16.
197
229 231 242 244 245 245
USING OFFICE VBA TO PROGRAMMATICALLY INTERACT WITH ONE NOTE 249 ¾Sending Data Using Command Line Switches ¾Using Import
253 264
APPENDIX A WHERE TO GET MORE HELP ¾Group Help Sources ¾OneNote Web Sites
283 284
281
CONTENTS
APPENDIX B OTHER ONENOTE IDEAS ¾Tools People Have Written
xi
287 289
APPENDIX C ONENOTE SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS AND DEPENDENCIES 295
Chapter
1
What’s OneNote? ¾
The Obvious Uses
¾
The Not-So-Obvious Uses
¾
How did OneNote come to be?
¾
Where Does OneNote Store Things?
Chapter 1
What’s OneNote? You’ve got OneNote. Now, you are wondering what you can do with it. Whether you bought it, are trying the trial version, or are just interested in learning more about the product, you have come to the right place to learn what you can do with it. You know the official reasons for buying OneNote, the stuff from the box and Microsoft’s Web site. Instead of repeating all of that, this chapter is here to introduce you to all the things that OneNote can help you do.
THE OBVIOUS USES Just from the name of the product, you have already guessed the number one use for OneNote: Putting all your notes in one place. 3
Chapter
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4
WHAT’S ONENOTE
•
A meeting attendee who needs to know what was said and who is going to take which action items
•
A student who needs to take notes during class
•
A writer who needs to organize thoughts for a piece
•
A researcher who needs to track where source material came from
•
A busy parent with a hefty to-do list who wants to keep the list at their fingertips
•
A list maker who has a million scraps of paper with notes, lists, and numbers on them who wants to put it all in one place
What do all of these people have in common? OneNote can help them do better. •
For the meeting attendee, there are pre-designed note pages that have all the fields you need to take meeting minutes
•
For the student, there are pre-designed note pages for different classes
•
For the writer, there is built-in outlining functionality for organizing thoughts into articles, chapters, and books
•
For the researcher, there is automatic annotation for information from the Web or other files
•
For the busy parent, there are ordered lists of different types that can be manipulated to show what’s done, what’s hot, and what’s not
•
For the list maker, there is a built-in hierarchy for information organization, as well as great search capabilities for finding just the note you need
WHAT’S ONENOTE
5
All of these solutions rely on the basic capabilities of OneNote. The built-in features that Microsoft knew you would want were provided as best they could. But that is only the beginning of what OneNote can do for you.
THE NOT-SO-OBVIOUS USES Do design work? OneNote allows you to combine text and graphics on the same page; you can easily create rough sketches, annotate, and store them. Create storyboards for presentations or videos? OneNote lets you create the basic storyboard content, move it around, add to it, remove items, and share it for review. Create websites and pages? OneNote can act as your neverending piece of paper to help you determine your basic layout. This is even easier than doing the design on paper. Because you can move elements anywhere on the page, changes become easy. Once you have the rough design done, you can even save your design as a Web file and bring it into your formal site creation environment. Need to keep a kid occupied? OneNote can act like a giant, never filled drawing tablet or coloring book. Even better, any game you can play on paper can be created in OneNote. Use it on a Tablet PC or a Notebook, and you save resources and eliminate clean up. Need to record a lecture or meeting? OneNote will let you record the sound and even the video while you continue to take notes. Even better, it will mark the multimedia files so that you can pull up what was being recorded while you were taking notes. Listening to a piece of music you need to learn to play or sing? Record it with OneNote and you can add your own annotations to know what is going on in the piece. Need to create choreography for that piece? Listen to the piece and draw your dance movements as it plays.
Chapter
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Chapter
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WHAT’S ONENOTE
HOW DID ONENOTE COME TO BE? Before we go too far into how to do all these great and miraculous tricks with OneNote, let’s cover how OneNote came to be the tool you are using today. NOTE The information in this section is either summarizations or actual quotes of Chris Pratley’s Web blog. Chris is the Group Publishing Manager for Office Authoring Services. To you and me that means that he is the manager responsible for Microsoft’s Word, Publisher, and OneNote teams. Chris’s blog can be found on the Web at URL: http://weblogs.asp.net/chris_pratley/
In Chris’s January 30th blog entry, he discusses how OneNote got started: as an email exchange in November 2000 between Chris and Steven Sinofskey, the Senior VP for Office at Microsoft. The two discussed creating a new outlining tool that would allow Office users to more easily track information that “…was not yet a document.” While Chris is a self-proclaimed non-outliner, the idea of meeting the need was very interesting to him. He started thinking about how to make work “drastically easier” for people who create unstructured notes, as well as those who were more used to a structured approach to information storage. To get a really great idea of what he ended up with, let’s read from the man himself: Over the 2000-2001 holidays I thought about this more (not that I thought hard - it was more of a percolation). In January I blasted out a draft “vision” document to describe a new tool that would be what I would want to make my daily work life more effective. Of course it wasn’t just for work- it would be useful for all sorts of things. In fact when you break down work into its component parts, your non-work life or student life starts to be pretty similar: things to do, important stuff to remember, things to review, and a bunch of stuff you think
WHAT’S ONENOTE
you might need some day but can’t be sure. Not to mention phone numbers, passwords, frequent flyer numbers, people’s names and addresses, links, blah blah blah. Things that defy categorization (or do they?). The key insight I had at this point was that whatever this tool was, it had to let you capture the thought or piece of info as you had it without forcing you to deal with any software goo up front. To take a note in Outlook you had to find the place where you were allowed to take notes. But if it was a phone number, you were supposed to use Contacts, but you had to create a contact and name it before you could save the phone number. Post-its beat that hands down. This new tool, which I called “Scribbler” would be as close to electronic paper as we could get to make capturing information easy, but then have much more power than paper to help you deal with the stuff you put into it. About this time the TabletPC was getting going, and that seemed like an interesting effort. It is always good when there is “synergy’ happening. New hardware that was sort of in the same space as the software I wanted to make would help. But realistically, it would take years for TabletPCs to take over the installed base even if they were a runaway hit, so with Scribbler I decided we should target desktop and laptops PCs, but be sure to be great on the tablet, where you’d have all the power of a laptop but also ink and pen UI. So we had to build a great keyboard app first and foremost. During the product creation process, “Scribbler” was renamed as “OneNote.” Once the product was into the alpha testing stage, the team decided to offer it to some non-Microsoft employees in the Seattle area. In February of 2004, Chris provided some historical information on the field trial of OneNote and how the trial impacted the development of the tool. The next couple of pages are Chris’s blog entry from February 4, 2003, “Field Trials.” We built OneNote in relative secrecy during 2001-2002. Well, it wasn’t cloak and dagger stuff - we just didn’t make any
7
Chapter
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Chapter
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WHAT’S ONENOTE
effort to talk about it outside of Office - although rumours that Office was building some “TabletPC app” did spread to other parts of the company, a misconception which until recently was probably worse inside the company than outside, since we were able to communicate pretty clearly to the public the message we wanted to get across after we announced. The result of this lack of exposure was that we had become a little insular and no longer had a good perspective on the product as a whole - was it useful? Did it suck? Although we kept the project secret, there was a select group of total outsiders whom we enlisted to burst our bubbles and give us raw real world feedback. Now, we had done usability tests on individual features, but we had not yet had the whole app up and functioning well enough to do real “dogfooding” - that is, living with the product and trying to do real work with it, rather than just test it or play with it. For that we wanted people in a variety of life situations - students, professionals - anyone who used a computer and tried to take notes or do research. We recruited around 20 people in the Seattle area to become part of our “Field trial”. We narrowed down a pool of about a hundred people to a set of around 30 whom we thought would make good candidates based on their answers to our screening questions. We then approached these people personally to verify if they would be a good fit, and if they were, we invited them to join. Since we had 6 program managers on the team and I had decided about 3 participants per PM was a good ratio given the time investment we were going to make, we wanted 18 participants, with a few as backup in case some had to drop out. We got 20, and prepared the NDAs (non-disclosure agreements, whereby the participants agreed not to blab to others or the press about what they were doing for cheap glory). We had 6 students at the University of Washington, and the rest were spread across quite a spectrum, from a dean at the university, to a health care professional, to a writer, to a belly dancing instructor.
WHAT’S ONENOTE
Although OneNote could barely stay up for a few minutes at a time, we already had very good file robustness, so people were not likely to lose any data even if they crashed. Always saving helps in that regard, as does a new file structure designed explicitly to prevent corruption and allow super-fast incremental saves. Although I am a huge XML fan, sometimes binary file formats just ARE better at some things. (Note: that doesn’t mean we won’t do XML in the future - you just gotta admit that XML isn’t always the best at everything) We collected a bunch of tablets (mostly beta hardware and prototypes, since there were so few to go around in the fall of 2002 before they had launched) and gave out the machines with an “alpha” build of OneNote on them. We agreed with our participants that we would meet them for 2 hrs a week - one visit was to watch them in action doing whatever they do with the tablet and OneNote, and the other hour was an interview where we asked them to describe their experiences, what they liked and didn’t like, what they had discovered that week, etc. We also committed to be on call to save them if a disaster struck with their notes. We kept a tally of what features were discovered when, and if people deviated too much off the norm, we stepped in and told them about some things so that they wouldn’t miss out on the later parts of the trial. The trial ;lasted 8 weeks, getting progressively more advanced. We lost about 5 of the participants over that time – some just didn’t use the product, and a couple found they couldn’t handle the time commitment. The trial went pretty well, although the instability of the alpha meant people were taking notes in class and had to switch to paper when the app came tumbling down. We also found unsurprisingly that the willingness to adopt new technology more or less correlated with age (can’t teach an old dog new tricks!). And on top of that the students were just animals in terms of adopting OneNote – it was clearly a good fit for them.
9
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10
We learned a lot from the trial - it helped answer critical questions about our user model, our assumptions about how people would use the product and to what end, what features just didn’t work, what features would get used a lot, and importantly, what expectations people would have before they used the product. This latter was important because as we crafted our message to analysts, the press and the public, we had to anticipate what conclusions they would jump to when we announced, and tune our statements to make sure they did not come away with the wrong impression (like, it is a Tabletonly app!). One thing that the field trial helped us with was to make abundantly clear that the ink model we had was weighted too heavily on structure, as I discuss below. That prompted the ink-o-rama sessions to get ink to a shippable state. Want to learn more about Chris’s views on OneNote, project management, project development, and other inspiring topics? Read his blog. Each month’s entries can be viewed by checking out the archive links in the left column of his blog pages.
WHERE DOES ONENOTE STORE THINGS? OneNote has its own hierarchy for storing information. It is based on the spiral or three-ring notebooks you have been using all your life. In fact, the default one is even called “My Notebook.” When you open OneNote, you see a number of tabs across the top of the window: Fig. 1.1
Each of these tabs is a section in your notebook. On a new installation, you will see these tabs: “General,” “Side Notes,” and “Meetings.” Just as each section of your paper notebook can have one or many pages, each section of your electronic notebook can have
WHAT’S ONENOTE
11
one or more pages. These pages are indicated on the left side of your window by numbered tabs as shown Fig. 1.2 in Figure 1.2. Notice that the third tab has a blank piece of paper instead of a number. Clicking this tab adds a new blank page to your section. Want to see your page names instead of the page numbers? Check out View Titles in Page Tabs. This switch changes you between page numbers and page titles. Pages are defaulted to be the size of the screen. When you need more space, either vertically or horizontally, you merely move your cursor to the edge and more space is added. Pages can be as big or as small as you want them to be. Just as sections are broken into individual pages, pages can be broken into individual subpages. The tab with nothing on it is used to create a subpage. Subpages are useful when you need to have a lot of content together under one page, but don’t want the pages to be hard to scan visually.
TIP 1
Need to make a quick note?
SideNotes are special notes that are created from your desktop. The SideNotes program is loaded and available as soon as you log in to your computer. It runs as an icon in your taskbar with the other programs you always have running on your machine. The interface is much like the main OneNote interface, but instead of multiple sections and pages, you are given a stack of papers that work like a sticky pad. Add information here and it will be available for use when you have either the full product open or just the SideNotes product. SideNotes are covered in detail in Chapter 5.
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WHAT’S ONENOTE
When you open OneNote the first time, it creates a folder in My Documents called “My Notebook.” This folder will contain all of your OneNote information. Inside this folder, OneNote will create a number of files: •
General.one: The stuff you put into any page in the general section of your notebook
•
Side.one: Anything which currently resides on a SideNote
•
Meetings.one: Any notes which appear in the Meetings section of your notebook
•
OneNote Table Of Contents.onetoc: A table of contents for all the sections and pages in your notebook. This file is also used to help OneNote know which sections are open or closed at any given time.
OneNote can also store information in sections in other folders. If you wish to create a section somewhere other than My Notebook, you can use the Save As option to create a folder either within your notebook folder or somewhere else on your computer or network. Need to share your content with other team members? In Chapter 7 you will learn about putting your OneNote sections on a shared server, a shared drive, or other common area. Once the data is there, you can set up sharing sessions where you both end up with duplicate copies of the file so that you know you are seeing the same things. Each user-id on a specific computer has its own notebook in their own My Documents folder. If you want to share sections or folders with another user, you can put it in a shared area and both can have it open at the same time. Now that you have a basic understanding of what OneNote saves, where it saves it, and what you can do with it, it is time to move to the next chapter and learn the OneNote Interface.
Chapter
2
The OneNote Interface ¾ Adding notes to pages ¾ Deleting Notes, Pages, and Sections ¾ Flagging Notes ¾ Date Stamps ¾ Searching for Notes ¾ Moving Content Around ¾ Customizing OneNote Pages ¾ Stationery ¾ Security
Chapter 2
The OneNote Interface Now that you know what OneNote is, it is time to start learning how to use it. The first thing to understand is the type of objects you can place on your note pages.
ADDING NOTES TO PAGES Note pages can really contain anything you need. However, the content you place on a page can all be thought of as one of these types of objects: •
Typed text objects
•
Sounds
•
Written or “inked” text objects
•
Videos
•
Screen shots
•
Graphics
•
Office documents
•
Highlighting
•
Linked files
•
Background objects
•
Web content
We will look at each of these types of content in detail in just a bit. First, you need to know where you can add content to a note page and how to do it. 15
Chapter
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THE ONENOTE INTERFACE
Where can notes go? Your note page is divided into two segments, the title area and the content area. If you look at the top of an empty page, you will see a color difference between the two areas. (Since this is a black and white book, the difference will not show as well.) Fig. 2.1
The top area contains a placeholder for the page title (the large white area) and the date and time the page was created. You can add content to any area of the title area and it will expand to accept the content. You can place content into the title area as well, but you probably want to limit the contentto highlights and summaries of the page content.
TIP 1
Want to change the size of your title area?
You can add more space for heading information by either dragging the edge of the page header or by typing CTRL-SHIFT-. (that is, control, shift, and period all at once). By the same token, you can make the header area smaller by typing CTRL-SHIFT-, (that is, control, shift, and comma all at once). If you just want to toggle between a small area and a larger area, use the keyboard shortcut of ALT-CTRL-X. If you want to zoom in or out on your header, use ALT-CTRL-SHIFT-+ and ALT-CTRL-SHIFT- (that is, the plus or minus sign with those strokes).
THE ONENOTE INTERFACE
17
The lower area is where you are going to create most of your notes. This area can have rule lines as shown here, or can be blank. If this page were created from a piece of stationery, you would see most of the stationery elements in this area. How do I add notes? One of the greatest aspects of OneNote’s interface is the ease with which you can add notes. You click and you add content. When content is added, it will be placed in a holder. If that holder is a text holder, Fig. 2.2 it looks like this when selected: See the two arrows on the right side of the gray bar? These arrows allow you to adjust the width of your text chunk. If the holder is for a graphic, it will have the edges and handles you expect. A selected graphic will look like this: Where can items go on the page? You can click anywhere on the current page to add content. You do not need to be near other content. Just like when you put your pen or pencil somewhere on a piece of paper, and write or draw, wherever your cursor is when you type, draw, or paste is where your note will appear. How do I move things around on the page? Clicking the bar or the handles for an object allows you to move that object around on the page. If you bring two pieces of information so that they are one above the other on the page, OneNote will assume that you want them combined into a single item and stick them together for you. To take elements apart, either select the item and drag it to somewhere else or click to the left of the element where you see a four-directional arrow. That arrow will select anything in its line and allow you to move it. If you have pasted text from another
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THE ONENOTE INTERFACE
program, that arrow will let you select the entire pasted chunk. In these cases, if you need less than the whole chunk, you will need to select the each part you need and drag it separately. Once you have moved it away from the holder, it becomes its own piece and can be moved or adjusted on its own. Outlines, bullets and numbers OneNote has built-in lists of many types. Each list is considered a hierarchical list, with as many levels as you want. Each indentation is a new level in the hierarchical list. To add the default bullets to a set of notes, click the bullet button on the toolbar. To move into the next level of indentation, click return to get to a new line and either tab in or use the increase indent button. If you are on any list level after the first, you can move out a level by clicking SHIFT+Tab. Numbered lists work just like bulleted lists. The power of OneNote’s outlining is demonstrated by the ease of changing from one bullet or number style to another. Next to both the bullet button and the number button, there are drop down arrows which bring up alternate bullet and numbering schemes. There are five built-in numbering schemes and five more built-in bullet schemes. If you want to create your own scheme, select the “More…” option at the bottom of either list, and the appropriate task pane will appear. These task panes allow you to change the scheme for your list. Once either task pane is up, you can also access the “List” task pane, which allows you to define the indentation space and the vertical spacing for the current list. Want to change the look of an entire list at once? Clicking once on the note holder will allow you to change the spacing between the bullet and the text. Clicking twice will allow you to change the bullets for the entire list in the holder at the same time.
THE ONENOTE INTERFACE
19
Special numbered list options When you have the Numbering task pane showing, you have two more formatting options. Clicking the word “Font” brings up the Font task pane, which allows you to reformat the selected text. Clicking “Customize Numbering” brings up a task pane that lets you change the sequence indicators for your list and the formatting of the numbers on the list. If you have a member of a numbered list selected when you are looking at the Customize Numbering task pane, you will also be able to change the start number for the current list member. There is much more you can do with lists, including collapsing and expanding your lists, combining your lists with flags for more customization, and selecting elements by level. Those details are discussed later in this chapter and in Chapter 10 where we talk about working with lists and flags. Types of Notes At the beginning of the chapter, there was a list of types of notes you could create within OneNote. Each of these types can be placed anywhere on the notes page. They can exist alone in a note holder or in combination with other notes in a holder. It is now time to take a more detailed look at the various things you can add to your note pages. Typed text Typed text objects are words added to a page in one of three ways: via typing, via converted written text, or copied in from another source. These objects are likely to be the bulk of your note content if you are using a regular PC. Typed text can be formatted in many of the same ways you are familiar with in other applications. You can change the font, color, size, and several other attributes.
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THE ONENOTE INTERFACE
As in other Office applications, you can change the look of the text via buttons on the toolbar. However, if Fig. 2.3 you select Format→ Font, instead of the expected window, you will get a task pane that allows you to make your changes: Written Objects Written objects are those added using a pen on a TabletPC. These objects can be converted to text or left as ink. We will talk a lot about these items in the chapter “Using OneNote with Your Tablet PC.” Graphics Graphics can be added to your note pages by either drawing them or copying and pasting them. Drawn objects are created either with your mouse or your pen. They are sketches stored only on the note page. When pasted to another application, any OneNote graphic is pasted as a bitmap drawing. Highlighting Highlighting creates a special case graphic. You create highlighting by selecting a felt marker for your pen, and writing, drawing, or scribbling on the note page. Highlighting cannot be changed to text. Highlighting stays where it is placed on the page and doesn’t automatically move when new elements are added above or to the left of the highlighting.
THE ONENOTE INTERFACE
21
Background objects Background objects are objects that exist on the stationery file used to create your page. In most situations, these objects can be edited and changed, just like other content objects. Sounds Sounds can be added to your note page either directly from the microphone or from an existing file. If you want to add sounds from an existing file, select the file and drag it to the page. The file name will be added to your page and can be clicked to start. In addition, the next time OneNote saves your notebook, a copy of the file will be placed in the notebook directory that contains the note page. Videos Like sounds, videos can be added either directly from a camera or from an existing file. The video files are added to your pages and stored within you notebook directory. Screen Shots OneNote will allow you to capture pieces of your screen as what is called a “Screen Clip.” When you start a screen clip, your computer screen will appear to dim. Click and drag through an area and the area will become clear. When you release the mouse, the selected area will be placed on your OneNote page with an annotation that shows the date and time the shot was captured. Office Files Want to have a copy of a Word, PowerPoint or Excel document in your OneNote Section? On any page, do an Insert→ Document as picture. You can then navigate to your document and have it added to your current page. There are other things you can do with Office files. We will talk about them in Chapters 13, 14, and 15.
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Other files Other files can also be added to your note page via drag and drop or copy and paste. Just as with sounds, when you add other files to your note page, you will see only a clickable link. A copy of the file will have been placed in the appropriate directory for the note page. Web content If you copy content from a Web page, OneNote does some extra processing for you. First, it will place the entire selection as one block of notes. These notes will be formatted as they are on the Web page, or as close to that formatting as OneNote can arrange. Second, any content pasted from a Web source will be with the URL for the content, as well as other useful information. We will cover the use of Web content in notes in the chapter “Using OneNote to Document Research.” Paste options with OneNote If you add content via copy and paste, you will be given several paste options, as in any Office 2003 application. However, the results of OneNote’s paste options aren’t always the same as you would expect. Where we paste the object, what paste special option we select, and what else is on the page all can affect your paste results. When you paste content onto a notes page, you have four different paste options. Keep Source Formatting When selected, “Keep Source Formatting” will keep the exact formatting as was applied to the text when it was copied. This text will also paste with dimensions as close to the original as is possible within the OneNote page.
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Match Destination Formatting When you select “Match Destination Formatting,” OneNote will give the pasted text the same formatting as the other notes on the page. If there isn’t any formatted text on the page yet, OneNote will apply the default formatting. Keep Text Only “Keep Text Only” is very much like “Match Destination Formatting.” The difference is that non-characters will be converted to standard characters. For example, bullets are replaced with an “o” or an asterisk, hyphens are replaced with dashes, hyperlinks are removed, etc. Paste as Picture “Paste as Picture” pastes a picture of the text as it exists in the original document. The picture is not editable. In addition, because the notes become a picture, the note can be sent to the background. What if there are already notes on the page? If you paste a note of any kind on a page that already has content, OneNote can also change how the text flows around the other objects on the page. Let’s paste that same block of text onto a page with elements on it, instead of an empty page. Fig. 2.4
Something you can’t see in the above shot is that there is a highlight over a part of the picture. As you look at the next few screen shots, look at where that highlight ends up.
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If you paste it as either Keep Source or Match Destination, OneNote will put the text on its own line, over other elements, at a default width. The result could look like this: Fig. 2.5
If you paste it with Keep Text, it will wrap it into the previous line. That would change the page from what it was above to this: Fig. 2.6
If you paste it as a picture, it will change even more, and end up looking like this: Fig. 2.7
DELETING NOTES, PAGES, AND SECTIONS Need to remove items from your notebook? You have a number of choices. For notes and pages, the easiest way to delete something is to select it and press the delete key. The second
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way to delete pages and notes is to select the items to delete, right-click, and choose “Delete.” Need a deleted page back? Go to ViewÆ Deleted Pages. This will bring up a special section that contains the pages you have deleted during this OneNote session. To undelete a page, right-click the page and select “Restore.” The page will return to the section where it was before you deleted it. What if you want to delete a section? To do that, you need to right-click on the section and choose “Delete” from the right-click menu. OneNote will ask you if you are sure you want to delete the section. Clicking “yes” will move the .ONE file for the selected section to your computer’s Trash Can. This is the only way to delete a section from inside OneNote, but you can also delete sections using Windows Explorer by selecting the .ONE file and deleting it.
FLAGGING NOTES Now that we know the basics of adding content to your notes pages, it is time to look at classifying your notes. OneNote allows you to mark your notes with a variety of flags. The flag choices can be found by clicking the Note Flag icon on your toolbar. The look of this button changes depending on which flag is currently selected. If you click the drop down arrow next to the flag button, you will get a list of the flag choices: Fig. 2.8
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To flag a section of text, select it and apply the appropriate flag. If you are going to be flagging text frequently, you may want to tear off this menu and leave it as an active toolbar instead. The toolbar Fig. 2.8 will look like this: Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? It really is. However, before you start using the flags too intensely, you should know what flags are available and how to customize them.
