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Customer feedback results in another powertoy

  • Artigo

I'm going to go off on a tangent here.

   

Another role OneNote testers have is that of customer advocate. We are tasked with monitoring the OneNote newsgroup, the Customer Connection site, responding to customer feedback and using all of this information to make changes to our test plans for new features.

   

One request I saw on our newsgroup was a customer who had thousands of TXT files which he wanted to import into OneNote. He had apparently used Notepad for years to store data on his hard drive. Fair enough. But now he wanted to migrate to OneNote and was stuck. The only solution he had was to open them one at a time and copy and paste into OneNote. Clearly not ideal. Another person wanted to see some sample code to simply add some text to a page in OneNote.

   

I decided to write another powertoy to help both of these users. It will allow you to navigate to a folder on the hard drive and import all the TXT files in it to OneNote. It will create a new section with the name of the folder on the hard drive as the section name. And here I hit a snag. I never really liked the behavior of putting all new information into Unfiled Notes by default. While it makes sense most of the time, in this case I really saw a need to control where the imported text files would go. I decided to implement a tree control to let the user choose which notebook the files would be imported. So now you can choose into which notebook you want the imported files to go. And the second fellow who wanted to see the code for this can download the source.

 This importer currently only works for ANSI text.

Here are the links (corrected ZIP files as of April 3, 2007, and again on Feb 21, 2010)

Update 2:  fixed bug with new line characters not imported into OneNote correctly. 2/23/2009.  Details here.

Update 3: OfficeLive went away, so you can get the newest version here: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/johnguin/archive/2010/06/24/the-text-importer-powertoy-gets-updated-for-onenote-2010.aspx. 

Update 4: The source code is now here: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/johnguin/archive/2012/10/25/source-code-for-the-text-importer-for-onenote.aspx

If you want the source code, email me via the link in the upper right. If I get enough requests, I will repost the code.

For the setup program: https://johnguin.web.officelive.com/documents/OneNote_Text_Importer_Setup.zip

And the source code (C#) https://johnguin.web.officelive.com/documents/OneNote_Text_Importer_Source.zip

   

As always, let me know what you think.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 01, 2007
    John, No comment on the powertoy, since I'm really too busy to test it.  However, I agree with you completely about unfiled notes.  I hate that everything gets sent there.  I would like to specify where the imported stuff should go (or at least say, "by default, go to unfiled" or "by default, choose where to import"). This would be a nice change for the next version of OneNote :).

  • Anonymous
    May 02, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 02, 2007
    I have the same problem Mark has. I tried to get around the problem by downloading the zip and trying to open it with explorer - but that didn't work either.

  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2007
    Similar but unrelated..... I have been using OneNote to generate documentation for our office. The screenshot ability is very handy for this. It is not handy that it automatically puts it in a new note. Is there a way to change this to adding it to the currently open note?

  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2007
    I just saw on John's blog that he posted another powertoy see what he has to say: One request I saw on

  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2007
    You've been kicked (a good thing) - Trackback from DotNetKicks.com

  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2007
    I also get errors when attempting to extract these.

  • Anonymous
    May 03, 2007
    Sorry all - There is a bug in Office Live that zipped files created with Windows XP (believe it or not) get corrupted when uploaded. I'll have the patched zip files installed by May 4. Sigh...

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2007
    I love the concept of this, but I'm not seeing how to actually perform the import of the text files.

  • Anonymous
    July 08, 2007
    I tried this and while I can navigate to the folder, when I click import, nothing happens and no import occurs.

  • Anonymous
    July 16, 2007
    Ed Learned, Are the files in TXT format?  Are they ANSI or unicode based? Thanks, John

  • Anonymous
    August 12, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 19, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 26, 2007
    This is really good I can import .TXT files BUT oneNote does not recognise any EndOfLine/NewParagraph in .txt Result - all the text in the file is presented as one big paragraph : not much good becoause it needs a load of reediting Is there a way round this? How does oneNote indicate a newPara? ^sharp

  • Anonymous
    September 26, 2007
    Hold on - I get it! You have to format the text as HTML So oneNote understands that the HTML paragraph tag is a new paragraph. lovely!

  • Anonymous
    October 08, 2007
    I wanted to share the status of our shared object model over on http://www.codeplex.com/onom So far,

  • Anonymous
    October 08, 2007
    I wanted to share the status of our shared object model over on http://www.codeplex.com/onom So far,

  • Anonymous
    October 29, 2007
    Still winzip can't handle these files

  • Anonymous
    October 29, 2007
    Still winzip can't handle these files

  • Anonymous
    October 29, 2007
    Recall. Worked now... when opening the zip file directly in winzip and extract. I think NetTransport was the problem...

