BPR247: OneNote 2003
Tips for OneNote
- Create separate work and personal folders and store everything else below that level
- Can create custom note flags and then search easily for them; for example, to store items for follow-up with your line manager or (for academic use) to highlight whenever a lecturer says "this will appear on the exam"!
- When you send a OneNote page as email, it sends both the OneNote page as a .one file and also as HTML in case the recipient doesn't have OneNote installed.
- Press Windows + N to create a new side note. This can be handy when you're in another application and you want to take notes in a smaller window without having to tile windows: side notes have a reduced UI to minimise clutter. Side notes are also ideal for taking "Post-It" style notes such as telephone numbers.
- You can also drag and drop from a web page in IE into a OneNote page and it automatically adds the URL that it came from.
- Use audio notes to take a recording of a meeting and have this bookmarked against what you're typing - you can then bring back the audio that matches your notes with a single click.
New SP1 Features
- Screen clippings allow you to do a screen capture of a selected area and have it dumped directly into OneNote.
- Insert Outlook Meeting Details automatically dumps the calendar details from Outlook at the top of a page: this makes it really easy to (for example) search notes for the attendees.
- You can create a peer-to-peer shared session: great for status meetings, where everyone can add updates for their own project area. This can also be used in a read-only mode for broadcasting your own notes out (for example, in a presentation).
- You can insert an Office document (along with a link to the original document) and then annotate that document using ink or text.
- Video notes - they work in the same way as audio.
- Create a group notebook by sharing out a directory containing a notebook; if someone is writing in the section at the time, you see a read-only view until they finish or time out. You could use this to share a single notebook across multiple machines.
- There's a Pocket PC and Smartphone import feature that allows notes and voice notes to be imported into OneNote. This is unidirectional, however.
- COM Extensibility API - one class (CSimpleImportClass) containing two methods: Import and Navigate. There's a preview of the documentation available on the web. The Import method takes an XML document that allows you to specify a page (keyed by GUID) and even insert ink.
Insights
- When you search for handwritten text, OneNote automatically searches for alternates, so even if the text hasn't been properly recognised it shouldn't stop it from working effectively.
- There was a lot of internal debate about whether OneNote would be accepted without a manual save button; in the end it turns out that not many people found this hard to deal with, and that most customers quickly got used to the auto-save feature.
- The OneNote team use Feedster to search blogs for entries relating to OneNote - so whenever you blog about OneNote the team will automatically read it as customer feedback!
- The development team are "thinking" about a OneNote viewer - presumably a free redistributable for sharing notebooks with users who don't have it.
Comments
- Anonymous
August 01, 2005
Is there a way to have the shared session send send keep-alives? Or to rejoin a shared session without having OneNote create a new copy of the (unchanged) page?
After about a minute or so of inactivity I find that the session disconnects with "The shared session ended unexpectedly. To rejoin the session, follow the instructions on the Join Shared Session task pane." I think that the problem may be NAT session timeout or similar (though nothing else seems to manifest a similar problem - I keep ssh connections open for days). There is no option to rejoin a session. Joining again gives me a new copy of the shared page.