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Flag your title
Just as you can apply flags to any note on the note area of your page, you can also flag the title of your page and any content in the title area. This is quite useful when you need to remember where a specific page is, or if you have the habit of forming multiple pages with the same name, but different content.
Available flags The five flags shown above (To Do, Important, Question, Remember for Later, and Definition) are the flags that Microsoft knew you would need when using OneNote. If you look at the icons next to these note flags, you will see that the first three have specific icons: A checkbox for To Do items, a star for Important items, and a question mark for Questions. The other two notes have the same icon, a pair of A’s slightly offset from each other. For the first three flags, Microsoft guessed at what you might want to use for icons. For the last two, it just left the default icon.
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When you flag a note, you select it and use the toolbar or the dropdown list to apply the flag to the note. The flag icon will appear to the top right of the note. If the flag is set up to change the text, the change will be applied to the entire note. If you apply a “To Do” flag to one of the notes added earlier in this chapter, the checkbox Fig. 2.9 will be added like this: You can add multiple flags to a single note. Each flag icon will appear next to the previous icons. For example, if the To Do item is also an important question, you would add both the new flags as well as the “To Do” flag Fig. 2.10 and the note sample would look like this:
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Quick flagging notes
If you have a note or a note holder selected, you can apply a flag by clicking the icon on the toolbar. But, what if you want to apply a flag different from the one that currently shows on the toolbar? Click the drop down arrow and select the new flag. Not only will the flag icon on the toolbar change, your current selection will be flagged with it as well.
Removing flags To remove a flag from a note, set the flag button to the flag you want to remove and click the flag area. The flag will disappear.
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To remove multiple flags, click the drop down arrow and select “Remove Note Flags from Selection.” The “To Do” flag has a special property that you will want to use. If you have a note flagged as “To Do,” the box that appears is unchecked. When you are ready to flag the note, click the flag or reapply it. The icon will change to a checked box so that you can easily see that the item is completed. If you want to toggle the “To Do” flag off, you will need to click once to mark it as complete and a second time to remove it. We will talk more about “To Do” lists in the chapter “OneNote To Do List Scenarios.” Adding more flag types While the default icons are useful, they will not meet every need of every note taker. Fig. 2.11 Therefore, the ability to add up to 20 more types of flags is provided. To add more flag types, select “Customize My Note Flags” from the menu above to bring up the Customize My Note Flags task pane: Notice that there are four undefined note flags on the list with control keys attached to them, and sixteen more that are just accessible from the flags menu, button, or toolbar. These are provided so that you can create your own flags. Select one by clicking on it, and then click the
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“Modify” button. This will bring up the “Modify Note Flag” window: Using this box, Fig. 2.12 you can change the name of the tag, the symbol (icon) to show on the toolbar and, next to the note, the font color for the flagged content, and the highlight color for items marked with this flag. Be careful when changing both the font color and the highlight color for a single flag. You can easily make your notes unreadable. To help you avoid unreadable notes, the changes you make to the flag will be shown in the preview area. Let’s set up a new flag called “Book Content” which has an icon, a font color and a highlight Fig. 2.13 color setup. When we finish setting up the new flag, the Modify Note Flag box looks like this: Note that customizations do not affect notes you have already flagged. If you change the settings for a flag, previously flagged notes will not change, even if you have them selected.
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TIP 4
Once you change a flag’s name you can’t go back to “Undecided”
Once you change a flag name away from undecided, you cannot change it back. Those flags with the default name of “Undecided” are the only ones allowed to have duplicate names. Once you set a name for one of the Undecided flags, you cannot change it back to Undecided. You can name a flag Undecided only after all other Undecided flag names have been changed. However, once you do this, it is a fully defined custom flag, not a default undecided flag.
When you apply this flag to one of your existing notes, the note changes to this:
Fig. 2.13
DATE STAMPS Sometimes, when you add a note to a page you will want to add the date and time the note was made as well. There are a couple of different ways to add the date, depending on where you are adding the information. If you are adding the date to a note in the notes section, use the key sequence Alt-Shift-F. This will enter the current date and time as a text string wherever the cursor is currently located. For example, adding the date on May 5th adds this to the page: 5/4/2004, 4:07 PM. You can also use the same key sequence to add a date stamp to the title area of your page. However, since the date is already
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in the title, you might find it easier to change the date that is on the page instead of adding a new date stamp. To change the date of a page, click in the date area. To the right of the date, a calendar page icon will appear: Clicking this icon brings up a Fig. 2.14 calendar with the date selected for the page. To change to the current date, click the “Today” button. To change it to some other date, navigate to the desired month and year then click the desired date. OneNote will let you set the date to a past date, the current date or a future date. Fig. 2.15 To change the time of a page, click in the time area. To the right of the time, a clock icon will appear: Clicking this icon Fig. 2.16 brings up the “Change Time” box: The default time will be the current time. If you wish to select a different time, click the drop down arrow and choose from the list. Your choices will be on the hour or half hour, 24 hours a day.
SEARCHING FOR NOTES OneNote has two different search mechanisms built in. You can search for textual content or you can search for flagged notes. In both cases, you can limit your searches to anything from a single page to all open notebooks.
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Text searches The basic process for finding text within your notes pages is much like the process for finding text in any Office application. You open the search box and type in what you need to find. To open the search box, either do a CTRL+F or select Edit→ Find… from the menu. An empty search box with an arrow button next to it will appear at the right of your section tabs. Type your word or phrase into the box and either press the enter key or click the arrow button. Two things will happen: Your search results will be highlighted on every page in your document and the search box will change to: Fig. 2.17
The first words “as you would” are our search string. You would expect that this would search for the phrase “as you would” but instead it searches for the words “as,” “you,” and “would.” If you want to search for the entire phrase, you need to put the phrase in quotation marks. Next on the results bar is the indication of how many times the string was found and which instance is the first one on the current page. In our case, there were 33 instances of the phrase found and the first one on this page is number eleven. If you want to move to the next instance, use the right arrow, if you want to move to the previous instance, use the left one. The next area in the results is a button you can click to bring up the whole list of search results. The circled “x” at the far right closes the search results and unselects all found items. Clicking the View List button brings up the Page List task pane with the unique notes containing the search phrase. This task pane allows you to change how you see the results grouped and the scope of the search.
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How you see the results is determined by the “Sort list by” drop down. Your options are: Fig. 2.18
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Section: Show results grouped by section, with expansion and contraction options for each section
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Title: Show results grouped by page title, with expansion and contraction options for each page
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Date: Show results grouped by creation date of the page, with expansion and contraction options for each group of dates such as today, yesterday, this week, etc.
In addition to determining how the results will be grouped and what you can see, you can also change the order of the results from top to bottom or A to Z, and bottom to top or Z to A by clicking the button next to the drop down arrow. This task pane also lets you determine the scope of your search. You can search the entire notebook, the current folder and its subfolders, just the current folder, or the current section. You select the scope of the search using the “Search:” drop down at the bottom of the task pane. Changing the scope of your search will change the results of your search in real time. If you narrow the search range, the results will change instantaneously. If you widen the search, you will have a small delay before you see the results, as the search is re-run and new results gathered. Text search tips Because of the way OneNote does its searching, you may not always get the results you expect. It does not differentiate based on letter case. OneNote’s search also does not differentiate between partial and full words. However, if you put your strings
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in quotes, OneNote will only find that exact string, not words or phrases that contain the string. OneNote’s text search covers both the title area and the notes area of your pages. Use this ability to find pages when you don’t remember which notebook or section contains the page you need. Play around with OneNote’s text search. It may take a little bit to get used to the differences between how it works and how the other searches in Office work, but you are likely to find that it works better than you expect for finding note text. Flag searches You can also search your notes for the various flags you have used within your notebook. Searching for flags instead of text gives you a broader range of results, since you can flag anything on any part of the page. To search for flagged elements, use View→ Note Flags Summary or click the Note Flags Summary button: You have the same options for sorting Fig. 2.19 the results as you do with the text search, with the addition of an option to sort by note flag name and note text. You do not have the option to flip the results from Z to A. The scope of your search can be defined in many more ways for a flag search than for a text search. In addition to the options given above, you can also set the scope to be: •
This page group: Searches only the current page and its subpages
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Selected pages: Searches any page you have currently selected, no matter which section or folder contains them
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Today’s notes, Yesterday’s notes, This week’s notes, Last week’s notes, Older notes: Finds notes flagged today, yesterday, this week, last week or before last week. (These search options are quite useful when looking for To Do items and Important items.)
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At the bottom of this task pane, you will find two buttons: Fig. 2.20
Refresh Results Use this button to update the search results as you work in OneNote. Flag searches do not rerun if you add new flags. Click this button to see the new flags in your search results. Create Summary Page Use this button to add a page to the current section that contains the current flag summary. This button also creates and tracks summary lists of all kinds. Another use for it is finding the To Do list items you created during the day and making a copy of them all in one place. You can also use it to create a list of all the action items created and flagged during a meeting. Keep in mind that the notes on the flag summary page are copies of your original notes. Marking them completed does not mark the original note completed. Editing the flagged notes on the summary page does not change the original notes in any way. One more word of warning: If you use summary pages, be careful to delete the old summary page before you create a new one. Because all summary page notes have flags, the new summary page will pick up both the original note and the copy from the summary page.
MOVING CONTENT AROUND You’ve entered all these great notes onto a notes page and now you want to move them to another page. Or, you’ve realized that the meeting notes you just took are in the wrong section. The interface for making these changes is fairly simple. The interface may look familiar to you, especially if you are an Excel user. In Excel, copy or move spreadsheet or chart pages is done
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through a dialog box. In OneNote, to move content from one section to another, you also need to go through a dialog box. Moving notes from page to page This is the easiest change to make on your notes. You can either drag and drop them to another page or section, or you can use cut and paste to move the notes around. In either case, start on the page where your notes currently live. Select the notes you want to move. The easiest way to move the notes is to cut the elements (from your keyboard, the edit menu, the toolbars, or the right click menu), move to the new page (in this section or another), and paste the content. If the notes don’t end up where you want them on the page, drag the selected items around to the desired location. Moving pages If you want to move pages around in your notebook, your options depend on where you want the page to end up. You always have the option of cutting and pasting the page(s), but there are built-in tools that you may find easier to use. If you are moving pages around within the same section, click the page tab and drag it slightly to the right. You will notice that the cursor changes to a double-ended arrow. Drag the page up to where you want it in the list and release the mouse button. The page will move and you will see the change in order in your tab list. What if you need to move a page from one section to another? You can’t just drag it. OneNote won’t let you. Instead, select the page tab or tabs from the list, right-click on the tab, select “Move Page To.” The submenu for “Move Page To” is a living menu. Every time you select a section as a destination for a page move or copy. that section will be added to the menu. The last selectable item on the menu is always “Another Section.” If you select a section name from the menu, the page will be moved to that
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section. If you use the “Another Section” option, you will be given the choice of moving the page or copying the page. Fig. 2.21
Using these options, you can move the selected page(s) to any other section you want. If you wish to, you can even create a new section or new folder for the pages to move to. Notice that in the screen shot the Move and Copy buttons are not yet clickable? This is because no destination section has been selected. When you click a section, these buttons become clickable. Clicking either of the create buttons will prompt you for the name of the new section or folder. In addition, after you enter the new name, that section or folder will become your default choice for the destination for this move. If you select “Deleted Pages” for your destination, your pages will be deleted. Since there are easier ways to delete a page, don’t do this. However, if you do accidentally move pages to the “Deleted Pages” folder, you can restore them by viewing the “Deleted Pages” section and using the restore option from the right-click menu.
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Moving sections Just as you can re-arrange your pages within a section, you can move sections around as well. To change the order of your sections, right-click on one of the section tabs and select “Move…” This will bring up the “Move Section To” dialog box: Fig. 2.22
Just as with moving pages between sections, you can move the sections to a new spot by clicking on the section you want this section to follow. If you move the section to a folder, it will go in the folder in front of any other sections in the folder. You can also create a new folder to contain your section by clicking “Create New Folder…”
CUSTOMIZING ONENOTE PAGES When you open OneNote the first time, the pages you see are plain white spaces. I don’t know about you, but I prefer to see lines on my pages so that I have some idea of how big to make things. Luckily, the ability to add lines to your pages is fairly easy.
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Go to Tools→ Options, and click the word “Display” in the left hand column. The right hand column will change to show you options regarding how OneNote displays on your computer. The option you are most interested in right now is “Create all new pages with rule lines.” Put a check mark in that box, click OK and all new pages from there on will have lines. Don’t want the lines on new pages? Go back to Tools→ Options→ Display and uncheck the box. New pages won’t have the lines. What if you want to Fig. 2.23 turn the lines on (or off) on an existing page? View→ Rule Lines, slide over and select the kind of lines you want:
STATIONERY When you add a new page to your notebook, it will use the current stationery file to create the page. Stationery pages are special OneNote pages that allow you to easily create pages with certain content already on them. The ability to create note pages based on existing pages is one of the most powerful parts of OneNote. Stationery sets allow you to organize information, without having to re-create the organizational elements every time you add a new page. Many stationery sets are included with OneNote. To see what stationery you have available, you need to bring up the Stationery task pane. You can access this task pane either directly from the Format→ Stationery command, or by doing File→ New and then clicking the “New from stationery” link at the bottom of the task pane.
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At the top of the pane, you will see an area of stationery categories. To expand the categories, click the plus sign to its left. To use a piece of stationery, click the name. A new page will be created in your current section that has the stationery as its basis. Stationery pages are a great way to get ideas on what you can do with OneNote. You will want to investigate the stationery on your computer, but here is a quick tour of a few of the pages I find most useful:
Fig. 2.24
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The To Do lists – Found under the Planners category, these pages give you an easy way to enter and track the items on your To Do list.
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The Meeting Minutes pages – Found under Business, these pages are prestructured to help you get through your meetings with less pain. They even make minute-taking something I might actually volunteer to do!
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Lecture Notes and Study Questions – Found under the Academic category, this page lets you easily track what is going on in a training or teaching session. Students will use these pages as intended. I use them in my training design to make sure that I know what I need to cover during a particular session before I start the actual creation of the class.
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You will also find the blank pages quite useful. These pages let you create three different styles of blank pages. The first few selections in this category let you set the page size for your notes page. I really like the index card one. The next two pages set up college ruled blank pages and blank pages with grids. The rest of the blank pages will let you create new pages with colored backgrounds. While the other stationery pages are created with background graphics, the colored pages are actually notes pages with colored backgrounds. Towards the bottom of the Stationery task pane, you will find a drop down arrow that lets you set the default stationery for all pages in the current section. The list contains all the stationery pages you currently have installed on your computer. Use this option if you know that all of the pages in a single section will need to look alike. You can set a different stationery default for each section. This is useful if you keep all your messages in one section and all your meeting minutes in another. Set the default for the messages section to a phone message page and the default for the meeting minutes section to the appropriate minutes stationery page. If you don’t find enough variety in the stationery that comes with OneNote, search Office Online templates section for “stationery” – the results will contain pages from blank music paper to calendars to business trip information and more. If you don’t find the stationery page you need, you can create your own. Just like paper stationery, they come with information already on them. You add your specific content to the page, or copy elements from the stationery page to your current note page. We will be covering the creation of new stationery in the chapter “Create Your Own Stationery.”
SECURITY Are you in an environment where you need to be sure that no one can get at your notes without your permission? OneNote
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gives you the option of setting Fig. 2.25 up passwords on a section-bysection basis or on all of the sections in your notebook. In addition, you can set up how long it takes before a section’s secure lock is activated. Security is set up via the File→ Password Protection command or directly via the task pane interface. In either case, the Password Protection task pane will become visible: Before we start to add and remove passwords from sections, I want you to notice the tips listed on the task pane: The first tip is fairly obvious: Secure your pages before you add sensitive data. Makes sense, doesn’t it? The next tip isn’t quite as obvious: Audio and video attached to the page will not be protected. Since they are stored in separate files from the notes themselves, OneNote is not Fig. 2.26 able to secure them for you. The third tip is the one that is easiest to forget. If you regularly secure your notes pages with passwords, your search results will not show the notes or the flags from those pages. If you want to ensure that your searches are
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complete, you will need to unlock the pages so that the search function can find them. Setting and removing section passwords The first choice to make is what your password will be. To set the password, click the Set Password button. You will be prompted to enter a case sensitive password and confirm it: Fig. 2.27 Note that if you forget your chosen password, you will not be able to recover it and you will not be able to access the protected page. Once you have selected your password, click the OK button to save it. If this was an existing section that has previously been backed up, OneNote will notice and give you the choice of either keeping the existing backups in an unsecured state, or deleting them so that no one can access them. Fig. 2.28
No matter whether you choose to keep or delete any existing backups, all future backups of this section will be secured with your chosen password. If you choose to delete existing backup copies, OneNote will delete the backups of this section that it has stored. If you have moved or copied these backups to another location, they would still exist and would still be unsecured.
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When you return to your notes, you will notice that a new button has become active on the Password Protection task pane: Remove Password. Clicking this button prompts you for your current password then removes the password when you click OK. Fig. 2.29
Adding to locked notes pages If you have added a password to a page, it will automatically lock within a certain amount of time after you leave it. To access the notes on that page again, you must unlock it. A locked page will be blank except for the following notice in the center of the page: Fig. 2.30 When you click or press Enter, you will be prompted for the password. If the correct password is not provided, you will be reminded that the section is secured and the password needs to be provided to access it. Setting lock options Once you have set up passwords on sections, you will want to control how often the sections are locked. There are two ways a page can become locked. If the “Lock All” button on the Password Protection task pane is clicked, all pages with a password would become immediately locked and inaccessible. In addition, you can set pages to automatically lock a certain amount of time after you leave the page. To set the lock time, either do Tools→ Options and select the Passwords tab, or click the words “Password options…” on the
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bottom of the Password Protection task pane. In either case, the password options will appear: Fig. 2.31
On this page of options, you have three choices. All three choices will be applied to all of the secured sections in your notebook. You can set your pages to lock after a certain amount of time when you stop working in them. (Values range from 1 minute to 1 day.) Your next choice is to lock pages as soon as you leave them. The third choice is to select both to lock the page after a passage of time and whenever you leave the page. Why select both? If you expect to have a page open, but not be actively adding to it, you will want to have it lock after your chosen amount of time. To be fully secure, you will also want your secured pages to lock whenever you leave them. Can you have different passwords on different pages? No. You can set a different password for each section, but all pages within a single section are secured with the same password. If you use different passwords for each section you secure, make sure that you know which password goes with which section. Otherwise, you will lose the data you have secured.
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Passwords and Save as… If you have a password-protected section unlocked, you can use File→ Save to save it as a OneNote section, a Word file, or an MHT file. You can also use File→ Send to→ Word to export the information. In all these cases, the password will not carry over with the notes. You will get a warning message if you choose to save as a .one file, whether with a new name or the same name. You will not get the message with the other file types. If the section is locked, you will find that neither the “Send to” nor the “Save as” options are available to you.
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What’s the Difference Between a TabletPC and a Tablet?
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Using OneNote with Your Tablet PC Many people believe that OneNote was developed for the Tablet PC user. As you know from reading Chris Pratley’s information in Chapter 1, that isn’t the truth. OneNote was developed because Chris and his team saw a need for a tool to organize notes. At the same time, Microsoft was developing a new hardware platform and Windows XP version called the Tablet PC. Windows XP for Tablets starts with the full capabilities of Windows XP then adds special extensions to handle pen input, screen orientation and the other special capabilities of a Tablet PC. Because the two products went through development at the same time, it was easy for the developers to incorporate the Tablet’s main features directly into OneNote’s interface. If you own a Tablet PC, this chapter is for you. If you don’t own one yet, you may want to read this anyway. 49
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WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A TABLET PC AND A TABLET? There are many differences between a Tablet PC and any other PC. The two that affect OneNote the most are the inking capabilities and the ability to change the orientation of the screen. We’ll cover the screen orientation in the next section. Right now, we are going to talk about inking. Input into a Tablet PC can be done in the same ways as with any PC (using a mouse or keyboard). However, one of the strengths of the Tablet is the ability to control the computer via an electronic pen used directly on the Tablet PC’s screen. The input will be translated as mouse movements or ink inputs (commonly called inking) depending on where the pen touches the screen. Inking is the ability to write words and motions on the screen of a Tablet PC either directly into an application or by using the TIP (Text Input Panel). Examples of applications that are inkenabled include OneNote and the other Office applications. To add handwriting to other applications, you write in the TIP (or select the characters from the electronic keyboard). The information you write in the TIP is converted to text and passed to the application. For your inked input to be understood as text (instead of as a series of graphics), the application you are using must be inkenabled. With ink-enabled applications, handwriting can be left as handwriting or translated to computer text. No matter which way it is stored, the content is searchable. It can also be copied and pasted between applications, just as text can be. (If the application where the handwriting is pasted is not ink-enabled, it is handled as graphic content.) Why inking doesn’t work from a graphics tablet There is another kind of tablet out there. These are the pen input devices where you write or draw on an external device. These tablets do not capture input fast enough or often enough for the Tablet PC extensions to translate it as ink input.
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These tablets are basically substitutes for your mouse, but do not have the capture capabilities of a Tablet PC’s screen.
SCREEN ORIENTATION The other Tablet PC feature that affects OneNote is the ability to change the orientation of the screen. Tablet PC screens are shaped like a piece of paper. They are proportionally larger in one direction than the other. You can use your Tablet PC in either landscape mode or in portrait mode at any time. When I am using the Tablet PC with an external monitor or with a keyboard, I find it easiest to use in landscape mode. When I am using the Tablet PC in slate mode (no keyboard, just the screen and the pen), I tend to use it in portrait mode. Luckily, no matter which way I use the Tablet PC, OneNote adjusts to the orientation automatically. When the orientation is changed, OneNote doesn’t change the format of my notes. However, it does change the paper background. Any notes that existed on the page prior to the orientation change may appear to run off the edge of the paper. New notes can’t be added off the page, but existing notes will remain where you placed them. Look at these two diagrams to see the difference. Here is a note page whose notes were taken in landscape mode. The left hand screen shot shows the note block in landscape mode, the right hand has the same note block in portrait mode. Fig. 3.1
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Notice that while the box is completely on the page in the left-hand graphic, it runs off the page in the right-hand graphic. The full note is there, but no other notes can be added to its right. OneNote has a means Fig. 3.2 for you to easily change your notes page. If you go to the Page Setup task pane (File→ Page Setup), you will see that you can change the orientation for the current page or the currently selected pages. To change the page orientation, select a specific page size from the Size entry. Once you have chosen a size, the orientation option will become available and you can select either portrait or landscape. Unlike stationery, these changes can be made to existing pages. Orientation-specific stationery In addition to giving you the ability to change the orientation of your notes on the fly, OneNote also has several sets of stationery created just for Tablet PCs. These stationery sets, found under the Tablet PC category, are set up to handle specific Tablet PC note-taking situations. These stationery pages are set to adjust to orientation changes without changing your notes. If you would like more stationery set up specifically for the Tablet PC, go to the OneNote section of Office Online and search the templates for “Tablet PC.”
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CHOOSING A PEN Not everyone likes to write in black ink. The OneNote team acknowledged that and set up one note with a variety of pens. You have your choice of colors, pen style, and pen thickness. By default, you are set up with three sets of pens: •
Thin felt tip pens in black, blue, green or red
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Thick felt tip pens in black, blue, green, or red
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Highlighters in yellow, turquoise, green, or pink
This makes twelve pens available to you in the default setup. To choose one of these pens click the drop-down arrow next to the Pen button. The button looks like a pen with a line under it. The line indicates which thickness and color you currently have selected. When you click the drop-down arrow, you will get a list of the current pen choices. If you are going to be changing pens frequently, you can save yourself some steps by opening the Pen toolbar. It contains one button for each currently available pen type. Need more pen colors? Customize! If you need different pen colors than are available in the default pen list, select a pen you wish to change. Go to the drop-down list for the Pen button and select Customize Current Pen. Fig. 3.3
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You can select from forty different colors. The pen thickness can be any number from 0.1 mm to 99 mm. Name the color whatever you want. This name will show both on the dropdown list for the Pen button and as the tool tip when you hover over the selection on the Pen toolbar. Changing the color or thickness of a pen does not change previous notes taken with that pen. If you need more than twelve pens for a drawing, you can customize your pens without changing what you have already drawn.
