Freigeben über

Notebook cleaner and privatizer powertoy

  • Artikel

 

People that publish shared notebooks in some environments have a couple of requests which need to be addressed.  First, suppose you are an administrator creating a section or some pages in a "New Employee Orientation" notebook which will be shared with all new employees at your company.  OneNote keeps track of who modifies information on a page in shared notebooks (right click the "Outline Element" to see on the context menu who last modified it), but in this scenario, it is really irrelevant who typed the information.  Wouldn't it be nice to remove that data from the notebook?

 

People also may want this as an additional level of privacy.  I suggest spot checking the results if it is really critical that the personal information is removed.

 

Another problem is a bit more subtle.  If you add a lot of information to a page, focus (technically, the "insertion point," or location of the cursor) is remembered and focus goes to that location when anyone navigates to that page.  For our scenario, you would probably want the focus to be at the top of each page by default, but since you probably typed the information at the bottom of the page most recently, focus is left at the bottom.  The tedious way to move focus to the top of the page is to manually open each page and click at the top. 

 

Or, you can install the "Notebook Cleaner" powertoy from https://johnguin.members.winisp.net/Shared%20Documents/OneNote%20Notebook%20Cleaner.zip and let it do all this work for you.  (Update: the link for downloading is below my signature at the end of this entry).

 

Gary Neitzke wrote this tool and here is his summary:

 

Purpose:

To remove author information and reset navigation points to make the notebook easily distributable.

 

Description:

This add-in will allow you to prepare a notebook for distribution. When started it will do several things:

 

1.) Reset all navigation points to the top most page of each section, and the top most section of each section group.

2.) Removes selection from content so the cursor will be in the title box

3.) Clears Author and LastModifiedBy items .

 

This tool also includes a pair of registry files to toggle cleaning the names on or off.  If you only want to move focus to the top of each page in a notebook, double click the "DisableCleaning_Names.reg" file to leave the author names intact.  To re-enable this functionality, click the "EnableCleaning_Names.reg" file.  Cleaning the names is the default.

 

I can't really demonstrate this addin easily since I don't want to wipe out the "Last Changed By" data in my shared notebooks.  The toolbar does not have an icon - it just uses "Clean Notebook" as a label.

 

And we're still fixing a few nagging bugs with the Journal Importer.  It should be done in the next few days, so please bear with me.

 

Questions, comments, concerns and criticism always welcome,

John Guin

 

scrubber.zip

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2007
    Dear John! Dear Gary! Great job, you people are doing here! Producing powertoys by the dozen. Thank you so much. This one works well on most of my notebooks. After cleaning pages are starting much faster. Some notebooks of mine turn the application to crash Onenote, though. Example: "An error occurred while cleaning Notebook: Details: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x800706BA): Der RPC-Server ist nicht verfügbar. (Ausnahme von HRESULT: 0x800706BA)   bei Microsoft.Office.Interop.OneNote.ApplicationClass.GetHierarchy(String bstrStartNodeID, HierarchyScope hsScope, String& pbstrHierarchyXmlOut)   bei ScrubberAddIn.ONScrub.newAlgoClearPages()   bei OneNoteAddIn.ONAddMain.startCleaning() Hope this information helps. Keep on going! Kind regards Carsten

  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2007
    Hmm - I'll check out the crash.  Is this notebook on a network share which is connected? John

  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2007
    No (to my knowledge), it is on a Tablet PC (workstation) connected to the Internet via DSL (that is a network connection, but I think you mean something different). In case you need more information, I'll try to supply what I can. Got another crash, I shall try to reconstruct it. Great to answer, thanks a lot. Yours, Carsten

  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2007
    Here's the other: System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Zugriff verweigert (Ausnahme von HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))   bei Microsoft.Office.Interop.OneNote.ApplicationClass.GetHierarchy(String bstrStartNodeID, HierarchyScope hsScope, String& pbstrHierarchyXmlOut)   bei ScrubberAddIn.ONScrub.newAlgoClearPages()   bei OneNoteAddIn.ONAddMain.startCleaning()

  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2007
    As the messages basically are the same,I conclude that the crash would be caused by some specific trait of the document accessed. In the first of the two cases those were print outs (send to Onenote 2007) of invoices from a purchase I made through the Internet. Does that help? Yours, kindly Carsten

  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2007
    Printouts are probably the key - let me see if I can reproduce the crash locally. Thanks, John

  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2007
    But why only some? I do them all the time. Thanks for caring, Carsten

  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 02, 2009
    After installing, I don't see "Clean Notebook" on my toolbar. I have a few other addins already, and it's not listed amongst them. I can't find it anywhere - where should I see it?

  • Anonymous
    February 02, 2009
    Nevermind, I simply uninstalled and reinstalled and it's there now. I set the toolbar to 2 rows while fiddling around, trying to find it - other than that I did everything the same between installs, including exiting OneNote beforehand, so I don't know what happened.

  • Anonymous
    April 16, 2010
    The comment has been removed