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New functionality for Equation support in OneNote 2010

  • Artigo

I've mentioned several times that we use persona testing to help define scenarios for OneNote testing. As an example of how that changes the product, I can point to some new behavior with OneNote's equation editing that changed between the Tech Preview release of OneNote and the Beta of OneNote 2010.

Specifically, you can now toggle equation support on and off while typing in an outline. That probably does not mean much, so let me describe. The Tech Preview would allow you to toggle equation support ON by typing ALT+=. You would get the familiar

clip_image001

You could enter your equation using the math autocorrect rules and hit ENTER to create a new line with equation support OFF.

This worked exactly as designed.

But now imagine you are a student and are typing while taking notes. You want to be able to insert an equation inline with what is being said, something like this:

It follows from clip_image002

And here you get stuck. You turned equation support ON with the ALT+=, but wanted to turn it OFF to type "that…" (notice how the font in that is Cambria and italicized. This means equation support is ON). You want to be able to continue the thought using regular text instead of math. Hitting ALT+= will now turn the equation support OFF without requiring a new line.

It follows from clip_image003

that the square root of the radius is directly proportional to a/pi, or (now I'll toggle equation support back on) clip_image004

Due to blog limitations, the images for the equations don't show inline above, but they do exist there in OneNote. 

 

While I admit this is not earth shattering, it is a change we made based on a student or teacher wanting to use OneNote in a specific way.

As always, let me know what you think.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 30, 2009
    That's actually pretty cool.  I love reading how OneNote is getting tweaked in the development process. One thing that really slows me down in OneNote (and doesn't seem to be hard to implement, but what do I know lol) is that OneNote does not have any Find-and-Replace functionality.  Every other Office app has it.  If I have a big page of notes from a meeting and then a week later the product name changes (as happens so often in product development), I have no way to go back and find-and-replace the old name with the new name.  I have to copy the entire page of notes into Notepad (of all things) to get find-and-replace.  Hopefully there's no formatting information.  If there is, I have to use Word instead. Do you have any inside knowledge on if OneNote 2010 will have find-and-replace?

  • Anonymous
    December 01, 2009
    there is a powertoy for search and replace at http://blogs.msdn.com/descapa/archive/2007/06/23/onenote-search-and-replace.aspx.  It will only work with 2007 format notebooks for now, and we can hopefully get it updated for 2010 when the schema gets finalized.

  • Anonymous
    December 01, 2009
    I had no idea the powertoy existed.  I can't be the only one requesting this feature.   I just tried it out and ... it leaves a lot to be desired.  Even with "whole word matching" off, it's still not finding any substrings in my notebooks (2007 format).  The icon is corrupted in 2010, and you can't add it to the quick access toolbar.  It doesn't show up in the Ribbon configuration too.  Back to Notepad for me (UGH). A powertoy is good, but integrated support would be so much better!  Then there wouldn't be these oddities.  Plus, it would look more slick and inline with the UI. Anyway, keep up the great work on OneNote.  We all appreciate it in userland!

  • Anonymous
    December 01, 2009
    Substring search in OneNote is not perfect, and I can understand it not working for that.  Whole word should match, though.   Can you use the email link in the upper right to contact me?  I'd like to get a copy of the notebook (or section, or page) that you can use to reproduce the problem, and also a screenshot of the icon. There should be a separate ribbon tab for all the older OneNote 2007 icons - do you not see that either? Sorry for the problems.

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2009
    I just started using the 2010 beta and am happy to see that it now has styles and a format painter available. That's good. But there doesn't seem to be a way of modifying the styles. I don't need involved style manipulation like in Word or InDesign, but the ability to at least change the font seems necessary. I paste a lot of source code into my notebooks and always format the code with Courier New. But the Code style in OneNote 2010 is set to Consolas, which I really don't like (too condensed). I really hope this gets fixed in the release version.

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2009
    Thanks for the feedback.  I’ll send it to the format painter folks. Thanks for using the beta.  Feel free to send me other ideas/bugs/thoughts/suggestions and such.

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2009
    Sorry if I'm being OT here, but there's one other quirk (or set of quirks) that needs to be fixed in 2010: pasting from another application. When pasting text, especially HTML, OneNote still removes paragraph spacing. Unless you paste as plain text, 2010 works like earlier versions by removing the spacing between paragraphs. It means you have to go through the whole document and insert hard returns to make the document readable. Pasting text and graphics now pastes the graphics, which is a good fix. And pasting from a browser now seems faster, also. But even the "keep formatting" option in the Smart Tag still keeps only basic formatting, like bold and italic. Anything else, like layout or table backgrounds are still removed. It would be very helpful to be able to keep the formatting of pasted data.

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2009
    Cool.

  • Anonymous
    November 05, 2010
    when writing on a tablet, I cannot type "alt =". I also want to add, with the support of the linear format (similar to latex), Office is becoming a much better tool.

  • Anonymous
    November 05, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2011
    This equation enviroment looks quite nice, but as a postgrad mathematician who uses onenote a lot it would be nice to have some TEX support for writting more complicated mathematics... is this available? Will it be available anytime soon?

  • Anonymous
    January 02, 2011
    Try this: blogs.msdn.com/.../equations-and-tex-support-for-onenote-2007.aspx  It works with ON 2007 and should still work with ON 2010 if the notebook is in 2007 format.