TEXTUAL INKED NOTES Now that you have selected and customized your pens, it is time to create some inked notes. The first set of notes we are going to work with is textual inked notes, also known as handwritten notes. OneNote can capture your ink as either searchable handwriting or as graphic elements. If the ink is handwriting, it can be converted to text from within OneNote with just a few pen strokes. To convert the handwriting either click the Convert Handwriting to Text button or select Tools→ Convert Handwriting to Text. (The button has two “a”s on it – one in script, the other in print.) This option, available only when there is handwriting on the current page, will convert any handwriting on the page to text. The ink conversion is very good. I have terrible handwriting and it still coverts most of it to text correctly. There are a couple of things you can do to make the conversion better: •
Turn on the grid lines and try to write between the lines– OneNote will convert all handwriting, but the conversion works better when the text is aligned between and on the lines.
•
Practice the skill of inking – the more you play around with it, the more comfortable you will become and the better the translation will be.
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To select ink notes, switch from pen input to text input by clicking the Type/Selection Tool button. One awesome ability that came with Windows XP SP2 is the conversion of highlighter input to text as efficiently as the felt tip pens. Since the highlighted text isn’t easily selectable, this makes it easier to convert it to text. The interface is even able to tell when highlighting is written input and when it is highlighting of existing text.
DRAWN INKED NOTES In addition to creating written notes, you can also use your Tablet’s pen to create drawings and diagrams. These notes can be either single color items or multiple color diagrams. To create a drawing, select the pen color and thickness, then move your pen across the screen just as you would on a piece of paper. The resulting drawings can be moved to the background of the page just as with any graphic. To change ink color and thickness, simply select another pen from the list. If you are using the pen to create drawings or graphics, closed pen strokes will generally be translated as one object. If the pen strokes don’t connect or come close to connecting, they will be translated as separate objects. For example, the next graphic shows two sets of four lines on a note page. Notice that the four connected lines are one object with one set of movement arrows. However, the four non-connected lines are four objects. Each of the movement arrows for this drawing only controls one part of the selected drawing. Fig. 3.4
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There is one potential drawback to inked drawings. The drawings do not always move down the page as you would expect. If you write over the top of the drawn items, then convert the ink to text, the text will overlay the drawn items. To avoid this, either drag the drawings to a different spot on the page or select the drawings and then use Insert→ Extra Writing Space. If you do the Insert→ Extra Writing Space without selecting the drawings, the drawings won’t move but any text further down or over on the page will move.
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OneNote Audio and Video ¾
Configuring Audio and Video
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OneNote and Audio
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OneNote and Video
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Audio and Video Limitations
Chapter 4
OneNote Audio and Video Think about the last meeting you attended. If it was anything like the ones I attend, it started with a discussion of who was going to take minutes. You’ve now got a good part of the solution: OneNote. You already know how to add text and graphic notes to your minutes. Now, with the power of OneNote, you are going to learn how to record the entire meeting (either in just audio or in both audio and video), take notes during the recordings, and have the notes connected to the right part of the recording.
CONFIGURING AUDIO AND VIDEO To create audio and video notes in OneNote, you need to first tell OneNote which devices you want to use, how you want to use them, and how you want the content stored. The setup is done via the Audio and Video Options category of Tools→ Options. It looks like this: 59
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Fig. 4.1
Audio setup When setting up the audio, you need to define what device will be providing the input, how it will be providing the input, how you want the input encoded for storage, and what quality of sound you want to store. •
Device: This option lets you choose the device used to capture the input. On my machine, I have three choices for audio input device: the default sound device (the builtin microphone), the microphone on my webcam, and the audio device that is my sound card.
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Input: This option tells OneNote where the sound to record is coming from. Some computers only have microphone as an option. More flexible computers will offer you other input devices to use. In my case, because I can choose my sound card to create the sounds, I can change input devices
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to include sound files, CD tracks, sound effects and sounds from external devices (like a stereo). •
Codec: The codec is the encoding method for the sound that is being saved with your notes. I have found that it is best to use the default option, especially if the notes will need to be moved from machine to machine.
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Format: Your final audio choice determines what quality level of sound is saved with your notes. The higher the quality, the more space it takes on your hard drive. For ordinary notes, the default of 8/8/mono is probably good enough. (8/8/mono means that for every second of sound, the computer will store 8 kilobits of data sampled 8 times
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Which audio device and input options should you use?
It depends. I make my choice depending on what type of sound I am using and where that sound is coming from. If I am doing live recording of just audio, I use the built-in microphone. If the webcam is not installed, I use the built-in one as well. If I am recording both audio and video during the same session, then I will use the webcam’s microphone, because it is easier to use the same device for both types of notes if you are switching back and forth. If I am using existing sounds, like music or a prerecorded track, then I use the sound card options. When you are recording minutes for a meeting, you are probably going to choose the microphone for the input device. However, there are other uses for the audio notes and for those uses you may choose an existing WAV file, a CD, or an external device as your sound source.
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a second and only on one channel.) If you are creating recordings that will be played through a speaker system, you probably want to go to a higher level of quality, probably one of the mid-level stereo options. Personally, I have never used the superhigh quality settings. However, a friend who does music professionally uses them quite frequently. Video setup You have fewer choices to make when setting up the video device. You only need to choose the device and the profile you will use to store the video. •
Device: Your first choice is which camera you are going to use to capture the video stream. I have two choices: default and my Logitech camera. In reality, both devices on my machine are the same. If you have more than one video input device on your computer, you will have more choices. (For example, you would have an additional device if you are set up to capture video from a VCR, DVD or TV.)
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Profile: In setting up the video, you don’t need to worry about how the video is going to be stored. It will be stored as a WMV file. What you have to choose instead is the video storage and playback profile. The profile determines
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As with audio files, the higher the quality the larger the amount of disk space needed to store the video file. However, the bigger question for video is how much bandwidth can you afford to dedicate to the video playback? The higher the quality the more bandwidth and other resources it takes to create the recording and to play it back. I use the default setting for the profile, since it meets my needs. Play around with it and see what meets your needs.
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the quality of the video you are going to create and size of the file that will hold the video. Rewind option Rewind? How do you rewind when there isn’t a tape! What you are really setting up is the lead time for the counter. Here’s how it works: You are recording a meeting. You start the recording and everyone talks. You come to a point where you need to make a note on your note page (either a typed note or a drawn note). You click on the screen and add your note. You continue through the meeting taking notes and have no problems. After the meeting, you decide to play back the audio that was going on while you took one of your notes. You click the icon to play the audio and you hear the middle and end of the relevant conversation, but you miss the beginning. Why? Because by the time you clicked to start making your note, the relevant part of the conversation had already started. To help you overcome this problem, the OneNote developers gave you a way to mark the start point before you click. No, OneNote isn’t psychic. It looks at the rewind value you put in this field and subtracts that many minutes from the counter that marks the beginning of the audio segment attached to the note. For meetings and conversations, set this value to 5 or 10 seconds. You don’t want to go too much longer, unless you are not quick about starting your note taking. If you are annotating a piece of sound that comes from an outside source, you probably want to set the rewind value fairly low. For example, if you are annotating a piece of music for music appreciation students, you will want the rewind value to be zero – you want them to hear exactly what is going on when they get to your annotation. You can change the rewind value at any time. It will not affect previous sound or video files, only recordings made after the change.
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Tuning wizard OneNote doesn’t do the actual audio or video recording. Instead, the program lets your computer’s operating system handle those functions. However, because the developers knew that you would want to test your audio and/or video settings prior to creating your recordings, they provided a hook into the setup procedures for your hardware. When you click the Tuning button, you will see a Windows wizard start. It will walk you through ensuring that the hardware is connected properly, that the sound levels are where you want them to be, and that the camera is recording the video you desire. Because the steps for the Tuning Wizard are hardwaredependent, they are not covered in this book. I recommend that you look through the steps on your computer and familiarize yourself with its Tuning Wizard process. How are the files stored? When you create audio and video notes, OneNote creates files in the current notebook file to actually hold the audio or video. All audio files are saved as WMA files. All video files are stored as WMV files. These files are then linked to the notes page that is open when the recording is started. Before you start the recording… You can Fig. 4.2 access all of the features that we will talk about in the next few sections via the Tools→ Audio and Video Recording menu:
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I recommend that you turn on the Audio and Video toolbar instead. To do this, right-click any existing toolbar and select Audio and Video Recording. It will bring up this toolbar: Fig. 4.3
The buttons on the toolbar line up almost exactly with the menu items. There are three differences: •
The menu shows both Record Audio Only and Record Video as options, where the toolbar shows only one of the options. In the screenshot it shows the Record Video icon. To switch between the two modes, click the drop down arrow to the right of the video icon. This menu will appear:
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Fig. 4.4 From the menu, you can choose which of the two recording options you want. (FYI: If you are recording video, you will get audio automatically.)
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The first large button in the toolbar shows the recording timer. There are four parts to it. The left arrow moves you back one note in the recording; the right arrow moves you forward one. The first set of numbers shows where you are currently in the overall recording; the second set shows the total length of the recording.
•
The “See Playback” button is always available. However, it only means something during video recording. If you have this option selected, you will see what the camera is recording while you are recording. This is an interesting feature, but will slow down your computer considerably for higher quality video recordings.
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ONENOTE AND AUDIO Now that your computer and OneNote are configured for recording, it is time to actually make a recording. After the (apparent) complexity of the setup process, the process for recording and playback of notes is quite straightforward. To start recording an audio piece for a note page, click the microphone in the Audio and Video recording toolbar or select the Record Audio Only option from the Tools→ Audio and Video Recording menu. OneNote will start actual recording. When it has started the recording, a line of text like this one will appear on your notes page: Fig. 4.5
This annotation indicates that OneNote has actually started recording. There will be a slight delay between the time you click the record button and when the annotation shows up. This is because of the computer processing needed to start the recording. Once the recording has started, take your notes as you would during any other note-taking session. As you add notes, you will notice that the note holder gets Fig. 4.5 a new icon to the left of the note: This icon indicates that the note has an audio or video marker attached to it. The markers contain a counter that shows how far into the recording you were when you started the note. The marker’s counter automatically takes into account your Rewind setting. If there is a segment of your note session that you do not want to record, click the pause button from the Audio and Video Recording toolbar. It is the button with two lines next to each other. To restart the recording, click the same button.
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When you finish recording, click the stop button from the Audio and Video Recording toolbar. It is the button with a box on it. You can start and stop recording on a single page as many times as you want. All the sounds will be stored in the same file. To navigate the sound file, you can either click the recording icon to the left of the note or use the forward and back note buttons.
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Want to step through the recording quickly?
The timing area of the Audio Video toolbar not only lets you step through the recording by note marker, but also by time. Click the box that shows the timing and you will see a gray bar appear to the left of your mouse-click. This shows how far into the recording you are. (It is based on a percentage of the distance across the timing indication.) Click the play button and you will start playback from there instead of from the beginning.
Since all of the recordings for a single note page and its subpages are stored in the same file, you can remove the note from the page without affecting the sound file. If you want to delete all of the sound from a page and its subpages, click the Delete Recording button or select Delete Recording from the menu. You will be prompted with the usual verification question before the delete occurs, so don’t worry if you hit the button by accident. What do I use audio notes for? Beyond meetings, there are two other uses I have for audio notes. The first is to record my voicemail messages. I start the recording, play the message over the speakerphone and take notes. Later, when I am ready to return the call, I have all the information at my fingertips, as well as the original message.
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The other time I use audio notes is to leave reminders to myself during activities. I used to fill entire pads of little post-it notes with family reminders, schedule notes, etc. Now, I pop on the microphone, record my reminder and type a quick note about it. At the end of the day, I gather all the notes together and sort them to where they belong.
ONENOTE AND VIDEO Now that you know how to use audio notes, you will find the video notes easy to figure out. The buttons used are the same, except that you use the video camera icon to start recording instead of the microphone. The navigation process is the same. The start, stop and pause buttons are the same. Just as with audio recording, when you start a video note, you will see a new annotation appear on your note page: The only difference between this annotation and the audio one is the first word. As you make notes during the video recording, the same icon will appear to the left of your note holder. It may be a slightly different color, but it is otherwise identical. When you play back the video, it will show in a square box in the upper right portion of the viewable part of the page. Just as with your audio recordings, you can navigate through the recording by jumping from note to note, by clicking the video icon to the left of a note, or by clicking in the time area of the Audio Video Recording toolbar. The biggest difference between audio and video recording is in how your computer will react while the recording and playback are going on. Recording and playback of audio files do not take much in the way of computer resources and won’t impact the way your system runs very strongly. On the other hand, video recording will impact the way your computer responds very strongly. You will notice a significant slowdown if you are trying to create high quality video on an underpowered machine. If you have the playback window showing while
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you are recording, the resources used will double, slowing the computer even further. What if you only want to record video? You can’t. OneNote will automatically turn on your microphone for recording as soon as you turn on the webcam or other video capture tool.
AUDIO AND VIDEO LIMITATIONS As useful as the audio and video notes are, there are a few limitations that you should know about. External audio and video only OneNote only picks up external video and audio. If you can’t hear it from outside the computer, OneNote will not be able to record it. That means that you can’t just drop an audio or video file onto your notes page and have OneNote recognize that it is supposed to create markers to the file from your notes. It just doesn’t work that way. Audio and video notes don’t share When you are having a shared notes session, you will only be able to share the notes pages and subpages themselves. Any audio and video recording you do on your PC will not show up on the other session member’s computers. If you want to share a page that already has audio or video notes on it, you will need to be sure that you send both the section file and any audio or video files that go with that section. File naming Audio and video note file names are created by concatenating the name of the note section with the name of the note page. This allows you to have multiple sections with the same page
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names with audio and video notes provided the section names are different. It also allows you to have multiple pages with the same name with audio and video notes only if the pages are located in different sections. File storage Video files can get big very quickly. I made a test video using a fairly low quality profile and my webcam. The file size of the resulting video was over 4 meg. If you have a large hard drive or other storage medium (such as a flash drive) available, this won’t be a problem for you. If you find that you run out of space on your hard drive easily, you may want to be careful how much video recording you do.
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Side Notes ¾
Side Note Basics
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Moving Side Notes to Your Notebook
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Side Note Use: Side Thoughts
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Side Note Use: Phone Messages
Chapter 5
Side Notes OneNote itself allows you to add notes to organized note pages. What about the situation where you just need to jot down a quick note? You don’t want to worry about where it is going or if you will keep it, you just want to remember it for now. For these notes you are going to use Side Notes.
SIDE NOTE BASICS Side Notes are special case note pages. When you installed OneNote, you added a program to your Startup folder that runs docked on your taskbar. This program is accessed by clicking the small purple OneNote icon you find on the task bar. Clicking this icon brings up what looks like an electronic sticky pad. The pages are yellowish orange instead of white, and are generally much smaller than the main OneNote interface. The window doesn’t have all of the buttons and toolbars that the main interface does, but it has the basic tools you need to access your notes. As I said, Side Notes are designed to allow you to quickly add notes that you may or may not want to keep long-term. To make that easy for you, Side Notes are stored in their own 73
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.one file, which is called “Side Notes.one.” This file contains one notes page per side note you have created. When you have a Side Note open, it looks like this: Fig. 5.1
Notice that Side Notes don’t have title areas on them. Since they are designed to be quickly jotted notes, you aren’t expected to need all the formality of a regular note page. Side Note pages can be lined or unlined just like your regular note pages. In fact, they will take on the line or grid settings that you have set in OneNote itself. To add a Side Note, click in the Side Note page and type, drag, or ink. You can add any kind of note to a Side Note that you can to a regular page. Need more pages? Click the new icon (the one that looks like a sheet of paper). This will move you to a new, blank page. When you have more than one Side Note page created, you will see that the arrows on the toolbar change from gray to blue. A blue arrow means that there are more notes pages either in front of the current page or behind it. Just like in OneNote, you can record audio and video with your side notes. The sound files will be saved in your notebook, just as they are with your regular notes.
MOVING SIDE NOTES TO YOUR NOTEBOOK You can view your side notes from the main interface as well. When you open OneNote itself, you will see that there is a
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tab called “Side Notes.” This tab contains the note pages you created in Side Notes. Here, the side notes show titles on the page tabs and can have subpages added.
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Switch between the interfaces
If you are in a Side Note and want to move to the main interface of OneNote, click and drag diagonally down on the lower right corner of the side note window. As you drag, the page tabs will appear, as will the section header and the rest of the interface. Continue to drag right and the other tabs in your notebook will appear. If you change tabs, you can make another section for your side note (temporarily) by dragging the lower right corner of the screen back up and to the left.
Where did the titles come from? The titles are created from the first line of text in your side note. Since any page in the Side Note section won’t have a title area, you can’t change the title on a page without moving it elsewhere or adding text above the first line. As you acquire Side Notes, you will find that some of them need to be promoted to full notes pages within a specific section. There are two ways to do this: From Side Note or from OneNote. From Side Note While you are viewing a note, you can file it away by clicking the “Move Page To” button. Just as in full OneNote, clicking this button allows you to move a note straight to a section you have recently accessed, or to bring up the “Move or Copy Pages” dialog so that you can copy or move the note to any section you currently have write access to.
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From OneNote If you open OneNote while you have notes in Side Note, you will see that the Side Note tab now has pages in it with your notes. Right-clicking on the page tab gives you all the normal actions, including “Move Page To.” Click the appropriate page and your side note will become a full note page. What happens when you promote a Side Note? When you move a note created in Side Note to a regular section within your notebook, it loses its yellow background and becomes a new page. If you look at a promoted page, you will see that it now has a title area, a date stamp, and the ability for you to add subpages to it. What about the other direction? You can move existing notes pages to the Side Note section. When you do this, they re-acquire the yellow background and lose their title area. Pages moved into the SideNote section are visible via Side Note.
SIDE NOTE USE: SIDE THOUGHTS Side Notes are designed to be quick, short, jotted notes. I have found them most useful for those times when a thought I want to remember or that has nothing to do with a current project that I am working on needs to be documented. . I used to put these notes in the margins or on sticky papers and often misplaced them. With Side Notes, when I have something I need to remember, I: •
Click the Side Note button on the taskbar (if it isn’t already open)
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Create a new side page
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Type or write my thought
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Flag it with either a “Handle This” flag or a “To Do” flag
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When I am ready to handle the day’s side notes, I move the pages to the appropriate OneNote section. Since they are already flagged, when I run my notes summary for the day they automatically show up on the summary list.
SIDE NOTE USE: PHONE MESSAGES I get a lot of phone calls. Most of them seem to come when I am least able to get to the phone. I have developed a technique for creating side notes for my messages that I want to share with you. My voicemail system automatically date stamps each message. In addition, it tells me what phone number the call was from. When I pick up messages, instead of grabbing a piece of paper from my desk, I open Side Note and type or write each of the following on a new page: •
The time and date of the call
•
The number that the call came from
•
The name of the caller
• The message (if the caller left a different number than was given in the message envelope, I put that number next to the envelope number) If I have been gone for more than a day, I generally also want to know when I took the message. To get that information, I do Alt-Shift-F and add a date-time stamp to the message entry. Okay, now for the fun part: I found that no matter how great my note-taking skills were, I usually needed to listen to each message more than once to get all the details down. To make it easier on myself, I started recording each incoming voicemail. Now, when I call for messages, I do it from a speakerphone. When the envelope starts to play, I click the Record button from the toolbar. As I type my notes, Side Note takes care of noting where in the sound file the note was added. When I am done with each message, I click the Stop button.
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Now, I not only have my translation of the message and the actual recording of the message, I also have the actual message itself and a time and date stamp of when the message was written. When I have handled the message, I either delete the side note or I file it away under the correct section. If it is a message I might need to listen to more than once, I can use the Play button to play the entire message over. Don’t want to record the whole message, but still want the date/time stamp? Try Alt-Shift-F (all three keys at once). Your time and date stamp will be inserted right at the cursor.
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Saving OneNote Content ¾
Why No Save Option?
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Saving as MHT
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What Else is in the “My NoteBook” Folder?
Chapter 6
Saving OneNote Content OneNote was designed to be a living notebook. The interface was set up so that you could write anywhere on any page and still be sure that the information would be saved and available for use in the future. In order to ensure that you wouldn’t lose any of your notes, OneNote has its save options built into the product. Running under normal circumstances, you should never have to worry about saving your notebook sections, or about making a backup copy either.
WHY NO SAVE OPTION? As you may have noticed, OneNote does not have a Save option, it only has a Save As option and a Close option. Whenever you have OneNote running, it will automatically save your information for you. The saves happen in the background while you are working. If you leave a section, all the changes for that section are saved to your hard drive. In addition, sections are saved whenever a section is backed up. (The Microsoft OneNote team estimates that the average time between saves for any changing OneNote section is about 30 to 45 seconds.) 81
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Save options Save options are set via Tools→ Options, then by selecting “Open and Save” in the left column. On this screen, you determine where to look for notebooks, how frequently to release the lock on remote files and when to optimize your section files. Let’s look at each of these options a little closer: Fig. 6.1
Recently used list Just as in all Office applications, you can define how many files you want to show in your recently used list. Unlike in the other Office applications, here in OneNote, you don’t need to have a very large recently used list. Why do I expect that you won’t have many documents on your Recently Used list? Because in general, you will be keeping most of your notebooks open most of the time. The only time you won’t have something open is when you close it yourself, either for archival purposes or because you are done with the information in the notebook. Even if you share information with other OneNote users or with other computers, you are likely to keep the section open. You just may not be accessing that information at this time.
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Paths The Paths list tells OneNote where to look for and to put certain information. Two of the paths define the actual location of information outside of OneNote, two more define OneNote sections that contain special content, and the others define where you want OneNote to put notes owned by other people. My Notebook This is the actual path to your .one files on your system. By default, this path is to a “My Notebook” folder within the “My Documents” folder for the current user. However, this does not always have to be the case. If you use multiple computers that all have access to the same network drives, you may find it more convenient to put your main notebook on that network drive. To do this, click once on the My Notebook line, then click the Modify… button. A regular browse dialog box will come up and allow you to select the default save area for your notebook. Want to make your notebooks totally transportable? Put them on a USB thumb drive. Then, when you move from machine to machine, you can close OneNote, do a “Safely remove hardware” to save everything to the thumb drive, move the thumb drive to the next machine and open OneNote backup. If you have set up both machines to use that thumb drive for your storage, the sections should be found automatically. One warning: If the drive letter for the thumb drive changes from one insertion of the drive to another, then you may not want to use this method. Why? Because you will need to relocate the thumb drive every time you insert it. Backup folder This path defines where you want OneNote to store your automatic backups for your notebook sections. It defaults to an area in the “Local Settings” folder for the current user. I don’t
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recommend this. If it is at all possible, store your backups on another drive (preferably even on another computer). This way, if something happens to your main hard drive, you won’t lose all of your notes. If you are not connected to a network, you will need to do the backup on the same computer. If this is the case, then don’t depend on OneNote to make the only backup of your notebook sections. Try to make a separate backup on CD or other removable media regularly. Notes Mailed to Me This path defines which folder will automatically get the notes that you receive via email. When you first start OneNote, these notes are stored in “My Notebook.” However, as with your main notebook and your backups, you can change this to anywhere on your computer network that you have access to use. If you change the path for mailed notes and save the changes, the full path will always show instead of just the section name. Other Notes I’ve Seen This path points to where copies of content from other machines will go. For example, if you participate in a shared note session as described in Chapter 7, the local copy of the shared notes will be stored in this location. Like the path for notes that come in by email, once you change this path away from the default location, the full path will show on the option screen. Side Notes This path defines the location and name of the section that you will be associating with your computer’s side notes. (For more on side notes, see Chapter 5) If you change the section for your side notes, you will be prompted to close and reopen OneNote for the changes to take effect.
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If you do choose to have a section other than “Side Note.one” as your side note section, you will find that the pages in the new section will turn yellow and the pages in the Side Note section will turn white. The pages in the re-purposed section will still have titles on them, the Side Note section pages will not. Copied Pocket PC Notes This path defines the location of the notes that you share between your main PC and your Pocket PC. These notes will all be gathered together as pages in a single section. You can move them to other sections as you need to, but this is the place OneNote will put them when you pull them down from the Pocket PC. Accessing files from multiple locations OneNote allows you to store notes on multiple computers and access them at the same time as other people. To do this, OneNote locks a file when you are actively using it and releases the lock when you aren’t. By using the lock and release method of file control, OneNote makes it easy to share note pages and to use them collaboratively either locally or remotely. Unchecking this option will allow you to always have the file lock on for all .one files you have open. If you don’t ever expect to share notes pages or to access pages from multiple computers, then you may want to unselect this option. Otherwise, keep it checked and set up whatever you consider a reasonable time for keeping and releasing locks on unused pages. Optimizing section files The last two Open and Save options allow you to define how frequently you want OneNote to clean up and optimize your section files. You define the optimization in two different ways:
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Unused space: When there is a certain amount of unused space within the section, OneNote will run cleanup. You define the amount of unused space you are comfortable with having in each section. (Note: You set one value that is applied to all sections.)