  • Anonymous
    November 29, 2007
    Trying to open zip and still comes up as corrupted using Winzip or XP's native extraction tool.

  • Anonymous
    November 29, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2008
    Sigh - I've been fighting with this ISP to not corrupt uploaded zip files.  I used Winzip this time - can you try again?  Alternately, using Firefox typically works.  IE also reports the (valid) file as corrupt on download. Sorry for the problems, John

  • Anonymous
    June 04, 2008
    Hi,,Friends I want to  Export text to .Txt file from onenote. if any one know kindly let me know.

  • Anonymous
    June 12, 2008
    I was getting ready to post this list of the addins the OneNote Test Team worked on in the year 2007

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2009
    Hi This is exactly what I needed. However the importer does not recognize linebreaks in text files. All my text in my files came as big chunks of texts. Is there a workaround?

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2009
    Can you use the email link to send me a sample text file?  I tested this pretty well and am not able to reproduce the problem. Also, do you know what operating system was used to create the text files? John

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2009
    Hi I sent it via contact form. Let me know if you got it.

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2009
    I made a similar fix for the <br> & rn problem and uploaded new source files last night.  I can add your fix for searching subdirectories as well and post an even newer build today if you want.   The new files are converted to VS 2008 as well.   I have a separate Outlook to ON tool that might be useful as well at http://blogs.msdn.com/descapa/archive/2007/02/14/export-your-outlook-notes-to-onenote.aspx.   John

  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2009
    Dear John, I had seen your other tool but it is Outlook 2007 only. I, and many others, still have Outlook 2003. About the fix for searching subdirectories. Ideally it would be an option on the form, because not all user will want to search subdirectories as well. With kind regards, Willem

  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2009
    Hi Willem, I was thinking about this over the weekend and figured a nice feature resolves around this - the subfolders holding text files should get imported as separate sections.  But then I got stuck with thinking about how they would be held in section groups... John

  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2009
    I received an email which pointed out a limitation and a design problem with the OneNote Text File Importer.

  • Anonymous
    February 23, 2009
    Dear John, Good! This is what I needed. However the importer doesn't support UNICODE e.g. KOREAN. :(

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2010
    I John, The links to the plugin and source code are not working. Can you please check It? It seems that your domain is expiring. Thank you, Miguel

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2010
    OK, I think I have them updated correctly...

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2010
    Thanks, this is exactly what i was looking for. Its a shame that it doesn't take unicode though; Japanese text is in about a third of my files

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2010
    I take back what i said 5 minutes ago; i tried it on Japanese and it worked. This program is a perfect 10. Thanks man

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2010
    Hello Gabriel, Can you contact me via my email link (at the upper right)? Thanks!

  • Anonymous
    February 08, 2011
    Another great way of collecting customer feedback at point of sale is via a touch screen kiosk. Feedback collected at point of interaction is a lot more acurate and this method is both time and cost effective. www.experiencekiosks.com

  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2011
    It would be good if this also worked for inserting a folder of Word/OpenDocument Text documents as editable OneNote pages into a OneNote section (PowerPoint/PDF import as bitmaps), setting the date and time at the top of the OneNote page to the file's modified date.

  • Anonymous
    August 17, 2011
    The variety of formats of data in those files (HTML, rich text, Unicode, ANSI text, images, videos, etc...) makes that very difficult...

  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2012
    Hi John, Well, the zip file contains setup.exe and an MSI file, so an install is required. I then get three files: Johnicon.ico,  MS.Interop.OneNote.dll and Text File Importer.exe. The exe doesn't work, just hangs. Thanks, Dirk

  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2012
    Ah, OK.  Silly mistake on my end - I was working with my section color changer and did not transition to this tool.  If you click File  | Help, what version of OneNote shows on the right?  Does it say anything about "Click to Run?"  or 32 bit?

  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2012
    Hi, both links are broken. Can you check it? Thanks

  • Anonymous
    July 09, 2012
    It's over here now: blogs.msdn.com/.../the-text-importer-powertoy-gets-updated-for-onenote-2010.aspx Sorry for the problems, John

  • Anonymous
    December 28, 2012
    Where can I get the OneNote_Text_Importer_Setup.zip for OneNote 2007?