•
After a certain amount of time has passed: OneNote will also go through and optimize any section that has been unused for your defined number of minutes. If you feel that your system is low on resources and you don’t want OneNote to go through and do its optimization on a regular basis, you can turn off the time-based optimization.
Backup options Since OneNote takes responsibility for saving your files, it is logical that it also takes responsibility for making backups of your files. Just as the Save options are found via Tools→ Options, so are the Backup options. Fig. 6.2
You have two Backup options: How often to save and how many backups to keep. You can also tell OneNote to backup your data now by clicking the “Backup Now” button. You can set OneNote up to do your backups as frequently as every minute, or as seldom as every six weeks. You need to determine your backup frequency based on how much of your notes you would feel comfortable risking at any given time. I would never recommend going longer than a week without a backup. If you are in a situation where continuous backups are needed, set the backup to happen very frequently. The more often you back up, the more processing power you will need
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to have available for OneNote. The less frequently you back up, the more content you risk losing.
TIP 1
Want to force a save?
If you don’t want to wait for your work to be saved at the next automatic save, you can force your page to be saved by doing a CTRL-S. This will force a save on the pages you currently have locked for editing.
SAVING AS MHT While the .one file format is set up to contain many different types of note containers, it was not designed to be used to share the notes with other applications. For that purpose, you should use File→ Save as…→ MHT. What is an MHT? MHT files are Web archive files. These files contain all of the HTML, graphics, and other files associated with a piece of Web content all packaged into one file. Microsoft products use these files to make it easy to transport many different elements from one machine to another. Sounds good, so you should use it, right? Well, that may not always be the case. MHT files work really well if you need to move information from one machine to another and know that the information is always going to be viewed with Internet Explorer (IE). If however, you want to use it to move information from one application to another, there may be problems. The file definitions for MHT files are fairly fluid. Each application that opens an MHT file translates the information in a different manner. Some applications run through the file from top to bottom and display the information in the same order
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that it was placed in the file. Other applications pull out text information first, then graphics and other elements. Saving your notes pages as MHT files works really well if you are emailing the notes to someone who doesn’t have OneNote, but who needs to see your notes. They can open your notes using IE and see just what you needed them to see. However, if the MHT files are opened in other applications, the note containers may not end up where you expect them. Let’s look at an example. You have created a note page that contains the information needed to prepare your group for a meeting. Most of the members of your group have OneNote and use it regularly. To send them the information, you would send the actual .one file. However, one member of your team doesn’t have OneNote. They still need to see the preparation information, so you save the notes as an MHT file. In OneNote, your prep materials look like this: Fig. 6.3
When the team member opens your MHT file in Word, the notes look like this:
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Fig. 6.4
See the difference? The note holders have been placed on the page in an order very different from the one on your OneNote page. The difference is due to how the MHT file is created. MHT files are a grouping of multiple files all in one package. The general idea behind an MHT file is to put the HTML information at the top of the file structure, then follow it with the graphics and multimedia files. Each note holder in the OneNote file is placed into the MHT file in top down order, text first, then graphics. The problem is that OneNote pages are saved with page layout information embedded in them that Word doesn’t understand. Since note holders can be placed anywhere on the page, regardless of what else is under or on top of them, the order of the note holders in the MHT file may not relate directly to where the holder was on the note page. In order to be understood by IE, the MHT file has page layout and note placement information in each note section.
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Unfortunately, Word doesn’t understand the layout information. So it runs through the MHT file and places each note holder one after the other in the order they are in the MHT file. Added to the linear nature of Word is the fact that the text information comes before the graphics in the MHT file. Going through the file from the top down gives you all the text, then all the graphics. The logical solution to this would be to try to bring the MHT file into a program other than Word. I don’t recommend it. In the case of Word, we can guess how the content will be placed in the Word file. In other applications, the content placement is even less logically defined. If you want to see this for yourself, try saving two notes pages to an MHT file and then opening that file in PowerPoint. You will get a single slide that contains all the note holders placed at the upper left of the slide, one on top of the next. But you need to share that information… The developers of OneNote realized that the MHT solution wasn’t always going to work the way users expected it. To overcome the problems with MHT file translation, they gave us the option of File→ Send to→ Word. The details of sending OneNote pages to Word are covered in Chapter 13 “OneNote and Word.” For now, know that it works better – but still isn’t perfect.
WHAT ELSE IS IN THE “MY NOTEBOOK” FOLDER? There will be a few other files in your “My Notebook” folder. These folders fall into three general categories: •
Audio files that OneNote created
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Video files that OneNote created
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Files that are somewhere else, but are have been linked to from a note page
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For information on the audio and video files, see Chapter 4 “OneNote Audio and Video.” Here, we are going to deal with the third set of files – those you linked to. Fig. 6.5
When you drag a file from your desktop, Explorer, or another application to OneNote, you will get this dialog: If you select the first option, you will get just the link to the file. You won’t actually see the file content on your OneNote page, but you will be able to launch the link to start the application associated with the document. If you select the second option, OneNote will make a copy of your document and place that copy in your “My Notebook” directory. As with the first option, you will not see the actual document on your note page, you will only see a link. Clicking the link will open the document. However, if you make changes to the original document, you will not see them in the OneNote version since there is no link between the two copies. If you select the third option, OneNote will use the Microsoft Office Document Imager (MODI) to create a black and white image of the document and place that image into the background of a new page in your current section. (If the document is very long, the MODI will automatically break it up into subpages for you.) When would you use each option? While use of each of the three options will depend on your individual circumstances, there are some general rules of thumb you can follow:
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Use the “Insert link” option when you know that you will be changing the original document and want to be able to see the changes when you open the document from OneNote.
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Use the local copy option when you need to see a snapshot of the document. For example, you would use this option if you were reviewing a document as it stands and would not want to see any changes the next time you open the document.
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Use the third option when you want to mark up the document and see the markups directly on the document. Your changes and annotations will not be made to the actual document, but you will be able to write directly on top of the picture of the document.
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Common Pages
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Sharing Notes One of the greatest advantages of OneNote for the business person is the ease of note sharing. Notes can be shared by the same person between two computers, say a desktop and a laptop or Tablet PC. Notes can be shared between two people in a serial manner via email or remote storage. Or notes can be shared via an interactive session with several people changing the content of notes pages at the same time. Teachers will find the various note-sharing capabilities a great way to get pre-formatted notes pages to their students. Create a page that contains the lecture outline for the session, share it with the students, and then add to it during class. Interactive sharing sessions can be used for group discussion points and note sessions. Students working in study groups can share their pages to make sure that everyone gets the full benefit of the other people’s notes. Just like some study groups provide paper copies of notes to make sure that everyone studies the same materials, using shared notes pages with OneNote ensures that everyone gets the same electronic notes. 95
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COMMON PAGES The most basic way to share notes pages is to place a copy on a shared network drive from one computer and then access it from another computer. These pages are stored in one location, but accessible from any machine with access to the shared drive. I use this method to share pages between the various machines on my home network. Notes pages that have information I need to access from more than one machine, or which both my husband and I need to access, get stored in the “Shared Documents” folder for one of the desktop machines on our network. To save a note section to a shared drive, use File→ Save As. This will create a copy of your section in the folder “Other Notes I’ve Seen.” The tab for this folder will have a swooping arrow on it to show that the page is stored somewhere other than your “My Notebook” folder. Fig. 7.1
Any section that does not reside in your “My Notebook” directory will have the swooping arrow on it. The folder icon between the folder name and the section tab allows you to move up the folder structure to where your other note sections reside. To access a section from another machine, use File→ Open and browse to the section. Fig. 7.2
In this case, because the file was directly opened, the section tab stayed at the same level as the other sections, but was still given an arrow icon to indicate that it is not located in the main notebook.
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Both computers accessing the section can make changes to the pages, but the changes cannot be made simultaneously. When the section is being changed by a user on one machine, the section will be locked. Access to the section from other machines will be changed to “Read Only.” Until the original user stops making changes, the second user won’t be able to make any changes. Once the original user is done making changes, they are going to need to release the edit lock. This is done via File→ Current Section→ Allow Others to Edit, which brings up this warning: Fig. 7.3
When the OK button is clicked, your copy of the page will go to “Read Only,” and the other user will be able to get the edit lock. If you try to make changes, nothing will happen. The edit lock will remain available until someone does a File→ Current Section→ Allow Only Me to Edit. When that happens, the process starts over. This method of editing works really well in an environment where only one person will ever be changing the section at a time. It allows information to be shared without having to worry about setting up shared sessions or emailing sections from one machine to another.
SHARING VIA EMAIL The next way you can share sections is via email. This works best if you are using Outlook 2003, but can be made to work
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with any email program. (There is more information on using Outlook 2003 with OneNote in Chapter 9.) To share notes via email, you send the .one file from one machine to another. Each machine then ends up with its own copy of the section and you can make changes at will. The default item to send is the current page. If you want to send more than one page from the section, use Control click or Shift click to multi-select the pages you want to send. There are three ways to access the email options: File→ Send to→ Email Recipient, CTRL-SHIFT-E, or via the link on the top of the Sharing task pane. In any case, if Outlook 2003 is installed, the page will appear to change to an outgoing email message:
Fig. 7.4
To send the message, add your recipient information, an optional introduction, and then click the “Send a Copy” button. Your message will be sent with a copy of the section attached. If the receiver doesn’t have OneNote, they will be able to view the page, but not change it. If they have OneNote installed, they will be able to save the section to their notebook and work with it as with any other section. What if you decide you don’t want to send the section after all? There is no obvious way to get out of the email interface, but there are ways to do it. The email interface is a toggle switch. Repeating what you did to bring it up will remove it from your screen.
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What if I don’t have Outlook 2003? If you don’t have Outlook 2003, you won’t have the Email Recipient option on your Send To submenu. You also won’t see the email option on your sharing task pane. You can still email your notes, but you will need to do it from outside of OneNote. If your recipient has OneNote, you can use your email client to create an email, attach the .one file for the section and send it off. Don’t want to send the whole section? Create a new section with just the pages you want to share and send the .one file for that section. If they don’t have OneNote, you will need to save the page or pages as MHT or .doc files and attach that file to the email. (Remember, if they are receiving MHT files, they will want to browse the files in IE for best viewing. Be sure to tell them that in the email you send.)
SHARING VIA REMOTE STORAGE Sharing your notes via remote storage is a combination of the ability to share via a network drive and sharing via email. First, you save the section to your desired location by bringing up the Sharing task pane and clicking the “Browse and Move to” button at the bottom of the pane. Next, navigate to the location where you want to save your file and click Save. You will get a “Saving…” message box, and then you will get this message box: Fig. 7.5
Clicking “No” will return you to the OneNote interface. Clicking “Yes” will bring up a message shell outside of OneNote.
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Edit the message as desired and send. Your recipient will be told where the file is stored and how to access it. If you are attached to a SharePoint Server, you will be able to select your server location when you click “Browse and Move to.” You may need to log into your SharePoint area before you can save things there. Once you have access to the area, the rest of the process is the same as with any other remote storage location.
SHARING INTERACTIVELY All of the sharing options covered so far in this chapter only allow you to take notes sequentially. You can either take turns changing pages or you can each have individual copies of the sections. The ability to share notes Fig. 7.6 in this manner is useful, but limited. Wouldn’t it be better to have multiple individuals accessing a notes page at the same time and have everyone involved see the changes in real time? OneNote lets you set up sessions that allow just this option by using the sharing session options. To set up a sharing session, you need to bring up the Sharing task pane. This task pane is available from the task pane list or via File→ Share With Others. (Remember: Your task pane will look different if you do not have Outlook 2003 installed.)
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For an interactive note-sharing session, you use the two buttons in the middle of the task pane: Join a Session and Start a Session. In addition, you can start or join sessions by using the Tools→ Shared Session sub-menu items. Starting a session Clicking the “Start a Session” button brings up a new task pane, the Start Shared Session task pane. This task pane allows you to do three things: •
Set a password for the session
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Select the pages to be shared
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Actually start the sharing session
If you are setting a session Fig. 7.7 password, make sure that you share it with the other invitees, but keep it secure so that outsiders cannot break into the shared session. It is always a good idea to use a strong password when you create session passwords. (Strong passwords are those that contain both letters and numbers, do not contain actual English words, and are more than 6 characters long.) The list pages to be shared will default to the currently selected page or pages. To add pages to the session, use control click or shift click to multi-select the note pages you wish to share.
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Once you have set up the optional password and selected the pages to share, click the Start Shared Session button. When you click it, a message box will appear stating that the session is being started. After that, the task pane will change to the Shared Session task pane. Your shared session is now set up and ready for use. Optional settings There are three other shared session settings that you may wish to adjust. They can be found on the Tools→ Options→ Shared Session tab. Fig. 7.9
Fig. 7.8
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The first option is the name that gets displayed during shared sessions. The default name is picked up from the information you provided when you registered OneNote. You can change it here without it affecting anything else. The second choice has a bigger impact. This choice is whether to let OneNote automatically select the port to use for sharing sessions or whether you need to define your own port. In most cases, you will let OneNote choose its own port. However, if you are behind a firewall, you will need to check with your system administrator to find out if you need to use a specific port. The third option, whether to automatically configure your router, is best left at default. The only time you need to change it is if your system administrator says you should do so. Hosting a sharing session Once you have started a session, your next step is to invite attendees to the session or have previously invited team members join the session. To invite people, click the Invite Participants button. If you have Outlook 2003 installed, this will bring up a readymade email that looks like this:
Fig. 7.10
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If you don’t have Outlook 2003 installed, you will get a dialog box that provides the same text along with a reminder to send this information to all invitees using your email program. There are two ways to join the session: Either by opening the attached invitation note section or by copying the address and using it in the “Join” session task pane. You can invite both participants within your network and from over the Internet to join the session. They each get their own IP address. These addresses are the way that other computers will find your particular session. This IP probably won’t change from sharing session to sharing session, but this depends on your network setup. The number after the colon is the port number that you saw in the options tab above.
TIP 1
Static vs. dynamic IP addresses
Some IP addresses are static. That means that they don’t change from time to time. Usually these are assigned permanently to things like servers. Dynamic addresses are assigned every time you connect. To make life easy, this system generally gives you the same IP address as last time, although this is not guaranteed. If your sharing sessions suddenly become unavailable, check to see if your IP address changed.
The password is not provided in the email. If you have password protected your session, you will need to either add the password to the message or send it as a separate message. Add your invitees to the “To” and “cc” lists and click Send. You are now ready for others to join your session. Joining a session If you receive an email invitation to a shared session, you can join the session by opening the .one file attached to the email. No matter whether you received the .one file or not, you can
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join a session just by typing the IP address (along with the port number) and the password (if there is one) into the Join Shared Session task pane: Fig. 7.7
After you provide the needed information, click the Join Session button. Once you click the Join Session button, you will move to the Shared Session task pane, just as when you started the session. Working together in a Shared Session Once your session has been started, any changes made to a page that has been shared will be seen by all participants. Unfortunately, if you aren’t on the same page as the person making the change, you may not see the changes.
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TIP 2
Joining sessions repeatedly
Once you have the IP address and port for a session started from a specific computer, you can join any session started from that computer. So, when you get invitations to shared sessions, save the address information – you will probably need it again later. Your IP probably isn’t going to change from shared session to shared session. If you need to invite someone to a shared session during a phone call, just give them the IP address and password over the phone. To verify your session number, start a sharing session and then click the Shared Address Information button. The IP information will be displayed in a message box on your screen. Share this information with the other people you want in the session and they can join the session directly.
That brings us to our first Shared Session hint: Set up ahead of time how participants will tell each other what page is being changed or edited. I like to share a blank page each session. During the session, if you need to mark something that isn’t currently on everyone’s screen, go to the blank page and put location information in the title area saying what page you are working with. If the page is more than one screen long, make sure that you leave a hint at the top of the page that says how far down the page you are working. Another way to do this is to have an agreement that if someone needs to move up or down within a page or between pages, they need to leave a trail behind. For example, they might make a new note that shows the size of the page and color in the area indicating where in the page they are moving.
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They might also just type a quick note where everyone else is looking that says “Need to show you something on page XX. Scroll down to mid-page and look for my arrow.” Another option is to change the arrow to a pointer by checking the “Use pen as pointer” box. You won’t be able to write on the slides, but you can show things to the other participants. If you create a new page and want to share it, select the page tab, then click the “Add Page” button. Your page will show up in the list for all participants. If you initiated the session, you can turn off the ability of others to edit the pages in the session. This option is useful for class sessions where the teacher or trainer wants to share information on a lecture topic, but doesn’t want everyone to be changing the pages at the same time. Leaving a session To leave a shared session, click the “Leave Shared Session” button on the Shared Session task pane. You will leave the session and be returned to an individual OneNote session. Notice that even though you aren’t sharing pages with others anymore, you still have access to a copy of the shared pages. This is because the pages that were shared with you were stored on your computer in your main notebook. You won’t see changes that were made when you weren’t in the shared session, but you will still have access to the information and changes that were made up to the point you left the session.
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Create Your Own Stationery ¾
Designing Stationery
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Adapting Default Stationery
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Other Stationery Tasks
Chapter 8
Create Your Own Stationery We’ve already seen how to use the stationery files that come with OneNote. There are several and they cover a fairly wide range of topics and needs. You will find that there are certain times when you need to either tweak the existing stationery pages or create entirely new ones targeted to your own uses. At first glance, creating a customized stationery page is an easy task. It is easy to do, but it is not easy to do right. Because you can create a stationery file out of any note file, there is a tendency to not think through the design and the reusability of the page. To keep you from creating unusable stationery pages, we are going to walk through the design of a stationery page. Before you decide whether you want to create your own stationery from scratch or adapt one of the existing stationery pages, you need to think about how you are going to want your page to look. 111
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DESIGNING STATIONERY Like any notes page, your stationery is going to have two main sections, the title section and the notes section. When you design stationery, you need to answer some basic questions: •
What is the main purpose of the stationery?
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What editable elements will you need to add to the title area?
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What editable elements will you need to add to the main notes area?
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What do you want for backgrounds for the title area and the notes area?
Main purpose Just as there is a wide range of uses for OneNote, there is also a wide range of reasons why you might want to create a new stationery page. Most of the pages I have seen break down into one of these categories:
Table 8.1
Stationery Category
Example
Specialized meeting notes pages
Department meeting page, customized with logo, attendees, and standardized agenda items
Specialized classroom notes pages
Physics class notes, with common formulas down one side
Specialized to-do list or other tracking lists
Project tracking pages
Pages designed to expand the abilities of OneNote
Pages of shapes and patterns to allow for drawing flowcharts
Purely for fun pages
Games, such as hangman or dots
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To make this easier to understand, we are going to create a stationery page for a wedding planner. Our wedding planner has recently moved her organization system from paper notebooks to a tablet PC. She has a paper form that she uses for each wedding. Now that she is using the tablet, she wants to move her wedding organization to OneNote. She knows that some information would go in the title area and some in the main note area. In addition, because she wants to impress her potential customers, she wants the form to be both useful and something attractive she can show to customers. Title area items The first decision to be made when designing stationery is what information needs to be in the title area of the notes page. This area should contain the information that you will need to see most frequently. It should be short reminders that can be used to bring you up to speed when you look at the page. Our wedding planner knows that there are a few basic items that she needs to remember for each bride. Once she has put these items on the page, her title area looks like this:
Fig. 8.1
Since this is a stationery page instead of an actual notes page, the specific wedding information is not filled in. When our wedding planner creates her actual notes page based on this stationery, she will click after each of the main text elements and add the appropriate wedding-specific information.
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TIP 1
Stationery titles
Our wedding planner originally named her stationery page “Wedding Planner for BRIDE,” expecting to replace the word bride with the bride’s name for each wedding. When she had the title this way, she realized that the bride’s name would not show in the page tab. This would make it impossible for her to tell at a glance which wedding page went with which bride. So she moved the bride’s name to the beginning of the title. Now, scanning the tabs to find the page for a specific wedding becomes easy.
Main notes area items Now that the title information has been decided, the rest of the notes page can be built. For our wedding planner, this meant creating a number of areas on the page for the different parts of the wedding. While she knew that not all areas would be used for all weddings, she realized that removing sections from a notes page would be easier than creating them on the fly. To make it easier to create all the notes areas she would need, our wedding planner started by putting her standard wedding to-do list down the right side of the notes page. This allowed her to organize the page in the same order as her to-do list. Our wedding planner’s stationery page ended up being more than one page long. Here is a shot of the top of the page so that you can see a sample of her page:
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Fig. 8.2
Background graphics Looking at her page, our wedding planner quickly realized that it would need some jazzing up if she were going to be showing it to her customers. To make the pages look more visual, she added several pieces of clipart to the page. Adding clip art to note pages While there is a built in way to add pictures to your notes pages, there is no interface from OneNote to the Office Clip Organizer. That’s to be expected: about the only time you need clipart in OneNote is when you are creating stationery. I solve this problem by opening either Word or PowerPoint and accessing the Clip Art from there. Foreground graphics vs. background graphics If you are creating a piece of stationery where the graphics are only aesthetic or where you will not want the graphics to be accidentally moved, put the graphic on the background of the page. If the graphic is part of the content of the page or if you
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will want to move it around while using the page, leave the graphic on the foreground of the page. To put graphics on the background, right-click each and select “Set Picture as Background.” If you decide later you don’t want the picture in the background layer, you can move it back to the foreground by right-clicking and unselecting that option. Our wedding planner decided that since her graphics were for looks only, she didn’t want to worry about accidentally moving them. So she put all her stationery graphics on the background layer. When the graphics were added, her stationery page looked like this: Fig. 8.3
Saving the stationery Once your note page is the way you want it, it is time to change it from a regular note page into a stationery page. If you choose to put the stationery in your “My Stationery” section then the saving process is easy. To save your stationery, go to the stationery task pane, expand the “My Stationery” category, and then create the new stationery using the “Save current page as stationery” option at the bottom of the page. The “Save As Stationery” box comes up:
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Fig. 8.4
Why expand the “My Stationery” category? You are about to define the name for this piece of stationery. If you use a name that you have already used, you will overwrite the existing stationery set and it will be lost. The Save As Stationery box also has an option to allow the new stationery page to be the default stationery for the current section. This option is very useful if you use different stationery sets in different sections. When you click Save, the window will close and your list of available stationery pages will collapse to show just the categories. Expand “My Stationery” and you will see your new stationery. Where is “My Stationery” stored? Your customized stationery is stored in a hidden file in the “Documents and Settings” folder for your username. Once you get to that folder, look for the following sub-folder: Application Data\Microsoft\Templates
To see the “My Stationery.one” file, use Windows Explorer to navigate to this folder. Use the “View” tab of Tools→ Folder Options to set your view to include hidden folders. When you return to the folder view, you will see your stationery file. Now, you can’t do anything with this file in the templates folder. In order to see its contents, you need to make a copy of the file, put it in your “My Notebook” folder, and work with it from there.
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ADAPTING DEFAULT STATIONERY You aren’t normally going to create all your stationery from scratch. You are likely to find that the stationery pages that came with OneNote are close to what you need. With some simple adaptations, many of your stationery needs can be met. You are also likely to find that you need to change a piece of stationery you previously created. This same process will work for stationery stored anywhere on your local hard drive. The first thing you need to do to change one of the precreated stationery pages is to find the file. You could just open a new page using the stationery set you want to start with, make your adaptations, and then save it as stationery. The problem with this process is that it places your stationery in the “My Stationery” category instead of the category containing the original. Instead, we are going to leave OneNote, find the regular stationery sets, and make a copy of the set we need to work with. Where is the regular stationery? As you just learned, stationery pages are stored in hidden files. You have the path to your “My Stationery” file, now you need to use the same process to find the rest of the stationery. Unlike “My Stationery,” there is only one copy of the other stationery sets on your computer. It is located on your main hard drive in your “Program Files” folder under these subfolders: Microsoft Office\Templates\1033\Onenote\Stationery
In this folder, you should see the following files: •
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TABLETP.ONE In addition, you will also see a OneNote table of contents file. To change one of the existing stationery sets, you will need to make a copy of the file that contains it and work with the copy. Working with the original stationery sets With OneNote closed, copy the set you wish to change and paste it into your “My Notebook” folder. Then, re-open OneNote. You should have a new section that has the same name as the stationery file you just copied. Select the stationery page you wish to adapt and make a new copy of it. When you paste the new copy, it will appear just below the existing copy. Edit the copy and make your changes. When you are done, close OneNote and go back to Windows Explorer. Copy the file you just changed, navigate back to the program files copy of your stationery sets, and paste the file. You will be asked if you want to replace the existing file. Click Yes. Return to your “My Notebook” folder and delete the stationery file you just edited. Now, re-open OneNote and bring up the Stationery task pane. When you expand the category you just changed, you will see that there are two stationery entries with the same name. Your new one should be the second entry.
OTHER STATIONERY TASKS After seeing how to work with existing stationery sets, the other stationery tasks become pretty obvious. To delete a stationery page, make a copy of the stationery set that contains the page, open the copy with OneNote, delete the page form the .one file, close OneNote, and put the copy back.
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You can only change the names of stationery pages that are in “My Stationery.” In order to change the name of a piece of “My Stationery,” you create a new page using that stationery and save it under a new name. You will then have two copies of the stationery page. To share a piece of stationery, create a new section and name it the same as your stationery. In the section, create a new page based on your piece of stationery. Exit OneNote and use Windows Explorer to navigate to your notebook. You will see a new .one file with your stationery page name. Send that file to whomever you wish to share it with. If someone sends you a piece of stationery, save the .one file in the templates folder for your username. It will then show up as a new category of stationery for you. If you want it to show up for all users on a single computer, save the file in the Program Files template folder.
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Using OneNote with Outlook 2003 Notes are rarely created as stand-alone items. We have already seen how easy it is to share notes with other users. In this chapter, we are going to look at how to share your notes with Outlook 2003. If you don’t have Outlook 2003 installed on the same machine as your copy of OneNote, you will not have these options available to you. In Chapter 7, Sharing OneNote Sections, we covered the basics of how to use email to send notes sections to other users. In this chapter, we are going to discuss that further and see how to use these other OneNote and Outlook features: •
Using a note to create an appointment
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CREATING APPOINTMENTS Turning a note into an Outlook appointment is a pretty easy process, but that is only because it is only partially automated. While OneNote will set up parts of the appointment for you, you will still need to do most of the work by hand. The first step is to select the notes you wish to turn into an appointment and do the Tools→ Create Outlook Item→ Create Outlook Appointment. This will bring up a new Outlook Appointment. Your selected notes will appear in the blank area of the appointment. The text that was sent will be a copy of the note in OneNote. Changes made to the appointment text won’t affect the note and changes to the note won’t affect the appointment.
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You can only send text notes to the appointment interface. Any selected graphics, sounds, or movies will not be added to the appointment.
Once your appointment text has been added by OneNote, you will need to set up the remainder of the appointment by hand. I find that it works best to start with the items I can drag and drop from the text to an Outlook field, such as the subject and location. You can drag and drop dates and times into the start and end fields as well, but it is a little trickier. First, you must make sure that the date is a full date. The date shown in the example above comes in as a date in the past because Outlook doesn’t know which year to use. Second, when you add the note contents to the date and time, you need to be sure to remove the existing field values or Outlook will ignore your selected date and time information. You may find it easier to set these values using Outlook’s time and date interface. When you are done setting up the appointment, click the Save and Close button, just as you would for any other appointment.
CREATING CONTACTS Creating an Outlook contact from a note works much the same as creating an appointment. The note text goes into the miscellaneous information box and you can drag and drop it from there to the other fields. Also, as with the appointment, once the note has been sent to Outlook, there are two copies of the text. One is in Outlook and the other in OneNote. Changing one will not change the other.
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After sending the information to Outlook to create a contact, the contact will look like this:
Fig. 9.2
CREATING TASKS When you send a note to Outlook as a task, your task will look like Figure 9.3. While creating the tasks works the same as well, there is one change to the resulting task, which you may or may not like. The text of the note goes into both the miscellaneous text area and into the subject area for the task. The whole of the note’s text goes into both areas. This means that you will have task subjects that are as long as your note. I have found two ways around this problem. The first is to only select the text that I want in the subject when I create the task. Then, I copy any other note text over by hand. The second is to edit the subject text and only leave the text that I want as the task.
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Fig. 9.3
The title of the task is taken from the first line of the task subject. If the task title isn’t what you want, you can easily change it. Changes to the title are not shown until the task is saved. Again, the note text and the Outlook task are not connected in any way. Changing one does not change the other. Marking one complete does not mark the other complete. Deleting one does not delete the other.
SENDING NOTES AS EMAIL In the Sharing chapter (Chapter 7), we covered the basics of using File→ Send to or the Sharing options to send notes pages to other users. Now, we are going to look at setting up your email options so what you send is what you mean to send. Remember that when you send notes via email, you will be sending the entire page. If there are things on the page you don’t want the recipient(s) to see, make a copy of the page, edit it, and send the copy instead of the original.
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The email options are set via the Tools→ Options→ Email tab:
Fig. 9.4
The first option on this page allows you to decide how your notes will be mailed. If you unselect this first box, selected notes pages will be sent as HTML email. The email will start with any text you added in your introduction, followed by a horizontal line. Following that will be the title text in larger and bolder letters. Note flags and other graphics will appear embedded in the notes page where you put them on the page. If you send multiple pages, they will appear in succession in the email. If you leave the box checked, selected notes pages will be sent as a single .one file and as an HTML email. The file will contain all the notes pages. If you send notes as a .one file, you may be tempted to remind your recipient to save the page to their notebook before they open it if they want to work with it. Don’t worry about it. The section will be saved in a special folder within your notebook. This section is called “Notes Emailed to Me.”
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The second option is whether you want to send any audio or video files attached to your notes along with the email. If you send these extra files, they will be sent as attached files. This will make your emails larger. Since sound and video files can be quite large, make sure that the email system can handle the size of the files. The final option is whether you want to provide a signature with your OneNote content. The default is to have the option turned on with this tag line: Created with Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 One place for all your notes
You are likely to want to change this signature to the text you normally use for your emails. When OneNote generates emails, it does not attach your Outlook signature file to the email. There is no other way to add the signature other than via this interface.
IMPORTING MEETING DETAILS Now it’s time to look at taking information the other direction: Getting Outlook information into OneNote. The normal way of getting information from most Outlook elements into OneNote is by copy and paste or drag and drop. However, when it comes to appointments, there is a special interface: Insert→ Outlook Meeting Details. Fig. 9.5
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OneNote will list all the appointments in your calendar for the current day. Select one appointment from the list by clicking it. Then, click the “Insert Details” button. At this point, OneNote will extract the meeting date and location, attendees, subject, and information in the miscellaneous field for the appointment. The information will be gathered together into a note holder and placed on the current notes page. Fig. 9.6
Once the appointment has been added to your notes page, you can edit any part of it that you desire.
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Collapse meeting information
If your meeting information is taking too much space on your note page, you can collapse any individual segment or all of the segments. Hold your cursor over the keyword until the note handle shows. Double-click the arrow and the information will collapse to just show the heading. Double-click again to bring back the entire list.
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What if you want to select a date other than today’s date? In the upper right corner of the “Insert Outlook Meeting Details” dialog, you will find a small calendar icon and two arrows. Use these icons to adjust the date. The two arrows go forward and backward a day at a time. If the meeting you want is on a date more than a day or two away from the current date, use the calendar icon to select the date instead of the arrows. When clicked, a small “month at a glance” calendar will Fig. 9.7 appear: You can change the month being viewed by clicking one of the arrows at the top of the calendar. Once you get to the correct month, click the date. The calendar will close and the appointments for that date will appear.
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To Do Lists in OneNote OLD METHODS OF TO DO LISTS Being slightly obsessive, I love to keep to-do lists. Until OneNote came out, none of the tools in Microsoft Office seemed particularly well suited to my method of keeping to-do lists. The Tasks folder in Microsoft Outlook is OK, but leaves a lot to be desired. Paper To Do lists In the figure below, you can see my typical paper to-do list. At the start of the day, I wrote out my plans for today. As I complete items on the list, I enjoy the satisfaction of scratching out the item. Off to the right side, I might also jot down the unplanned items that came up during the day. Fig. 10.1
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At the end of the day, you have a visual picture of how many items were completed and how many were not. You can see if your day went according to plan as shown below. Fig. 10.2
Or, you can see if you were sidetracked with requests from the boss… Fig. 10.3
This type of list might work for a couple of days. Eventually, when you have just a few incomplete items and many completed items, you will want to copy the incomplete items to a new sheet of paper and start over. Tracking To Do lists with Outlook Until OneNote, users of Microsoft Office would often use the Tasks folder in Microsoft Outlook to handle a to-do list. With a little customization of the field chooser, you can set up a view that shows the task, due date and the date that the task was completed as shown below.
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Fig. 10.4
Using OneNote I love the flexibility afforded by OneNote. There are a variety of note flags available with a “to do” style checkbox. You can easily set up lists of tasks to do today, this week, or this month. It is easy to move tasks from one list to another. If you want to move completed tasks from one list to another, this is easy in OneNote. If you have a personal favorite way of keeping your to-do lists on paper, it will be easy to match this style in OneNote.
BASIC ONENOTE TO DO LIST Start a new section for your to-do lists. Right-click any section along the top of your notebook and select “New Section.” You will see that the new section has an unimaginative name like “New Section 1.” You will want to give this a descriptive section name like “Goals” or “To Do” or “Tasks.” Double-click the section name so that
Fig. 10.5
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the words “New Section 1” are Fig. 10.6 highlighted in gray. You can now type a new name. It is possible that you will be using the To Do section frequently. Some believe that certain colors are associated with certain emotions. If your new section happens to have an angry color such as red or orange, you should change the section color to something cooler. Right-click on the tab name and select a new default color. Fig. 10.7
Give the page a title. Because this title will be visible along the right side of the notebook, I usually use a title that reflects the date. Next, type a list of the tasks that you need to complete. Enter one task per line, Fig. 10.8 with each task separated by the return key. Your list might initially look like the list shown below.
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Next, you will want to add a to-do note flag to each item. Like any good Microsoft program, there are several different ways to do any task. In this case, there are many options. The easiest is to select all of the lines. Click anywhere in the text block and hit Ctrl+A twice. Hit the Ctrl+1 key to add a to-do note flag to each selected line as shown here. Fig. 10.9
NOTE
The first 9 note flags are assigned to the shortcut keys of Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+9. Since the first note flag is a standard to-do flag, the Ctrl+1 key has the unique ability to toggle through three possible states. When you press Ctrl+1 the first time, all of the selected lines are marked with an unchecked note flag. Press Ctrl+1 again and they are marked with a checked note flag. Press Ctrl+1 a third time and the note flags are cleared.
Alternate method #1 of assigning Note Flags Right-click on an item and choose Note Flags from the rightclick Menu. Select the To Do icon as shown here.
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Alternate method #2 of assigning Note Flags From the menu, select View > Toolbars > Note Flags as shown.
Fig. 10.10
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Select a line or lines of text. Click on the To Do icon in the Note Flags toolbar as shown. Fig. 10.11
Using the To Do list throughout the day As you complete an item on the to-do list, click the note flag to “check off” the item. In addition to the satisfaction of seeing the item checked off, you might enjoy watching your to-do list shrink through the day and the satisfaction of seeing your completed list grow. In order to achieve this, drag completed items to a second list. Create a new list on the right side of the page with the heading of “Completed Items.” To drag a completed item to the new list, click to the left of the note flag and drag to the right side of the page as shown.
Fig. 10.12
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Managing new items How often do you find yourself in fire-fighting mode? You arrive at work with a list of things that need to be done and within the first hour of the day, your manager calls to tell you that there is an emergency request to query all of the east coast customers who purchased a certain widget. He needs the data mined in Excel, charts showing the sales by month, and a PowerPoint presentation that he can take to his boss.
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For a great treatise on data mining in Excel, read Bill Jelen’s Guerilla Data Analysis Using Microsoft Excel. For the best book on PowerPoint, read Kathy Jacob’s book, appropriately titled, Kathy Jacobs On PowerPoint.
When these emergency “fire-fighting” requests hit my desktop, I like to somehow note that this was a task that would get me off track from completing my normal to-do list. With the new SP1 release of OneNote, you have many note flags available to you. Changing Note Flag 2 to be a different To Do icon for firefighting requests It is easy to customize the note flags in OneNote. Although 25 note flag slots are available, the first 9 note flags are assigned an easy-to-remember hot key of Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+9, so save those note flag slots for the most-used flags. If you often find yourself in fire-fighting mode, using note flag position 2 for the hot to-do would make sense.
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Keep in mind that note flag customization applies proactively to all notebooks and sections in your computer. Changing a note flag from “Important” to “Unexpected Tasks” will not change any note flags that you have previously used in notebooks. However, all future uses of the Ctrl+2 hotkey will cause the “Unexpected Tasks” flag to be used in all notebooks on this computer.
Note flag modifications are made in the task pane. To display the task pane, either hit Ctrl+F1 or select Task Pane from the View menu. There are 20 different task panes available. When you display the task pane, you will see whichever task pane was last displayed. Click the black arrow as shown here to see the complete list of task panes.
Fig. 10.13
Fig. 10.14
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Select Customize My Note Flags from the list. Fig. 10.15
If the task pane is not wide enough, you can use your mouse to grab the gray bar to the left of the task pane and make it wider.
Fig. 10.16
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In order to modify the second Note Flag, highlight the note flag in the task pane and choose the modify button.
Fig. 10.17
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The Modify Note Flag dialog will appear. Initially, the dialog has the settings associated with the Important note flag. Type a new name for the note flag such as “Unexpected Task.” Choose the Symbol dropdown and select from the available symbols. In the present case, a yellow to-do box with the exclamation point seems to be appropriate. Fig. 10.18
Depending on your attitude about these unexpected tasks, you can either select an angry color or a cool color from the color dropdown. Fig. 10.19 Select the OK button and you will see that both the task pane and the Note Flag toolbar have been updated. Marking new Items with the unexpected Note Flag Type new tasks at the bottom of your list. As you type each item, hit Ctrl+2 to assign the new note flag. You now have a visual
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indicator of which items were in your original plan and which items were dumped in your lap during the course of the day. Fig. 10.19
At the end of the day One advantage of this system is that at the end of the day, you have a quick visual clue of what you did on the day. If you move items over as you complete them, the list on the right will contain an effective log of how you spent your time.
Fig. 10.20
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If you are truly obsessive, you can add a note to each completed item showing the time that it was completed. This tip will give you an idea of how much time was spent on the unplanned diversions.
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Fig. 10.21
Beginning a new day Unlike a paper to do list, you can easily copy and paste uncompleted items to a blank sheet for a new day. Select the New Page tab. Fig. 10.22 On the new page, type the date in the title area. Go back to the previous day’s page and highlight the unplanned items. Copy to the clipboard with Ctrl+C, and paste to the upper left corner of the new page with Ctrl+V. Summary of the Basic To Do System The system described above matches very closely to the way that I used to keep paper to-do lists. After several weeks, I can flip through old pages to see what projects were the priority and which items were once important but were never completed. These ideas can be revisited at a future date. You may find that you use a different style of to-do lists. That is fine – you can easily customize this basic OneNote to-do system to match your style.
ADVANCED ONENOTE TO DO LIST With 25 note flag slots and 21 different to-do note flags available, you could build a fairly complex note flag system. Use
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various combinations of the 7 styles of note flags and various color combinations to represent any variety of to-do information. Below is a to-do list with a variety of different note flags. Fig. 10.23
BUILT-IN METHODS FOR ONENOTE TO DO LISTS OneNote SP1 shipped with three types of built-in stationery for to-do lists. You can easily insert any of these built-in lists into your notebook. Fig. 10.24 Make sure that you can see the Task Pane. If it is not visible, hit Ctrl+F1. In the title bar of the task pane, choose the drop-down arrow and select stationery as shown below.
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In the Stationery task pane, click the plus sign next to Planners. There are three built-in stationery types for to-do lists; Simple, Prioritized, and Project. Fig. 10.25
The Simple to-do list contains 15 checkboxes and a 3-ring notebook background as shown below. These items seem to be widely spaced apart. You must move from item to item using the down arrow instead of the enter key.
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Fig. 10.26
The Prioritized To Do List provides 3 columns of 11 to-do entries with a pencil background. They are organized into high, medium, and low priority as shown below. Fig. 10.27
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The Project To-Do list contains a simplified 8-step to do list for each of two projects. Microsoft used a thumbtack background and provided a side area for additional notes about each project. This stationary is shown here. Fig. 10.27
Next Steps This chapter detailed a number of ways to use OneNote to track your to-do lists. If you happen to have an item on your to-do list that involves research, then you will look forward to Chapter 11. OneNote has several features that make documenting Web research a snap.
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Planning Your Research
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Research Task Pane
Chapter 11
Using OneNote for Research OneNote offers some interesting possibilities for documenting research done on the Internet. As you find a bit of interesting information on a Web page, you can copy the information and paste it into a OneNote page. In addition to the content from the Web page, OneNote adds a convenient link back to the original URL and indicates the date and time that the content was captured. This information is useful in the fluid and ever-changing world of the Web.
CAUTION
To a certain extent, the subject of this chapter is controversial. In an article on Doing Research, the Kentucky Virtual Library characterizes Web sites as unreliable in nature.
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PLANNING YOUR RESEARCH The first step in conducting research is to build a research plan. According to the Kentucky Virtual Library’s Web site (http://www.kyvl.org/html/tutorial/research/developing/shtml), one strategy is to answer these four questions. •
What do you want to know? Write a question or state a topic.
•
What are the main ideas or keywords in the topic?
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What are synonyms for those keywords?
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How might you combine these keywords to get different results?
It is appropriate to set up a OneNote page to help you plan how to do your research. If you are going to do a lot of research, make the page shown below as reusable stationery. If you are embarking on a single research project, then just type the questions into a OneNote page. Fig. 11.1
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Brainstorming OneNote is great for brainstorming. Start writing ideas in a OneNote page and allow those ideas to generate new ideas. Make notes of all the ideas that pop into you head. Don’t reject anything that seems too silly at this point. The silly ideas might lead to more ideas. Later, you can go back and assign note flags to the ideas that you want to pursue.
COLLECTING INFORMATION OneNote really shines in collecting information from Web pages. In addition to the content of the Web page, OneNote adds a link back to the original page from where the content was pasted. There are three basic ways to get information from a Web page into OneNote. •
Copy from the Web page, switch to OneNote and paste
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Copy from the Web page, open a new SideNote and paste
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Use the Send To OneNote powertoy from Microsoft
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Create a Screen Clipping and paste the image to OneNote
Doing a copy from the browser and pasting into OneNote When you find any interesting fact on a Web page, use your mouse to highlight that information. Copy the information to the clipboard using your favorite method (for example Ctrl+C or the toolbar icon to copy). Switch to an open OneNote document. In the OneNote document, paste in any blank area. OneNote copies the text, formatting, images, and adds a convenient note showing the original URL. This figure shows the original text selected on the Web page.
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Fig. 11.2
This figure shows the text as it is pasted into OneNote. Fig. 11.3
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If you have both the browser and OneNote open, you can easily switch between applications by holding down the Alt key and hitting the tab key to rotate through applications. Hitting Alt+Tab once will always take you back to the most recent application, so mastering Alt+tab will allow you to easily switch back and forth between the browser and OneNote
There are many advantages to using OneNote to collect Web research material. Rather than merely saving pages to your Favorites list, you can actually copy a snippet of the page in order to remind you what can be found at that page.
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Capturing images and text The copy and paste method works equally well for images and text. Select the image and the text in the browser and copy to the clipboard. When you paste into Excel, the images and the text may be rearranged – remember that OneNote does not do tables well. The information in the first figure in this chapter is actually two cells in an HTML table. OneNote renders this showing first the image in the left cell and then the text in the right cell as shown here.
Fig. 11.4
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Collecting information via SideNotes Personally, I find SideNotes annoying. You can try them out, but for the task of collecting research material, it seems to be an idea that was not well implemented. Here is the concept. While browsing a Web page, you see something interesting that you would like to Fig. 11.5 capture in OneNote. Click the OneNote icon in the Windows taskbar to open a SideNote. A SideNote is a small window that appears always on top of the screen. It takes up about an eighth of your screen so it is large enough to be annoying and block the view of whatever you were working on. Fig. 11.6
You can now copy something from your Web page and paste it to a SideNote. The information in the SideNote stays visible on your screen until you dismiss the SideNote.
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Fig. 11.7
A downside of using SideNotes is that they are always sent to a new section called SideNotes. This means that if the side note turns out to be truly interesting and useful, you will have to copy and paste it to the right section of your research notebook. Collecting information using the Send-to-OneNote PowerToy Microsoft has released a free add-in for Internet Explorer that will allow you to highlight part of a Web page, click the toolbar icon in Internet Explorer and have the content copied to OneNote. Downloading the PowerToy This PowerToy requires the .Net Runtime Library. It is an optional download from Windows Update. Before downloading the PowerToy, go through Windows Update to download the .Net Runtime. You can find the utility at Office.Microsoft.com. Because the Microsoft site changes frequently, I won’t suggest that the URL at press time will match the URL when you are reading this.
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Follow the links for downloads, Office Downloads, OneNote 2003, the Add-ins.
CAUTION
Microsoft does not support or provide technical assistance with PowerToy utilities. This utility requires a lot of system resources. Performance on a computer with only 256MB of RAM is very slow and not optimal.
Once the utility is installed, one of your Internet Explorer toolbars will have a OneNote icon. H i g h l i g h t Fig. 11.8 some text, click the OneNote button, and the information is copied to a OneNote section called “WebClippings.” The utility offers some nice features. Compare the original Web page shown here. The highlighted information is selected for sending to OneNote.
Fig. 11.9
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After clipping to OneNote, the information appears as shown below.
Fig. 11.10
OneNote automatically copies the title of the Web page and inserts it as the title of the OneNote page. The link back to the original URL is included in the OneNote page. The disadvantage is that the utility always sends the clipping to a notebook called WebClippings in your MyNotebooks folder. In this particular case, I was busy working on a notebook in the Research folder, so having this information paste to a new section was frustrating. It would have been preferable to have the information paste to the currently opened section of OneNote. Collecting information using the Create Screen Clipping Tool If you simply need to create screen shots of the Web page, the OneNote icon in the Windows Taskbar might hold the easiest solution. There are two ways to use this utility, either from OneNote or from Internet Explorer.
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Creating a Screen Clipping from Internet Explorer When you are Fig. 11.11 browsing a Web page, right-click the OneNote icon in the Windows taskbar. From the right-click menu, select Create Screen Clipping. The entire screen will be grayed out and this message will be shown. Fig. 11.12
Using your mouse, draw a rectangle on the screen. As you draw, the Fig. 11.13 portion within the rectangle will return to full color.
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When you release the mouse, a picture of the screen will be sent to a new SideNote in OneNote. Fig. 11.14
The screen image is pasted with the URL and with the date and time that the screen clipping was taken. I appreciate the fact that OneNote adds a date and time. This is a useful feature. I don’t appreciate that OneNote adds the image to a SideNote instead of the currently active page in OneNote. The alternative method for inserting a screen clipping discussed next does allow you to control the positioning of the resulting note. Creating a Screen Clipping from OneNote If you are browsing a Web page and would like to capture a screen shot of the information, you can control placement of the screen clipping by following these steps. • • •
Use Alt+Tab to return to OneNote Put the cursor at the desired insertion point on your OneNote page From the menu, select Insert > Screen Clipping
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•
The screen will gray out, OneNote will be hidden, and you will see the most recently used application.
•
Drag to draw a rectangle on the screen. As you draw, the rectangle will be restored in full color. When you release the mouse, the screen clipping will be added at the insertion point in OneNote. Fig. 11.16
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This method is great for saving Web site content to a specific place in your OneNote notebook. The disadvantage is that you are only storing a picture of the content and this picture will not be searchable.
TRACK RESEARCH FROM PRINT BOOKS AND JOURNALS As pointed out by the Kentucky Virtual Library, the problem with relying solely on the Web for research is that the Web is notoriously unreliable. If you need to do serious scholarly research, you might find yourself actually consulting print versions of books and journals.
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The improved Amazon.com “Search Inside the Book” program will allow you to view up to twenty percent of many books online in any given month. Before visiting your local library, see if you can screen-capture relevant material directly from Amazon.com
CAUTION
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If you try to access too much of a book through the Amazon.com Search Inside the Book program, you will be locked out of the program until the next month.
Books24x7.com provides online content of many great books. You pay a monthly subscription fee. The authors of the books get a tiny royalty for every page that you view. (So, if you happen to be reading this page on Books24x7.com, please look at a few more pages for us!)
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If you have a scanner hooked up to your computer, you can use the menu to Insert > Picture > From Scanner or Camera. The scanned image will not be searchable and it won’t automatically add the bibliography information for you, but it will allow you to capture relevant sections in OneNote.
Fig. 11.17
RECORD AN AUDIO INTERVIEW OR LECTURE If you have a microphone connected to your laptop or Tablet PC, you can record a first-person interview into a OneNote page. The Microsoft OneNote Team added a cool trick into the playback feature. Before you start your interview, go to a blank OneNote page and from the menu, select Tools > Audio and Video Recording > Record Audio Only.
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Alternatively, you can choose the Recording icon in the Standard toolbar.
As you are interviewing the subject, you might want to casually take just a few notes about what the person
Fig. 11.18
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is saying. If the subject is “starts talking about installing a carburetor in a ’68 Oldsmobile,” type Olds Carb and press return in OneNote. To stop recording, press the Stop button on the Audio and Video Recording Toolbar. Fig. 11.19
Playing back the interview The figure below shows the notes that I took during an interview with Josh about his views on chess. As you hover the mouse over each line of the note, a playback icon appears to the left of the note as shown to the left of “Moves to be able to castle?” When you click the playback icon for that particular line, you will hear the audio portion of the interview that started about ten seconds before you began typing that line. This delay is really amazing – the audio portion of the interview almost always coincides with the typed note. Fig. 11.20
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SEND TO MICROSOFT WORD After you have completed your research, it is time to send the information to Word for creating the final report. OneNote includes a feature to send pages to Microsoft Word. However, this feature only works if you have Microsoft Word 2003 or higher installed on the computer. Select one or more pages of content in Microsoft OneNote. To select multiple pages, touch one page tab and then hold down the Ctrl key while touching additional pages. From the File menu, select Send To > Microsoft Word.
Fig. 11.21
All of the selected pages will be combined into a new Microsoft Word document. Audio and Video files are not copied, but all other content will be combined into the Word document.
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The only “strange” behavior with this command is that Microsoft also sends the embedded images from stationery to Word as separate images. After sending a page with stationary to Word, the results included the title from the page on Page 1, the background from the page on Page 2. The actual content from the page began on Page 3.
Fig. 11.22
RESEARCH TASK PANE Office 2003 introduced the Research task pane. This feature is mildly useful. If you are offline, you are limited to a thesaurus or a translation service. Given that Fig. 11.23 a thesaurus has been available in Word for a decade, this is hardly an exciting offering in the Research task pane. If you are connected to the Internet, then the Research task pane offers the standard complement of research services.
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If you need a stock quote without leaving OneNote, use the Research task pane. Fig. 11.25 Next steps OneNote offers great resources for documenting research from the Web. Perhaps you were doing the research in order to create a PowerPoint presentation for your co-workers or your class. In Chapter 12, Kathy Jacobs will illustrate how to use OneNote and PowerPoint together.
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Designing Presentations
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Using OneNote with PowerPoint PowerPoint is designed to communicate information. Team it up with OneNote, and you can communicate even better! OneNote can be used by presentation designers to make sure the presentation content is right from the very beginning. In addition, OneNote can be used by participants needing to take notes about a presentation that is being given. In both cases, information can be shared between PowerPoint and OneNote quite easily.
DESIGNING PRESENTATIONS When designing a presentation, it is a good idea to get a rough idea of what the presentation is all about. A good way to do this is to lay out what the messages of the presentation are going to be and then translate those messages into content. With OneNote, you can brainstorm your presentation messages as random notes placed anywhere on the note page. As you begin to formalize your content flow, you can take your 175
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notes and convert them to outlines using the list capabilities covered in Chapter 10. If you prefer to think visually instead of verbally, OneNote allows you to create line drawings, import pictures, or even make an audio recording of your notes. No matter whether you have an outline or a visual map of your presentation, OneNote can help. Personally, once I have the flow of my presentation determined, I find it good to move to a new note page. On this page, I draw a series of boxes, one per slide I expect to have. Each box represents a slide. In each box, I place the notes and graphics that I have designated for that slide. In addition, I create special boxes to indicate title or divider slides. I also find it useful to add color swatches to my note page. I copy and paste the swatches over the drawn slides to indicate backgrounds. I then change the font colors for the included notes to match (or at least approximate) the colors I plan to use in the real presentation. I have found that this little extra step has saved me more than once from using very bad color combinations. Just as with the colors, using the actual font for notes also helps. If I can’t read the font when I am making my notes, chances are pretty good that the participants won’t be able to read it on the final presentation either. By using the actual colors and fonts on my notes pages, I find that I separate the content from the design of the presentation. Since I tend to play with the design on my presentations quite a bit, I find that having the colors determined at an early stage frees me early on to concentrate more on the content rather than the design. Working with a team? If you are working on the presentation design with members of a team, you can use OneNote’s sharing capabilities to review slide design, slide content, and slide flow. Each member of the team can markup the slide drawings, the outlines, brainstorm
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contents, the color schemes, the fonts, etc. Consensus can be reached during design instead of sending the entire PowerPoint presentation around and needing to make changes later in the process. Using OneNote to develop the initial PowerPoint content also allows individual team members to work on sections and then combine them later on. Each team member can be provided with a stationery page that is set up with several empty squares for slides. They can then create the content for their section. When all sections are completed, the notes pages are gathered on a single computer and the entire presentation is converted at once. Sending content to PowerPoint I wish I could tell you a magical or even easy way to send your designs from OneNote to PowerPoint. Unfortunately, none exists yet. The only way I have found to get content from OneNote to PowerPoint is to copy the rough slides from OneNote and paste them into PowerPoint. Copy and paste works somewhat for text. You can copy outlines and paste them into the outline pane in PowerPoint. Unfortunately, PowerPoint’s title placeholders don’t understand OneNote’s outline indicators. If you paste your notes into the first line of slide outline or into the title placeholder, all content will end up on the same slide and formatted rather unusually. If you have this as your notes in OneNote: Fig. 12.1
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They will end up Fig. 12.2 looking like this in the outline pane in PowerPoint when pasted into a title area: If instead, you paste the notes into a space that correlates to content, PowerPoint does a little better. The content still all ends up on the same slide, but the indentations are retained. In this case, the outline pane Fig. 12.3 will look like this: After pasting the outline into the content area of a slide, you can change it to multiple slides by using Tabs (to increase the indentation level), Shift-Tabs (to decrease the indentation level), delete keys to combine content, and the enter key to create new slides. When you are done with Fig. 12.4 the reformatting, you will have this for an outline: By the way, if you want to take the outline of a presentation and add it to a note page, don’t use copy and paste.
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You will get only the text of your outline. Level information will be lost. No matter how you get the text into your outline, any font or color settings from your notes page will be overridden by the settings from the master slides and the color scheme. But, as you can see above, underlining and other character formatting will be carried over. I find it useful to format the slide master and the color schemes before I paste the text in. That way, it will look the way I want it to when I do the paste. Now that your text is on your slides, it is time to set up the graphics. You can copy graphics from your notes pages to your slides. I don’t recommend this as a long-term strategy. I prefer to copy the graphics to the slides and then use them as guidelines for inserting and creating the actual graphics that will be shown. If you are using clipart, there is a tendency to just copy the clip from the note page to the slide. After all, aside from resizing the clip, you probably aren’t going to do anything to the clip once it is there. Don’t give in to the temptation. Graphics added to slides via copy and paste can bloat your PowerPoint slide. Instead, save the graphics to a file and then insert the graphic file onto the slides. If the clip is in your clip gallery, you can just insert it directly from the gallery, you don’t need to save it to disk and insert it from there. What about drawn elements? I bring these items across via copy and paste, then use them as guidelines to create my own graphics either in PowerPoint (using autoshapes) or in a separate graphics tool. Once I have got my real graphic on the slide, I delete the drawn element. As of now, there is no mechanism to convert drawn shapes to the corresponding autoshape.
REVIEWING PRESENTATIONS Once you have completed the presentation, chances are high that you are going to need to go through a review process with
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other team members or clients to verify that what you created is what they want to see. Again, OneNote can help you, by creating a single place for the review notes to be stored. There are three ways to get your PowerPoint content onto a notes page. You can insert the slides in black and white, you can copy and paste the slides from PowerPoint to OneNote, or you can use the new OneNote API which allows you to push content into OneNote from outside the program. Insert slides OneNote allows you to insert pictures of Office documents onto notes pages with the execution of a single menu option: Insert→ Document as Picture… Using this menu option allows you to select any Office document and add it to the current section as a new note page. The Office document will be printed to the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer (MODI). The MODI is delivered with all parts of Office 2003, including OneNote. It creates a black and white picture of the selected document and (in this case) sends the picture to the background of the new notes page. (It can also be used to save a black and white copy of a document to a file.) Once the document picture is on the notes page, it can be written on or drawn on just like any other notes page. If you wish to have the document picture as an element of the page instead of the background, right-click the picture and uncheck the “Set as Background” selection. If you remove any slide picture from the background of a page, all slide pictures on that page will be removed from the background. Insert→ Document as Picture… is a good tool for adding Word or Excel content to a notes page. It doesn’t work as well for PowerPoint content for three reasons: 1. The document picture is in black and white. Since most slides are in color and the colors affect what the slide is
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communicating, a black and white copy may not help as much for reviewing slides. 2. Only slides are brought across. While you can use the MODI to print any view PowerPoint allows, when the MODI is run from OneNote it only picks up the slides. 3. When the presentation picture is placed on the notes page, it is split into 10 slide chunks. The first 10 slides are placed on the notes page, with each of the succeeding 10 slide chunks going on subpages. The subpages are named after the slide page number for the first slide on the page. (Removing slide pictures from the background of a subpage does not affect the slide pictures on any other subpage or the main page.) Copy and Paste The long way to add PowerPoint content to a notes page is to copy and paste it from one application to the other. First, open the presentation in PowerPoint and go to the Slide Sorter View. Select each slide individually in PowerPoint, copy it and paste it into OneNote. You will get a single color graphic of the slide, that is sized proportionally to fill the width of your notes page. If you do the copy and paste from the Slide View, you will only get the slide elements. You will not get the background. If you want the notes for each slide, you will need to go to the Notes View and individually select, copy, and paste the notes from PowerPoint to OneNote. While this solution works for short presentations, if you are working with anything over 10 slides, you will quickly tire of all the copying and pasting. So, let’s look at the better way to do it. Using the API When OneNote was first released, there was no ability to automate content addition to notes pages. When Service Pack 1 was released, this functionality was added via a programming interface called the Application Programming Interface (API).
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The API allows programmers to build pieces of code outside of OneNote which push content into OneNote and place it on designated sections. The API is meant to be used in conjunction with the .Net framework. It is not expected that all OneNote users will develop programs to push content into OneNote. Instead, the interface has been created to allow programmers to create applications that help users by pushing content into OneNote. One of the applications that have been created is called PPT2One. It was developed by Jeff Borlick because he needed to have his college materials in OneNote so that he could take notes on the presentations during class. PPT2One is available for free download from his website, http://www.borlick.net/blog. The download is a self-extracting zip file, which when double-clicked will install the program on your hard drive and create an icon on your computer desktop. Let’s look at how this works. When you double-click the desktop icon, the program will launch. The dialog box on the next page will appear. This dialog box will allow you to define what presentation you want placed in which section of your notebook. Fig. 12.5
The first entry allows you to enter the file representing the section where you want the notes placed. Click the box with the
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three dots and browse to the .one file containing your notes. The second entry allows you to define the PowerPoint file you want sent to OneNote. In the third box, you can enter the title page for the new notes page. The two check boxes allow you to define what you want placed on the page. By default, pictures of the slides will be placed on the page. If you desire the slide text or the notes to be added as well as the slide graphic, click the appropriate boxes. Why add the slide text? If the slide has many autoshapes with text included, it is likely that the text will not be readable in the resulting graphic. In addition, if there are many automated elements, they may overlay each other preventing you from seeing the text on the bottom shapes. Once you have selected your files and your options, click the “Add to OneNote!” button. The program will send the PowerPoint content to the designated notes page. The graphic will be on the left, followed by the slide text and the slide notes. Using this tool will allow you to import your PowerPoint content to OneNote in a cleaner, easier manner than doing it by hand.
TAKING NOTES DURING PRESENTATIONS Once you have your PowerPoint content into OneNote, notes can be taken just as they are with any other content. If the slide pictures are set to be part of the background, your can make notes directly on the slides. If your slides are not part of the background, you will need to be careful not to overwrite a slide picture, a notes box, or other content when you add notes.
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Using OneNote with Word ¾
Sending General Notes to Word
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Sending Lists and Outlines to Word
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Sending Word Documents to OneNote
Chapter 13
Using OneNote with Word Word is used to create text documents of many types: straight text documents, documents with text and graphics, outlines, etc. Many new OneNote users are confused by the apparent similarity between OneNote and Word. After all, both can be used for creating documents, many of which are of the same style. So: When do you use OneNote and when do you use Word? I use OneNote to take notes. Many of those notes may eventually become Word documents, just as many of them may become PowerPoint documents. In general, I move my notes to Word when: •
The content needs to be formatted for formal distribution When I am working on a proposal for a new project, I will keep my research notes and ideas in OneNote. When I am ready to create the final document for distribution to the potential client, I move the content to Word. I use Word’s tools to add the styles and formatting that need to go across the whole document. 187
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•
Internal document references need to be made and updated When the information needs to have a table of contents or an index. Yes, I can use note flags and a summary page to create an index, but that’s not really what it is designed to do.
•
The content in question surpasses five or ten pages in length I make some pretty large notes pages, probably longer than most people. But, even I have my limits. Book chapters usually start as unformatted notes, are formalized into OneNote outlines, and then are transferred to Word to fill in, complete and check.
•
The content in question needs to be grammatically correct I’ll admit it: My notes aren’t usually grammatically correct. I depend on the spell checker in OneNote to catch the spelling errors. If I am going to need to be letter perfect, the document goes to Word and the grammar checker is used. The same goes for any text document that needs information from the thesaurus.
•
The content has to be formatted, sized, or targeted Some of my writing must be of a certain length and at a certain reading level. OneNote can’t do either of those functions natively, so I send the documents to Word and do the final cleanup, tightening and level aiming in Word.
There are other circumstances when I send things to Word. Any document that needs headers, footers, built-in page numbers, etc., will be done in Word. The same goes for tabular data. Since the table functions in OneNote are still pretty primitive, content that needs to be in tables will also be done in Word.
SENDING GENERAL NOTES TO WORD There are three ways to actually turn your notes pages into Word documents. You can send them to Word, you can save them as documents, or you can use copy and paste.
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File→ Send to…→ Word Using Send to creates a Word file from your notes. All text formatting is saved. Most of the text order is saved, but if you have more than one column of notes, the order is not retained. If you have graphics on your notes page, they may be placed out of order as well. An Example If you have the following as a segment of a notes page:
Fig. 13.1
When you send this page to Word, you would expect it to look somewhat the same. Instead, you will get: Fig. 13.2
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Notice that the page starts with the notes on the right hand side, then shows the notes on the left hand side. This is because OneNote finds the topmost note holder and processes it, then moves to the next topmost note holder. If your topmost note holder does not contain text, then the Send to Word option will not be available. In this case, select all of the note holders you want sent to Word. As long as one of them is text, the option will be available. There is one thing that I don’t like about sending notes to Word: It opens a separate instance of Word on your computer. It doesn’t look to see whether you have Word already open, it just opens a new one. This can cause you to waste resources and eat virtual memory quickly. Do the Send to Word too many times and you will run out of computer resources to do the work. File→ Save as… The second option is to save your notes as Word documents. The results will look very similar, but instead of opening a new copy of Word to work with the document, the document is saved to your hard drive. When you do File→ Save As… the default format will be “.one.” To change it to “.doc” click the dropdown arrow for Save as Type and select Word. You can then navigate to wherever on your hard drive you want to put the file, give the file a name, and save it. To access the document, open it from within Word. Copy and Paste Of course, you can always use Copy and Paste to get your notes from OneNote to Word. This actually is what I am most likely to do. Why? Because it is more intuitive, easier to do, and I like the results I get better. Because I control what I copy and where I paste it, I can select smaller pieces of my notes and paste them exactly where I need them to go in my document. Since I am making the
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decision instead of OneNote or Word, I have greater control over the results. What if I don’t want the whole page? If you only want certain parts of your notes page to go to Word, select those note holders (even sections of note holders) and then do the transfer. If only some items are selected, only those items will end up in Word when you do a Send To. If you do a Save As, the whole page is saved. One last thing on going from OneNote to Word Even though I didn’t show it in the screenshot above, any item transferred from OneNote to Word via Send To or Save As will be annotated with the source of the note and the date and time the note page was created. The annotation looks like this:
Fig. 13.3
SENDING LISTS AND OUTLINES TO WORD While the ability to send general notes to Word is quite useful, there is a more powerful feature built into OneNote that relates to Word. In Chapter 10, we went over making OneNote lists. Now, we are going to look at how those lists go from OneNote to Word. The basic procedure is the same, but the results could make your life much easier. As an example, let’s work through getting the outline for the first section of this chapter from OneNote to Word. To create the outline, I brainstormed what needed to be in the chapter, put the sections in order and then set up the indentation. The note holder looked like this:
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Fig. 13.4
Notice that I set my outline up so that the chapter number started at 13, but the inner lists started at 1. I did this by going to the Custom Numbering task pane and setting the starting number for each of the outline levels. My next step was to take this outline and move it to Word. It doesn’t matter how I got it over to Word. When Word gets the note, it recognizes that numbered content is involved and automatically changes it to outline content. You can add content in between outline elements and Word will do the renumbering for you. Formatting Outlines from OneNote When the outline is transferred from OneNote to Word, Word recognizes the content as an outline. It will apply the default text style to your outline content. In order for your outline to have the styles you desire, you will need to apply them by hand. Because of this limitation, when the above outline was pasted into this document, it looked like this: Fig. 13.4
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I had to hand-apply my styles to match the formatting of the book. For such a small segment, it doesn’t appear to save much work. On large projects, the ability to brainstorm in OneNote, reorder the resulting notes, and then bring those notes into Word in a logical manner is a great time saver.
SENDING WORD DOCUMENTS TO ONENOTE So far in this chapter we have been covering how to send notes from OneNote to Word. However, if you are working in a collaborative environment, you might need to send Word documents to OneNote to use as a base for note taking. There are two ways to go that direction: •
Copy and Paste
•
Insert→ Document as Picture
The difference? Copy and Paste puts the actual content of your Word document on your notes page. You can work with the document as note holders. Insert→ Document as Picture uses the MODI printer to put your document on the background of your note pages. Copy and Paste has the advantage that your content is editable and movable. This can be quite useful if you are disciplined at moving only those notes that you want moved. On the other hand, because inserting the document as a picture puts your document as a part of the background, you can take notes or markup the document pages and not have to worry about moving content around. Another advantage of inserting the document as a picture is that you retain the look and feel of your document. Page breaks, headers, footers, and formatting are all automatically retained. In contrast, when you paste Word content onto your notes page, only the exact content goes over. Your indentation, tracking, headers, footers, and other Word-based items do not transfer as well.
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One example of this: The main text of this book was created in Word. The chapter titles are numbered using automatic numbering with automatic text applied (the word “Chapter”). If the chapter heading information were to be copied to OneNote, it would look like this: Fig. 13.5
Notice that the word “chapter” is not capitalized. Because the page size on a note page can be anything you want, the indentation is different. However, the biggest difference is one you cannot see in a screenshot. The indentation and the line markers are editable. Unlike in Word, where those elements are considered part of the list, in OneNote they are just regular text that can be moved and adjusted at will. (The chapter number is set via the Customize Numbering task pane.) Why ever use Copy and Paste? The one advantage Copy and Paste has over inserting as a picture is that colors stay. When you create a picture of a document with MODI, it is a black and white picture. If you use colors in your document, you would be advised to use Copy and Paste to add the information to your notes pages. I have developed a workaround for when it is important that the colors are retained for certain sections of a document. I use MODI to insert the picture of the document. Then, I go through the document and highlight the text that is to be in color. For example, red text gets a red highlight. Blue text gets a blue highlight. Because highlighting is not considered a graphic, it cannot be moved to the background. Be sure that you don’t accidentally move it when annotating your notes. For diagrams, pictures, and other graphics, I copy and paste the actual graphic onto the note page near its location on
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the document picture. (If I have the original of the graphical element, I use Insert→ Picture instead of Copy and Paste.) Doing this, I can send the picture to the background and guarantee that it will not be moved accidentally. How much text fits on a OneNote page? When you insert the document as a picture, OneNote will automatically split the document into subpages. The split will occur every tenth page. Because the pages are printed pages, not just content pages, the page count contains many blank pages caused by forcing new pages to a right or left page as well as the content pages of your document.
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Using OneNote with Excel ¾
OneNote and Tabular Data
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Bring Excel Data to OneNote Using A Screen Clipping
Chapter 14
Using Excel with OneNote At the current time, using Excel with OneNote is fairly disappointing. Microsoft claims that you can insert Excel data into OneNote. Serious Excel users may find that the limitations far outweigh the benefits.
ONENOTE AND TABULAR DATA The primary problem is that for all of its flexibility, OneNote is not set up for tabular data. The OneNote help file suggests that you can set up a table of numbers using the tab key to move from column to column. There are a several quirks with this method. Consider the OneNote table shown here.
Fig. 14.1
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•
When you get to the end of the first row in the table, pressing enter will take you to the last row of the next column. You then need to use the left arrow or backspace key to go to the first column.
•
Just like if you were using a manual typewriter, numbers are left justified so the decimal points will not automatically line up
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When an entry is too wide for a column (i.e. United Kingdom in row 4), OneNote automatically wraps to a new row. However, it then becomes possible to type numbers next to the word Kingdom in the figure.
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It is possible although not intuitive how to resize a column.
Resizing Columns in OneNote Tabular Data To resize a column in a table in Fig. 14.2 OneNote, you need to move the cursor to the beginning of the next column. Right-click on the four-headed arrow shown here. Choose Resize Previous Fig. 14.3 Column as shown here.
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You will then be given an object which you can drag to resize the column as shown here. While trying to resize Fig. 14.4 several columns one right after the other, I found a bug where OneNote seems to ignore every other request to Resize Previous Column. You will be pleased to see that after resizing the column with region names, OneNote did remember that United Kingdom was supposed to be on one row. The only apparent way to resize the final column is to grab the resize object at the top right of the current note as shown below.
Fig. 14.5
INSERT EXCEL DATA USING COPY & PASTE After seeing how poorly OneNote deals with tabular data, is it any wonder that it does not deal well with Excel data? Using Copy and Paste Take a simple spreadsheet like the one shown below. Select range A1:E8 and copy it to the clipboard.
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Fig. 14.6
Use Alt+Tab to switch to OneNote and then Edit and Paste. The result, shown below is a table very similar to the table that you typed manually above.
Fig. 14.7
You will see the same quirks – numbers are left-aligned. OneNote did do a fine job of keeping the original numeric formatting and making the first column wide enough to handle the longer entry of “United Kingdom.” Four Paste Options Furthermore, after doing the paste, an icon appears in the lower left. This icon offers several Fig. 14.8 choices to customize the paste as shown here. Each choice is described below. •
Keep Source Formatting: This option will paste
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the data using the fonts that were used in Excel. The image is the one shown on the Figure 14.6. •
Match Destination Formatting: The result shown looks similar to the Keep Source Formatting results, except the fonts have been changed to Verdana, my default OneNote font.
Fig. 14.9
•
Keep Text Only: In this and most Excel files, this is going to be an ugly option. Fig. 14.10
•
Paste as Picture: Changing the paste options to Paste as Picture causes the look of the table to change dramatically. As shown in Figure 14-10, the columns are now nicely lined up. I am not sure why OneNote seems to render the picture in a gigantic size font. Fig. 14.11
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Set as Default Paste: After choosing one of the above paste options, you can choose to make that style the default paste for all future paste operations.
Effect of Four Page Options on Various Formatting The example used in the beginning of this chapter was fairly boring. There were no special font effects, colors, borders or other Excel formatting. This section will take a look at the various Excel formatting options and how well each one translates to OneNote using the four paste options. Font colors Change the font color of a cell in the Excel table before you copy and paste. All of the paste options except Keep Text Only will reproduce the font color when the data is pasted to OneNote. Background color Add a background color to cells in Excel. Only the Paste as Picture option will reproduce the background color Font Face, Font Size, Italics, Underlining, StrikeThrough, Superscript and Subscript If you use an unusual font for one cell in Excel and then paste to OneNote, the options to Keep Source Formatting or Paste as Picture will bring over the font typeface, size, italics, and underlining options. Bold Strangely, the paste option for Keep Source Formatting does not keep the cells set to Bold when they are pasted. Only the Paste as Picture will keep the bold formatting of the cells. Cell borders Only Paste as Picture will copy the cell borders from Excel to OneNote.
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Summary of the options The “Paste as Picture” option seems to make the text larger but faithfully reproduces all of the various formatting possibilities that can be used. I tested the various paste options with this badly formatted Excel worksheet. Fig. 14.12
The best option is the Paste as Picture option. This option faithfully reproduces the hideous formatting from the Excel original.
Fig. 14.13
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The next best option is Keep Source Formatting. This handles just about every option that you would expect, however it fails to capture the bold font in the last column.
Fig. 14.14
Paste Considerations for Embedded Charts If your Excel worksheet contains an embedded chart, there are special considerations. Consider the embedded chart in the Excel worksheet below.
Fig. 14.15
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After you copy and paste this range, the option for Keep Source Formatting seems to work the best for embedded charts. In the figure below, notice how this option kept the chart during the paste and left the numbers in a readable size. Fig. 14.16
You would think that Paste as Picture would work nicely. It does capture the chart, but the entire picture was too small to read. It can however be resized as needed. Fig. 14.17
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INSERT EXCEL DOCUMENT AS PICTURE If you search for Excel in OneNote help, the help file suggests this option as one of two ways for dealing with data from Excel. It does seem to work for small Excel files but fails miserably with larger files. Microsoft does admit the following limitations: •
All colors are changed to grayscale in order to keep the size of the OneNote file smaller. In my opinion, this is a silly limitation. At least they should give you an option to bring color over or not. You cannot tell in a black and white book, but the colors in the chart above are vivid when captured in OneNote. In the image below, they are a boring gray.
•
You cannot edit numbers in the picture. This is obvious. It is a picture.
•
Each page of the Excel printout is added as a separate background image to OneNote. If you want to move the location of the image, you must right-click the picture and clear the Set Picture as Background checkbox.
Preparing to Insert a Document From the Insert menu, select Document as Picture. Fig. 14.18
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A dialog similar to the File Open dialog box will allow you to select which document to insert. The program then takes a fairly long time with the message shown here. Fig. 14.19
The result shown below is an image of a sheet of paper with the Excel document as it would appear if printed on a monochrome laser printer. OneNote does nicely add a hyperlink above the picture that allows you to open the original document. It is not obvious in this monochrome book, but the results from using Copy and Paste look far superior to the monochrome results of Insert Document as Picture.
Fig. 14.20
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Insert Document as Picture Fails for Complex Documents If your Excel file contains more than one page, you will need a lot of system resources in order to use this feature. On a computer with 512MB of RAM, the feature will fail when the printed document contains more than one page. Sometimes, you will get the first page of data and then several large rectangles of black for subsequent pages. Sometimes you will see the Document Imagewriter start to print and you will be returned to Excel without anything being inserted. Because this feature cannot handle color or work reliably with larger documents, I would suggest avoiding it at this time.
BRING EXCEL DATA TO ONENOTE USING A SCREEN CLIPPING Both authors of this book highly recommend an inexpensive product from TechSmith called Snag-It. All of the screen shots in this book were captured at 300 dpi with Snag-It. The SnagIt product runs circles around the Microsoft PrtScrn utility for capturing screen shots. Microsoft has finally improved their screen capture utility and the new functionality appears in OneNote as something called Screen Clipping. This utility works fine for getting a picture of Excel data into OneNote. While you are in your Excel document, look in the taskbar for the OneNote icon. Right-click the icon and choose the option for Create a Screen Clipping as shown in the figure below.
Fig. 14.21
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The screen will dim and the message shown below will appear. Fig. 14.22
As you click and draw a rectangle on the screen, the colors inside the rectangle brighten. Release the mouse and a new SideNote appears with the clipped region. A note indicates the date and time of the screen capture. A message indicates that the screen clipping can also be pasted into OneNote or any other application. When you paste into another OneNote page, the picture (but not the date/time stamp) appears.
Fig. 14.23
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Next Steps Excel data seems to work best when pasted as a picture into OneNote. In Chapter 15, you will learn some interesting uses for OneNote in the classroom.
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Lesson Planning Tools
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Precreated Assignment and Test Material
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Student Uses
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OneNote in the Classroom I expect that as OneNote spreads around the world, we are going to find that the second most common use of the tool will be in the classroom. OneNote’s original purpose was as a note-taking tool. Who takes more notes than students do? While students will take notes using the tool, I believe that teachers will also begin to use the tool to do their lesson planning, create homework assignments, create tests, and teach students how to do research. In this chapter, the focus is on where teachers and students can use OneNote directly. For information on using OneNote to record research, see Chapter 11.
LESSON PLANNING TOOLS As a trainer, a parent volunteer, and a classroom assistant, I know the pains that teachers go through to document the content, methods, assessments, and resources for each class lesson. I felt from the first day that I used the tool that OneNote 215
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would be the perfect place to document all of this information. In fact, I keep all of this information for my training sessions in OneNote on my own stationery set. Microsoft saw this need and with the release of OneNote’s SP1 created lesson-planning stationery. (To find the stationery set, go to Office Online and search for “OneNote lesson materials.” It should be the first one on the resulting list.) This stationery set has seven stationery pages. When downloaded from the Microsoft site, it will show up in your Stationery under a new section called “Lesson Materials.” If you haven’t already downloaded this stationery set, I recommend that you do it now. The next few pages are going to cover the individual pieces in the set. Having the set in front of you while you read will help you to understand the content. The information on the stationery pages comes close to what is needed for lesson planning and evaluation. As we go through each page of the stationery set, I will offer my opinions on what else you are likely to want to add to the pages. If you need more information on modifying the stationery pages, check Chapter 8. I don’t expect that any teacher or trainer will have time to complete the full set of pages for each lesson presented. The more you document for each lesson, the easier it will be to refresh your memory the next time you have to give that lesson. I see the completion of these pages as an on-going process that will be completed as lessons are presented over and over. Title page The title page lets you create a summary of the information you need to track for the class. At the top of the page, it provides space for your name, the grade, the date, the lesson time frame, and the description. In addition, it allows you to create a table that shows a summary of how each student did on individual assignments and how each student did on the lesson as a whole. You can also include notes that show why the student received the grade they did.
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Fig. 15.1
Overview This page helps you define the goals, standards, prerequisites, and other important planning information that will be covered during this class. For each set of information the page covers, there are hints and examples for you to use. This page is especially helpful to newer teachers or teachers presenting new material. Fig. 15.2
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Methods This page is where you will define the actual content and procedures for the lesson. It covers the four major areas for defining the content of the lesson: Instructional methods, Teacher and Student roles in this lesson, Learning environment/ resources, and Technology. I like the questions asked, but feel that there is a missing section to this page. The stationery set as a whole does not provide a place for documenting how long it will take to present each section of the class. While that information could be added to the Goals section above, I feel it fits here. By putting the timing information here, you know how long you expect to spend on each of the activities and lectures in the lesson. Again, each area includes tips on getting started with your lesson plan.
Fig. 15.3
Alternatives This page will be mainly used by teachers who have students that need adaptations to the learning environment. Space is
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given for the specific adaptation that each student needs. For this page, you may require an additional column that indicates which Individual Education Plan section or goal necessitates the adaptation.
Fig. 15.4
Assessment This page allows you to document how the students’ progress will be evaluated over the course of the lesson.
Fig. 15.5
Resources This page documents any resource material or person you need for this lesson outside the regular class textbook and materials. The page starts by asking for physical resources you will need. You can list the actual materials, how much you need of each
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resource, the cost of each resource, and the source for the resource. Next, space is provided to list services and volunteers needed during the lesson. Finally, space is provided for you to list links to online and intranet resources. Here again, I feel there is a missing section. I believe that any teacher using this section will need to track any field trips associated with the lesson. The page asks for volunteer information, but does not (by default) offer a place for the planning information for any out-of-classroom excursions. I would add a section that asks for contact information for the event, transportation times, costs, etc. As a volunteer at many classroom trips, I would feel it also necessary to include permission slip and contact information links.
Fig. 15.6
Evaluation This page helps you to evaluate how the lesson worked. It covers all the basics of evaluation from both, the teacher’s and
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the student’s viewpoints. There will be additional evaluation questions you will ask for most lessons, but there is plenty of space on the page to ask and answer them.
Fig. 15.7
PRECREATED ASSIGNMENT AND TEST MATERIALS The second use most teachers will find for OneNote is as a way to create and distribute standard assignments, handouts, and tests. If you already have these items gathered electronically in some other application, I am not suggesting you move them to OneNote. Instead, I am suggesting that new pieces be designed and created using OneNote when and where appropriate. The biggest advantage of using a OneNote page to distribute assignments and handouts is its flexibility. Because you can place information anywhere on the page, it is easy to set up
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pages that have informational areas, assignments, and research opportunities on the same page. As with any electronically generated set of materials, retrieval of information becomes much easier. Instead of digging through the file cabinet to find the sheet to copy, you search within OneNote and the page pops right up. You make any adjustments you need for the current situation and print it. Alternatively, you make the adjustments and send it to the students to complete using a computer. When they finish the assignment, they send it back to you electronically. Paperless classrooms come a step closer to reality and tracking becomes easier. For research assignments, a standard OneNote stationery page delivered to the students helps them document where the information was acquired. Since OneNote will automatically annotate where copied information came from (either on the Web or from another application) building reference lists and bibliographies becomes a simpler and more verifiable task. Creating the outline of the final paper or presentation can be done using OneNote’s outline and indentation features and then copied to Word or PowerPoint as needed.
OTHER CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT TOOLS In addition to creating detailed lesson plans with OneNote, I see the strong possibility of using OneNote for two other classroom management tasks: •
Create week-by-week plans
•
Provide notes to substitute teachers
Create week-by-week plans One of the biggest pains for teaching multiple classes in a single day is keeping track of what lesson which class is on at any given time. Most teachers have a paper notebook or desk
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calendar that shows day-by-day, class-by-class information. Changing that information due to classroom delays can be a real pain. If that information can be kept in a OneNote section, it will be easier to update and track. My suggestion is to create a specific calendar based piece of stationery that lists exactly what you need. Say you are a high school math teacher. Your school is on a block schedule, as many high schools are these days. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, you teach six classes of 55 minutes each. On Tuesday and Thursday, you teach 3 classes of 2 hours each. On paper, you would most likely create a block chart that looks something like this: Table 15.1 Monday 1st
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Alg. II
Alg II
Alg II
4th
Prep
Prep
Prep
5th
Lunch
Lunch
Lunch
Lunch
Lunch
6th
Alg II
Alg II
Alg II
Alg II
Alg II
2nd 3rd
7th 8th
Prep
Prep
Each square would be filled in with the lesson information for that class for that hour on that day. If anything changes, you would need to erase/scratch off the notes and rewrite them. Instead, create a OneNote stationery page that looks like this:
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Fig. 15.8
Make sure the image is set as the background so that it doesn’t move. Each box is a separate class, with space for notes and updates. Each note can be placed in its own note holder. If lessons have to be moved from one class day to the next, the note holder can be dragged to the next day and the changes for the following days cascaded similarly. As you work through the school year, new pages can be created for each week. One advantage to this process is that OneNote scales each page to fit nicely on a piece of landscape 8.5 by 11 inch paper. Provide notes to substitute teachers Once you have your lesson plan details and your week-by-week planning done in OneNote, preparing for a substitute teacher becomes much easier. If the teacher is computer literate, you
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can leave a note or email telling them where the information is for each class. If they aren’t computer savvy, you can print out the needed pieces for them to follow. If you know that you will have a substitute for a number of days, you can even create a OneNote section just for them. In this section, place copies of the week-by-week calendar, the lesson plans, the handouts, and the quizzes or tests. With everything together, it will be easier for them to control the class and keep the learning happening.
STUDENT USES Just as Microsoft has created stationery to help teachers teach better, they have also provided stationery sets to help students do a better job of taking notes. 5 pieces of stationery are delivered with OneNote: •
Simple Lecture Notes
•
Detailed Lecture Notes
•
Lecture Notes and Study Questions
•
Math/Science Class Notes
•
History Class Notes
Each of these note pages has targeted note holders. All of them are useful as is, but you will probably find that you need to adapt them to meet your exact notetaking methods. (For information on adapting stationery, check out Chapter 8.) In addition to the default stationery sets, Office Online has several stationery pages targeted to student note taking: •
College course note page
•
Book summary page
If you use the Cornell Note Taking Method, there is also a set of stationery available for you to download from Office Online. The set contains a page that is set up with the three areas needed for
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note taking (Cue Column, Note Taking Area, and Summaries). In the Note Taking Area, there is a diagram showing the design of a Cornell Method page and a textual summary of the method and how to implement it in OneNote. The other stationery set from Microsoft that you might find helpful for note taking is the Presentation Summary stationery. While this page is set up for use by presenters to help track what needs to be said in a formal presentation, it can easily be adapted to student use by combining the note holders on the page with those on the other student stationery sets. I do have one word of caution for those taking notes with mathematical and scientific character sets. In the other Office applications, you have access to the Equation Editor. That access has not been built into OneNote. There are a few different ways you can get your equations into OneNote, but they take some extra steps: •
Open the Equation Editor via one of the other applications. Create your equation and copy it. Switch to OneNote and paste the equation. It will be pasted as a graphic, but you will have the content there.
•
If you wish to stay within OneNote, you can handwrite your equations on the note page with a tablet or a Tablet PC. The special characters will not be converted by the handwriting translation, so you will again only have a graphic of the equation using this method.
•
Change the font to a font with alternate characters. You will need to remember which character goes with which key on your keyboard, which may be a problem. On the positive side, this method does give you an equation that is editable
Schedule and to-do tracking Students can be some of the busiest people I know. If they aren’t in class or studying, they are likely to be at some kind of practice, at work, or out with friends. Add in appointments, homework,
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projects, and maybe even some time with the family, and you have a very messy situation. OneNote has some answers for the problem of overloaded students. On the Office Online site, there is a set of stationery students can use to create an assignment calendar. The set has three pages: Day at a glance, week at a glance, and month at a glance. While there is no easy way to link the content of the three pages to ensure that all content is the same on all three views, copy and paste does help. I don’t know if many students will actually be using all three views at any given time. My experience says that most will use the daily and monthly views much more than the weekly view. That takes care of schedules. But with so much going on, there are always things to do, both high priority (like the basketball game) and lower priority (like month-long projects that can be finished any time). The to-do list tracking hints provided in Chapter 10 will help here. Study groups with shared sessions Once students get to high school and college, there are times when group work is necessary. Whether it is a group project where everyone needs the same information or a study group where you want to share the various viewpoints of the materials, OneNote has a solution for these students as well: Shared Sessions. Shared Sessions were covered in Chapter 7. Students doing shared sessions need to keep a few security and organization pointers in mind: •
If you are doing your file sharing in a public place, such as an internet café or library, be sure that you always set up password-protected sessions. You don’t want to be setting your computer up for those not in your group to change your hard-won information.
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•
Set up a leader for the shared session. This person should be willing to do the session setup, the invites, and the control of where on the pages the group is working.
•
Especially in the cases where you are working with many different versions of the same notes, it is a good idea to start the page title with the initials or name of the student who originated the page This will help the group know exactly whose version of the notes you are looking at.
•
If you are drinking coffee while you are working on your computers, be very careful where you put the cup. You don’t want to cause everyone to lose information because you were the one who spilled your latte!
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Using OneNote at Home ¾
Grocery & Meal Planning
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Monthly Bill Minder
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Emergency Number Vault
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Travel Planning
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Garden Journal
Chapter 16
Using OneNote at Home Although Microsoft probably envisioned OneNote primarily for business meetings and classroom use, there are many uses for OneNote in the home. There are several ideas presented in this chapter. You will undoubtedly find more ideas for use in your home. If you find yourself using OneNote at home, drop a note to Kathy at OneNoteAnswers.com. If we feature your tip in a future edition of this book, we will send you a free autographed copy.
GROCERY & MEAL PLANNING If you are planning meals for a family, OneNote can be a great place to keep track of the meal plan and subsequently the required groceries. The case example presented in this book is fairly robust. You could easily implement a simpler version. There is a common misconception in the marketplace that OneNote is only for Tablet PCs. This is simply not true – both of the authors are using OneNote primarily on desktop PCs. However, I have to admit that in the “dream home of tomorrow,” it would 231
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be radically cool to have a Tablet PC mounted on the wall in the kitchen to run this use of OneNote. Overview of the Application This application has three components. There is a section to hold a weekly meal plan. There is a folder to hold recipes. Finally, there is a section to hold the weekly grocery lists. If you have a collection of recipes in Word, take some time to copy and paste the ingredient lists to the Recipe folder. Before each weekly grocery shopping trip, you would plan out the meals for the seven days of the week. Copy ingredient lists from the recipe pages to the master grocery list. Each section would benefit from custom Stationery. Although the details for custom Stationery are discussed in Chapter 8, the overview will be covered here. Recipe Cards The Recipe Cards section of the application could be optional. If you don’t already have a collection of recipes in Microsoft Word, you might want to skip ahead to the Meal Planning section. New folder for recipe cards Create a new folder to Fig. 16.1 hold several sections of recipe cards. Right-click any section tab and choose New Folder from the right-click menu as shown Figure 16.1.
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Right-click the new folder as shown Figure 16.2 and select Rename. Name the folder Fig. 16.2 “Recipes.” Left-click on the Recipes folder to open it. Because this is a new folder without any sections, you will see the message shown in Figure 16–3. Click on the message to create a new section in the recipes folder. The section will be called “New Section 1.” Right-click the section tab, select Rename, and give the section a name such as “Desserts.”
Fig. 16.3
Custom Stationery for recipe cards A typical recipe card would have a section for ingredients, preparation directions, the number of people that the recipe serves and possibly some notes. If the task pane is not visible, press Ctrl+F1 to display the task pane. From the dropdown at the top of the pane, choose Stationery. Expand the Decorative section in the task pane. Scroll down and select the Notebook Stationery. Add a paragraph on the left for ingredients. Insert ten to twelve lines with “to-do” style note flags. These note flags will be used later in the grocery portion of the application. On the right, add small paragraphs for “Serves,” “Prep Time,” and “Notes.” Below the ingredients, add a paragraph for Directions. Take some extra time to make sure this page looks good, as you will be using it many times. For example, you might want to bold the headings or use certain fonts. Your page may look something like this.
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Fig. 16.4
Once you have the section set up as you would like it, use the final link on the Stationery task pane to Save Current Page as Stationery. On the Save As Stationery dialog, give the Stationery a name like Recipes. Check the box to Set as Default Stationery For All Pages in This Section. Fig. 16.5
Your first recipe section now has four tabs along the page margin. The first tab is a blank page without any Stationery. Feel
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free to delete this by right-clicking the first tab for Untitled Page and selecting Delete. Adding new recipe pages to the current section Every time you click the New Page tab, you will be given a blank recipe card. Fill in the recipe title in the title area of the page. Copy ingredients and instructions to the appropriate sections of the page. Setting up new sections for entrees, salads, etc. Now that you have custom Stationery set up as the default for the Desserts section, you will need to set up new sections that also use the Recipes Stationery. Add a new section by rightclicking a section tab and choosing New Section. Rename the New Section with a meaningful name. In the Stationery task pane, you will now see a new heading for My Stationery. Expand the My Stationery section. Right-click on the Recipes entry and choose Set as Default for This Section as shown in Figure 16.6. Fig. 16.6 When you click the New Page, the new page will use the Recipes Stationery that you set up. There does not seem to be a way to change the Stationery for the first Untitled Page in the section, so you will need to right-click that section and choose Delete. Overview of recipes Once you have set up all of the various sections, begin entering new pages for recipes. When you are done, you may have several sections and several recipes in each section as shown in Figure 16.7.
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Fig. 16.7
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As the recipes are created in their own folder, you need to click the “Up Folder” icon to return to your other OneNote sections. The up folder icon is located along the top of the page, to the left of the section tabs.
Fig. 16.8
Meal Planner Add a section to your Notebook for a Meal Planner. This section will contain one page for each week. Add seven headings with blank space where you can type the meal plan for each day. Custom Stationery for meal planner Follow the detailed steps in the Recipe section for creating your own Stationery. In this section, you might start with the Decorative Stationery called Recipe. Add headings for each day of the week. Save this Stationery as MealPlans and make it the default Stationery for the Meal Planner section. Your custom Stationery might look like the one shown here. Meal planning each week Add a new page to your Meal Planner Section. Add the “Week of” date to the title area. In the plan for each day of the week,
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Fig. 16.9
type a simple meal plan. If you set up recipe cards, you can use titles that correspond to the recipe section. A typical meal plan might look like the one shown here. Reusing meal plans After a few weeks of meal planning, you will find that you can mix and match meal plans from previous weeks. You can
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flip through the meal plans for the past few weeks and copy favorite days or even the entire schedule for a week to the current week. Grocery list The final component of the meal planning application is the grocery list. The grocery list benefits from the ease with which you can relocate list items from one list to another in OneNote.
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Planning the Grocery Application There are three components to the weekly grocery list. The first component is the weekly staples such as milk, bread, snacks that must be bought every week. The second component is when you need to replenish a commodity item. After you use your last dash of Old Bay seasoning, you need to jot down to buy a new can of Old Bay. Finally, there are the specific ingredients that you need for this week’s meals. If you are using the Recipe component of the application, you can easily copy entire ingredient lists from the recipe page to the grocery page. It will then be a simple process to compare the master ingredient list to the food that you have on hand in the pantry or freezer to determine what needs to be purchased. You can easily separate this list into lists of things that need to be bought and things that you already have on hand. Finally, it would be easy to build a section with the various sections of the grocery store. You can then move the various items from your various lists to the proper section of the grocery list. Set up Grocery Stationery Add a new section for the grocery list. Create a template that will become the Stationery for the weekly grocery list. In the upper right corner add the staples that you need to buy every week. Below that, add a heading for items that need to be replenished. During the week, as you use the last bit of a particular item, you can add it to the Replenish list. In the upper left corner, add a place where you can copy ingredients from the recipe pages. In the middle, add a section where you move items from the Meal Planner List over to the Buy list. Finally, if you wish to organize the grocery list by sections of the store, add the sections that correspond to your local grocery
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Fig. 16.11
store. In Figure 16–11, you will see how one local grocery is divided roughly into four sections. Save this template as new Stationery and mark it as the default as described previously in this chapter. Using the Grocery Application Add a new page to the grocery section. During the course of the week, add any items to the Replenish section. Fig. 16.12 After setting up your meal plan, copy ingredient lists to the Meal Planner List section of the Grocery page. At this point, you will have a complete list of items needed for the week’s meals as shown here.
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Look through your pantry and freezer and check off all the items that you already have on hand. At this point, you can either delete the checked items or move the unchecked items to a new list. It is easy to do either. This figure shows the process of moving the unchecked items to the Meal Planner to Buy application.
Fig. 16.13
After moving all of the items to the To Buy section, the upper right corner of your grocery page will contain all of the items that you need to buy this week as shown below. You could print and take this to the grocery store, or you could sort the list into various categories.
Fig. 16.14
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In order to sort the list, drag each item from the list to your predefined sections of the grocery store. This figure shows the final shopping list.
Fig. 16.15
MONTHLY BILL REMINDER Keep track of your recurring bill payments with OneNote. If you think about it, there are a certain number of bills that recur every month. Between car and house payments, utilities and charge cards, it is fairly easy to predict when bills are due. Create a new section in OneNote called BillMinder. On the first page, type your monthly bills in the order that they are due. Select the bills and hit Ctrl+1 to add a To-Do note flag to each bill as shown in Figure 16.16. Display the Stationery Task Pane. To display the task pane, press Ctrl+F1. To change to the Stationery task pane, use the dropdown at the top of the task pane to select Stationery. At
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Fig. 16.16
the bottom of the Stationery task pane, click the hyperlink for Save current page as Stationery. Give the Stationery a name like BillMinder and check the box to Set as Default Stationery for new pages in the current section. With each new month, create a new page and use the month name as the title of the page. During the month, as you pay bills, check off each bill as it is paid. Online Bill Payment Do you find that you are paying a number of bills online or via the telephone? For bills that are paid online, add the URL for bill payment to the To-Do list. Also add any notes such as user id or password to help you fly through bill payment easily. For bills that are paid via telephone, add the telephone number to the to-do entry. Saving Electronic Receipts For bills that are paid via the Internet, the company will often mail you a receipt via e-mail. Add a subpage to your monthly BillMinder page and paste screen clippings of the receipts on the subpage. All of your bill paying information and history will be in one place.
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EMERGENCY NUMBER VAULT OneNote is a great place to keep all of your important numbers. Set up sections for frequent flyer numbers, account numbers, the kid’s birthdays and social security numbers, shot records and more. This becomes the one spot to look when you need an important piece of information. As shown in the figure below, set up a new section. From the Stationery task pane, specify that the built-in Stationery of Small Pushpins should be the default Stationery for each new page in the section. Add pages for each category of information that you need to keep track of.
Fig. 16.17
Downloading additional Stationery from Office Online At the time this book went to press, Office Online offered several cool Stationery files that are designed for the home. In order to download these files, you will need an Internet connection. Display the Stationery Task Pane. Near the bottom of the page, click the hyperlink for Stationery on Office Online. The next two ideas for the home use Stationery are from the Office Online site.
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TRAVEL PLANNING If you are traveling out of town, there are many aspects of the trip you need to remember, such as airline flights, car rental, hotel information and so on. You will also want to jot notes about your final destination or any appointments that you have. You will want to jot notes about what you need to pack. You might want a screen clipping of the driving directions from the airport to the hotel. All of these can easily be tracked in an adhoc fashion on a page in OneNote. Assuming that you book your travel online, you can copy the emailed airline itinerary to OneNote. Include confirmation numbers that you will need for checking in at the airport. Copy and Paste car rental info, hotel information, etc. You can either create your own page or use the Business Trip Itinerary Stationery from Office Online. This free Stationery is shown in Figure 16.18.
GARDEN JOURNAL Display the Stationery Task Pane and follow the hyperlink to Stationery on Office Online. Download the Garden Journal Stationery.
NOTE
After downloading Stationery, the Task Pane changes to display the “New” task pane. Use the dropdown to change back to the Stationery Task Pane.
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Fig. 16.18
The Stationary Task Pane will now offer a section called Garden Journal. There are four built-in stationeries: •
A Year in the Garden
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Plant Inventory
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Design and Layout
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Resources
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Create a new page from “A Year in the Garden” stationery. As shown below, this page lets you plan your gardening tasks by month. The template has sample tasks for January through March filled in. You will have to customize for your climate and add additional months.
Fig. 16.19
The Design and Layout page is an interesting exercise. After turning on the gridlines, the stationery suggests that you use the drawing and writing tools to sketch your garden’s shape and then paste clipart of the types of plants for each section of the garden. My first attempt is shown in Figure 16–20. The most difficult part is using the pen tool on a desktop PC. It is nearly
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impossible to use a mouse to draw nice straight lines. This is one case where it would have been nice to have the line and autoshape tools available in other Office applications.
Fig. 16.20
Next Steps Using OneNote at home is limited only by your imagination. For any hobby or pastime you might have, you can easily organize and store notes about the hobby. In Chapter 17, you will see how to programmatically interact with OneNote.
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Sending Data Using Command Line Switches
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Using Import
Chapter 17
Using Office VBA to Programmatically Interact with OneNote I first saw OneNote at the 2003 Microsoft Authors and Publisher Conference. I immediately fell in love with the product and one of the first questions from several people in the room was “Do you expose the object model so we can interact with OneNote programmatically?” Many Office gurus love to tinker with Office applications using Visual Basic for Applications, the macro language hiding behind most Office applications.
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Unfortunately, Roan Kang said that there would not be a version of VBA in the first release of OneNote. He indicated that they might expose some of the object model in a later release. This happened in a limited way in the SP1 version. It opens up some interesting possibilities using Office VBA to populate new OneNote pages or to refresh pages that you previously programmatically created. Microsoft has given us two interesting features that allow things to be sent to OneNote. In the original release, they provided a number of command line switches. Unlike most command line switches, these switches actually allow another application’s VBA program a tiny bit of control over OneNote. In the SP1 release, Microsoft included an Application Programming Interface that allows far more control of content being added to OneNote. Unfortunately, all of the MSDN articles show you how to send content to OneNote using VB.Net. No one on the OneNote team seems to have an interest in allowing Office VBA to interact with OneNote. Luckily for you, we’ve broken the code and can now offer real life examples of sending data from any Office VBA program to OneNote.
NOTE
There are 200 million licensed copies of Microsoft Office in use today. Any of these 200 million people could use VBA to send content to OneNote. For some reason, the people at Microsoft wanted to write off this potential audience of 200 million people. Instead, they only focused on the techies who own VB.Net. In Bill’s opinion, the main difference between Microsoft Office and Star Office is that Microsoft Office handles VBA. If the Microsoft strategy of ignoring VBA continues, then Star Office will become the dominant Office software by the end of this decade.
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SEND DATA USING COMMAND LINE SWITCHES It is pretty rare to find useful command line switches, but OneNote has them. In the absence of any VBA for OneNote, you can use the command line switches to get data from Excel or Word or PowerPoint into OneNote. Command line switches for OneNote work whether OneNote is already open or not. If you send a command line switch to OneNote and the application is already running, Microsoft will simply carry out the action specified in the command line switch. In essence, then, repeatedly "opening" OneNote with different command line switches would allow you to add content to OneNote. For example, in Excel VBA, it is possible to repeatedly call OneNote with different command line switches in order to cause OneNote to carry out various tasks. The most common command line switch is the /paste switch. This switch will cause contents of the Windows clipboard to be pasted onto the current OneNote page. This allows you to easily copy various results from Excel VBA calculations to a OneNote page. The syntax of the command line switch is the fully qualified path to your copy of OneNote, followed by a space, a forward slash, the switch itself, and optionally any text needed by the switch. On my computer, OneNote is installed in "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\OneNote.exe". Thus, the command to cause the contents of the clipboard to be pasted into OneNote is "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\ OneNote.exe /paste". From any Office VBA application, you can force this command to be invoked by using the Shell command. The following lines of code will cause the contents of the clipboard to be pasted to OneNote. The Application.Wait command gives OneNote time to complete the task before going on to the next line of code. StrPath = "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\" StrPath = StrPath & "OneNote.exe "
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The Application.Wait is critical to success of this technique. In a later example, I tried looping through 10 cells. The program copied each of the 10 cells before the first shell command could finish. This caused the final contents of the clipboard to be pasted 10 times.
I have many applications in Excel. One of these applications will read large amounts of data downloaded from a cash register system at a chain of retail stores. The custom Excel VBA programs will find the top selling styles in any given department. The client might want me to develop a utility to copy these best selling styles and their pictures to a OneNote page. This figure shows the original data in Excel. Fig. 17.1
The following VBA code in Excel will load each picture and paste it to the current OneNote page. Sub PasteToOneNote() ' Build a report in OneNote of the best
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' selling styles. A previous program has ' provided a list of styles in A2:A6 StrPath = "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\” StrPath = StrPath & "OneNote.exe " strSwitch = " /paste" strCmd = StrPath & strSwitch ' Add a title to OneNote page Range("E1").Value = "Today’s Best Selling Styles" Range("E1").Copy ' Paste to OneNote Shell strCmd, vbNormalNoFocus Application.Wait Now + TimeSerial(0, 0, 1) ' Loop through each style For Each cell In Range("A2:A7") Range("E1").Value = cell.Value & " " & _ cell.Offset(0, 1).Value Range("E1").Copy ' Paste to OneNote Shell strCmd, vbNormalNoFocus Application.Wait Now + TimeSerial(0, 0, 1) ' Put picture in cell E2 fname = "J:\qimage\qi" & cell.Value & ".jpg" Range("E2").Select ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert(fname).Select ' Copy picture and paste to OneNote Selection.Copy Shell strCmd, vbNormalNoFocus Application.Wait Now + TimeSerial(0, 0, 1) ' Erase picture from Excel Selection.Delete Next cell Range("E1").Clear End Sub
After running the macro in Excel, the current page in OneNote has the pictures of all the best selling styles. The problem with the paste command line switch is that it always pastes the clipboard wherever the cursor happens to be. You do not have absolute control over the location of where the item should be pasted. It is basically impossible to create two columns of data using this method.
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Fig. 17.2
Other Command Line Switches There are many other command line switches. •
/ filename will open a particular file in OneNote. Filename must be in quotes, be fully qualified with the complete path, and end in the .One extension. You have no control over which page in the section gets opened. OneNote will go back to the last page that was open in that section and place the cursor at the last location. The code looks like this:
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strSwitch = "/ ""C:\Documents and Settings\Customer\" & _ “My Documents\My Notebook\Research\VisiCalc.one""" strCmd = StrPath & strSwitch Shell strCmd, vbNormalFocus End Sub
•
/new filename – will create a new OneNote file and open it. In theory, you should be able to specify the name of the file, but there is a bug that prevents this. In 100% of the cases, the new file is called Section n.one, where n is the next available file. The cursor is automatically placed in the title area of the first page of the new section. You must first copy and /Paste the title, then use SendKeys to send a tab character to OneNote. Again, you must use the Application.Wait after each call to OneNote in order to give the OneNote call time to finish. The following code will create a new section in the Research subfolder, type a title in the title area, then copy a list of cells to the page.
Sub PasteToOneNote() ' Build a report in OneNote of the best ' selling styles. A previous program has ' provided a list of styles in A2:A6 StrPath = "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\" StrPath = StrPath & "OneNote.exe " strSwitch = " /paste" strCmd = StrPath & strSwitch ' Add a title to OneNote page Range("E1").Value = "Today’s Best Selling Styles" Range("E1").Copy ' Paste to OneNote Shell strCmd, vbNormalNoFocus Application.Wait Now + TimeSerial(0, 0, 1) ' Loop through each style For Each cell In Range("A2:A7") Range("E1").Value = cell.Value & " " & _ cell.Offset(0, 1).Value Range("E1").Copy ' Paste to OneNote Shell strCmd, vbNormalNoFocus Application.Wait Now + TimeSerial(0, 0, 1)
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' Put picture in cell E2 fname = "J:\qimage\qi" & cell.Value & ".jpg" Range("E2").Select ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert(fname).Select ' Copy picture and paste to OneNote Selection.Copy Shell strCmd, vbNormalNoFocus Application.Wait Now + TimeSerial(0, 0, 1) ' Erase picture from Excel Selection.Delete Next cell Range("E1").Clear End Sub
•
/newfromexisting folder filename – This will copy the filename to a new folder and open the new file. This could be useful if the original file had certain stationary set up on its first page.
•
/openro filename – opens a file as read-only
•
/print filename – prints a OneNote file
•
/forcerepair filename – repairs a file
• /videonote – will start a video recording on the current page. •
/pauserecording – will pause audio or video recording
•
/stoprecording – will stop recording
•
/recordingprofile filename – will let you specify an alternate recording profile.
•
/startsharing password filename – will start a sharing session
•
/joinsharing sessionid password filename – will join a session in progress
•
/sidenote – starts OneNote in a side note window
•
/audionote – starts a recording on the active page
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•
/newtaskpane – opens the task pane
•
/import filename – in this case, the filename must be the full path, filename and .xml extension for a file that adheres to the OneNote SimpleImport XML Schema. This is a new feature in SP1. If you are going to use the /Import command line switch in order to import an XML file, I instead recommend that you use the .Import method discussed later. They both use identical XML data, but the .Import method appears to be far more robust than the /Import command line switch. I’ve found some files that will import just fine with the .Import method but fail with the /Import command line switch.
About OneNote XML XML is one of the hot new technologies in Office 2003. However, if you are like 99% of the computer population, you have no clue about XML. I want to demystify XML for you. Excel users are familiar with .CSV files – plain text files that can be imported and exported from Excel. Well – XML is also a plain text file. You can easily create XML using NotePad or simple VBA. However, the power is that XML files can contain both data and information about the data. You can include fieldnames, field validation, and a whole lot more. If you are familiar with writing basic HTML files, then it is easy to understand XML. Here is a quick primer on XML.
What is XML? If you have ever looked at the source code for a Web page, you are familiar with HTML tags. Near the top of a Web page’s HTML source, you will see a tag that defines the Web page title to appear in the blue bar at the top of the browser window. The tag might look something like this: <TITLE>Ask Mr. Excel - Tips for Excel
A Web page can contain tags to identify titles, paragraphs, tables, rows within tables, etc. This is the language of HTML.
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XML is like HTML on steroids. With XML, you can define absolutely any field in XML. The following XML file contains information about today’s orders received. There is no magic in creating an XML file – I actually typed this into Notepad. <SalesOrder> BCA Co 123 North Stow <State>OH 442242345650021.75 <SalesOrder> DEF Co 234 Carapace Lane South Bend <State>IN 44685345672050.00
Simple XML rules If you are familiar with HTML, then you are well up the learning curve to understanding HTML. However, XML has a few extra rules that differentiate XML from HTML. Every data element has to begin and end with an identical tag. Tag names are case sensitive. Data is not valid because the “n” in the closing tag does not have the same case as in the opening tag. Data is valid. The XML file must begin and end with a root tag. There can only be one root tag in the file. In the example above, the root tag is It is valid to have an empty tag. Put a slash at the end of the tag. If there is no zip code for an international order, use to indicate that there is no data for this field for this record.
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If you nest tags, the inner tag must be closed before you close the outer tag. This is different from HTML. In HTML it is valid to turn on bold, turn on italics, turn off the bold, then turn off the italics. The following is valid in HTML: XML is very cool. This is not valid in XML. You must close the italics tag before closing the bold tag. data will work, but data will not. XML Files are Defined by a Schema In order for various applications to create and consume XML data, someone must define a schema that explains what data is possible in the file. The files consumed by OneNote use the OneNote SimpleImport Schema. In a typical OneNote XML file, you will have one or more EnsurePage elements. An EnsurePage element will either ensure that a page previously exists in a section, or it will add it to the section. You must specify the section file name (for example, MyTodo.One). You may specify the title and a creation date for the page. You may also indicate that the new page should be inserted after a specific page that you previously created. You may include as many EnsurePage elements in the XML file as you wish. Next, you will have one or more PlaceObjects elements. You will need one PlaceObjects element for each page to which you want to write. The PlaceObjects will specify the path and id of the page. Nested inside the PlaceObjects element are one or more Object elements. An Object element will include the position of the object. The position is measured in points. There are 72 points to an inch. You will specify both the “X” and “Y” position of the object. There can be three types of objects. Image elements are used to insert an image on the page. The Ink element is used to insert a handwriting element on the page. An Outline element is used to insert text via an HTML string on to the page.
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Globally Unique Identifiers OneNote uses Globally Unique Identifiers (GUID) in order to identify each page in a section and in order to identify each object placed on a page. You can not import anything into OneNote without specifying several GUIDs. If you are using VB.Net, it is very each to deal with and generate new GUIDs. However, Microsoft does not document any methods for generating new GUIDs from VBA. Thankfully, Michael Kaplan of Trigemanal Software (www.trigemanl.com) has broken the code for generating new GUID’s from within VBA. The code samples below use concepts that he debuted at http://www.trigeminal.com/code/guids.bas. All of the 200 million users of Microsoft Office users who wish to send content to OneNote with VBA owe a big thankyou to Michael Kaplan for making this code available. A GUID is a 128-bit unique string assigned to every object. For humans, the 128-bit number is often converted into a string that looks like {A151F266-65E3-4B0F-B51E-BDC892328101}. If you manually open OneNote and insert a new page, or some text or ink on a page, there is no way to find out the GUID of the page or the ink. In theory, if Microsoft would add VBA support to Version 2.0 of OneNote, you would be able to learn the GUID of an object. Thus, there is no way to manipulate an object or a page that has been manually inserted into OneNote. When you build the OneNote XML to insert a new page, you will have VBA generate a new GUID for you to assign to the page. You will have VBA generate a new GUID for you to assign to each object on the page. If your VBA application saves these GUIDs for the future, then it is possible to later reference the same GUID to change an object that was programmatically placed on the page. One useful example is a sales reporting application. Each day, your Excel application could import a new sales report and produce summaries by Region. As the application set up the
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original pages and objects, VBA could store the GUIDs used on the spreadsheet. This would enable the application to later update or delete objects on the page. The following code is Michael Kaplan’s function for generating new GUIDs in VBA. Insert a new module in your VBA project. Copy the following code into the module. You will then be able to use the StGuidGen function to generate new GUID’s for your OneNote inserted objects. '-----------------------------------------' basGuid from http://www.trigeminal.com/code/guids.bas ' You may use this code in your applications, just make ' sure you keep the (c) notice and don’t publish it ' anywhere as your own ' Copyright (c) 1999 Trigeminal Software, Inc. ' All Rights Reserved '-----------------------------------------Option Compare Binary ' Note that although Variants now have ' a VT_GUID type, this type is unsupported in VBA, ' so we must define our own here that will have the same ' binary layout as all GUIDs are expected by COM to ' have. Public Type GUID Data1 As Long Data2 As Integer Data3 As Integer Data4(7) As Byte End Type Public Declare Function StringFromGUID2 Lib "ole32.dll" _ (rclsid As GUID, ByVal lpsz As Long, _ ByVal cbMax As Long) As Long Public Declare Function CoCreateGuid Lib "ole32.dll" _ (rclsid As GUID) As Long '-------------------------------------------------------' StGuidGen ' ' Generates a new GUID, returning it in canonical ' (string) format '------------------------------------------------------Public Function StGuidGen() As String Dim rclsid As GUID
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If CoCreateGuid(rclsid) = 0 Then StGuidGen = StGuidFromGuid(rclsid) End If End Function '-------------------------------------------------------' StGuidFromGuid ' ' Converts a binary GUID to a canonical (string) GUID. '-------------------------------------------------------Public Function StGuidFromGuid(rclsid As GUID) As String Dim rc As Long Dim stGuid As String ' 39 chars for the GUID plus room for the Null char stGuid = String$(40, vbNullChar) rc = StringFromGUID2(rclsid, StrPtr(stGuid), _ Len(stGuid) - 1) StGuidFromGuid = Left$(stGuid, rc - 1) End Function
USING IMPRT Using XML to import into OneNote XML files for OneNote must conform to the OneNote SimpleImport Schema. This is described below. Once you have a valid XML file, you can get the content into OneNote using one of three methods. •
You can use the /Import command line switch described above to import the XML into OneNote.
•
In VBA or VB6 or VB.Net, you can add a reference to the OneNote 1.0 Type library and then use the .Import(xmlString) method in order to send the data to XML.
•
In VB.Net, there is a class library offered by Microsoft which will allow you to pass content in HTML format. The class library will effectively format the HTML into XML and get the data into OneNote. While this is the easiest method, it requires that you have VB.Net. Since this package is not packaged with Office, it is beyond the scope of this book. If you do have VB.Net, check out the details of this method
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at http://blogs.msdn.com/dolange/archive/2004/06/17/ 158976.aspx. Generating OneNote XML from Excel VBA In Excel VBA, add a reference to the OneNote 1.1 Type Library. You might be able to get away without adding this reference if you only want to use the /Import command line switch. However, if you are going to use the .Import or the .NavigateToPage methods, you will need to add the reference.
HISTORICAL NOTE
When I originally asked Microsoft about using VBA to generate content for OneNote, they were a bit baffled. In VB.Net, Microsoft now offers so many excellent tools for dealing with XML, they could not understand why anyone would try to use VBA when VBA doesn’t offer support for such tools. I think that Microsoft forgets that long before Office had support for HTML, people like Jordan Evans wrote the excellent XL2HTML VBA code that would allow Office customers to publish Excel files to HTML. Jordan worked at NASA (but, as far as I know, he was not a rocket scientist) and needed to publish Excel 5.0 ranges to the Web. He wrote the XL2HTML VBA code that was picked up by Excel users everywhere. I began using XL2HTML in the mid-90’s to publish reports to the Web. I guess that by 1997, Microsoft would have considered it insane for anyone to write their own convertto-HTML utility for Excel. So – compared to the task of converting Excel to HTML, the whole task of converting Excel to OneNote XML seems pretty easy. For anyone interested in a look back at XL2HTML, check it out at http: //www.unibase.com/local/wmtk/convert/misc/ xl2html/index.htm
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Creating the XML File – Opening Portion of File The following code will initialize a temporary file called OneNoteImport.xml. The file name is not important, other than it has to end in the XML extension. Note that the 2nd line of the XML file defines the schema. Microsoft used a different schema for the SP1 preview. The following code will only work with the full release of OneNote SP1. fname = "C:\OneNoteImport.xml" On Error Resume Next Kill (fname) On Error GoTo 0 Open fname For Output As #1 Print #1, "" Print #1, ""
Creating the XML File – Syntax for the EnsurePage Objects The EnsurePage tag requires two parameters, but could have as many as 6 parameters. GUID = "{A151F266-65E3-4B0F-B51E-BDC892328101}" Title = "My Data" Date = "2004-09-26T21:34:00-05:00" RTL = "false” insertafter = "{7B4368A5-698C-413A-8330-85313E3B702A}" />
Only the path and guid descriptors are required in the EnsurePage object. Everything else is optional. Each is described below. •
GUID: You will have to generate a new GUID on the fly using the stGUIDGen() function above.
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Path: This describes the location of the OneNote file. In the example above, the page is in the Sales.one file located in
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the Reseach subfolder. If this file does not exist, the import process will create it for you. •
Title: The title is optional. If specified, it will appear in the title area of the page and along the right side of the notebook.
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Date: The date is optional. If it is not included, you will get the actual date and time that the code ran.
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RTL: This stands for Right-To-Left. If you are using a Hebrew version of OneNote, you can specify true for RTL.
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InsertAfter: This parameter requires the GUID of another page. Now – this is only going to be possible if your VBA program previously inserted the other page and you saved the GUID somewhere.
In practice, your code is going to have to generate a GUID and then build the XML on the fly. The following code will add the Ensure tag to an XML file. PageID = StGuidGen() Print #1, " <EnsurePage path=""Research\Sales.one""" Print #1, " guid=""" & PageID & """ " Print #1, " title=""Overview""/>"
You may specify multiple EnsurePage objects in one file if you need to insert many pages. Creating the XML File – Syntax for the PlaceObjects Tag The PlaceObjects tag contains two parameters and both are required.
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pagePath: this is the same as the path parameter in the EnsurePage tag.
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pageGUID: this is the unique GUID. It must be the same GUID that you used when creating the page.
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The following code would generate the PlaceObjects tag. Print #1, ""
Creating the XML File – Adding an Image to the Page Add an image using this first syntax of the Object tag. The following XML will add a logo 1 inch from the left side of the page, 2 inches from the top of the page. It will set the image as a background image.
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Guid: The GUID for the object must be a new and different GUID than the one used for the page.
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Position: The position parameter specifies an x and y location in points.
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BackgroundImage: This parameter indicates if the image should be made a part of the background as is the case with stationary.
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File Path: This is the location of the image to be imported.
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Width: a positive decimal number of points
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Height: a positive decimal number of points
The code to generate this XML follows: PictureID = StGuidGen() Print #1, ""
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Creating the XML File – Adding Ink to the Page Adding an Ink object is similar to adding an image. The BackgroundImage parameter may not be used. The Ink should be in Ink Serialized Format (ISF) and be contained in a plain file with a byte stream containing the ISF Creating the XML File – Adding Text to the Page Text must be described in HTML. This means that you can specify some common HTML tags like bold or italics, line breaks, headline fonts, etc. You can not specify tables in the HTML format. The HTML must be encoded in a string and passed to the XML in a CDATA block. While an Image or Ink can stand alone, the Text object must always be part of an Outline. You specify the top and left position of the outline as well as the width of the outline in points. You may then insert HTML, or Images and/or Ink in the outline. The following sample will add some text to the page.
