Microsoft OneNote - some experiential Tips & Tricks

[IainB]

...Added to which, the OneNote developers are quietly beavering away in the background, making changes that are beneficial for users, so a seemingly kludgy feature found in OneNote today may be gone by tomorrow.
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-IainB (July 22, 2016, 06:17 AM)

Partial extract from: OneNote July roundup - From <http://blogs.office.com/2016/07/21/onenote-july-roundup/>

OneNote Web Clipper
Our OneNote Web Clipper is better than ever. We have a number of new features on our Web Clipper for Chrome, Safari, and IE to give you more control over your screen clippings before you send it into OneNote.

• Preview—Ever wonder exactly what was about to show up in OneNote once you clipped? Problem solved! Now all clipping modes—full page, region, article, recipe and product—provide a preview so what you see is what you get.
• YouTube and Vimeo support—You can now clip videos from YouTube and Vimeo pages into OneNote.
• Highlight text—When you clip an article, product or recipe you can highlight sections of text, and those highlights will be saved to OneNote.
• Clip multiple regions in one go—Clip multiple regions of a webpage and save them all in a single OneNote page.
• Use your own title—Change the title of your page in the preview window before sending it to OneNote.
• Articles your way—Change the font size and type in your article to improve readability before you even clip it to OneNote.

Update to the latest version to see all the new features or download the extension at www.onenote.com/clipper.

Some useful, timely and overdue changes there.   
There's more at the link.

[Attronarch]

No Firefox support? Shame.

[IainB]

No Firefox support? Shame.
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-Attronarch (July 22, 2016, 11:24 AM)

Heh. Yes, that's what I thought too, even though I'm weaning myself off of Firefox, so it doesn't adversely affect me. Mind you, MS have never provided a OneNote clipping tool for Firefox, though there was one called Clip to OneNote provided by http://web.madharasan.com/
- details at http://web.madharasa...ects/clip-to-onenote
That had two components - a Java-based "Listener" and a browser add-on/extension - one for each of Firefox, Thunderbird, Chrome, and Opera.
I trialled the Firefox one and gave a lot of feedback to the developer (Jayarathina Madharasan) as it was not functioning happily and he needed a guinea-pig (me). He eventually got it to work OK, but not the way he expected, and then I think the Firefox one didn't work for the later Firefox versions - see https://addons.mozil...don/clip-to-onenote/
I eventually stopped using it as it stopped working properly with newer versions of Firefox.

Still, it might be worth a trial if you were interested. His website seems unattended (he apologises for his absence), but - who knows? - he might be interested in some collaborative development effort/testing.

I nearly forgot: he has a read-only shared OneNote NoteBook - a Guide to using Clip to OneNote (click on the link). (Smart thinking, that.)

[dantheman]

Other than the lack of support for Firefox, this is probably the best thing Microsoft has done since Windows 7.

[yosemite]

It appears you (still) can't save clips to desktop Onenote (windows).

I was mildly disappointed when the new clipper was first unveiled last year, that it didn't have this basic ability.  But not long after that I realized that significant improvements to the classic desktop version were unlikely, and contrary to their desire to move people to the online version.

[dantheman]

Still, a very functional extension that will make its way to Firefox "soon" since Mozilla plans on "adopting" Google extensions.

[IainB]

It appears you (still) can't save clips to desktop Onenote (windows). ...
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-yosemite (August 11, 2016, 01:14 AM)

Well, yes you can, actually.
I have my default Quick Notes location set as the Quick Notes section in my default web-based Notebook.
However, I always operate on the client-based cached copy of that web-based Notebook. I rarely - hardly ever - operate on the web-based Notebook itself via a web browser when online.
The client-based cached Notebook looks and feels like, and behaves like, a client-based Notebook, though it is constantly syncing with and updating changes as I am making them, onto the web-based Notebook. If I am not online, then the changes are synced when next I go online.
Thus, to all intents and purposes, I am working on a client-based Notebook.

Under these circumstances, I have rarely needed to clip stuff to the Quick Notes section, using the browser-based OneNote clipping tool, so that tool has effectively been surplus to requirements as far as I was concerned.

However, the browser-based OneNote clipping tool has just been updated so that its functionality currently enables it to be used:

• To to send a screenshot capture of an entire scrolling web page to the web-based Notebook - and those screenshots are at least as good as, if not better than, the scrolling screenshots you can get using SC (ScreenshotCaptor), but I rarely need to do that.
• To capture sections of a web page as a screenshot, but I never need to do that as I use the client-based clipping tool for that.
• To capture just the article text on the web page, "in an easy-to read format", but I I rarely need to do that, but if I did I would use the client-based clipping tool or, more likely,  CHS (Clipboard Help and Spell) - though it seems that CHS does not also capture the URL (meta-data), except in Firefox.
• To clip a bookmark - "just the title synopsis, thumbnail and link" to the web-based Notebook. This is a new feature in the OneNote browser-based clipping tool, and I have wanted something like it for ages, as it captures all of the relevant meta-data for bookmarks that I had been wanting to be able to capture in CHS (but which can't do that).

But look at this:


That Clip Images and Selections (and edit them) is rather nifty (shades of the FF add-on Scrapbook, though not as comprehensively useful).
The Automatic Video Selection is also rather nifty, and I had accidentally discovered a couple of days ago that this had been enabled for the direct pasting into a client-based Notebook/cache - this was before I saw the above announcement in my SlimJet (Chrome) browser.

[dantheman]

Works well with Slimjet Linux (ChaletOS in my case) version too! 

Not at all with other Chromium based like Opera and Vivaldi and still none for Firefox.
Same situation with Google Chrome Keep Extension.

So, for those switching from Evernote or Windows, it is good news for sure!

[IainB]

Rather than being a tip about some useful functionality in OneNote, this is a tip about the limitations of OneNote's OCR functionality. Though it can produce very good (relatively error-free) OCR output from a good quality image containing text, it evidently does rather less well with poorer image quality.

[IainB]

As a result of reading this: Office Lens: CamScanner For Windows 10 - I download the Office Lens for PC app from Download Office Lens (Store link).

I already have the FREE Office Lens app on the Windows smartphone that I have been using, and it's very useful and integrates well with OneNote.
The FREE Office Lens download (above) is more obviously useful on (say) a tablet PC with a camera, and may not be much use on a laptop/PC. However, it has an Import function, so one can get it to process any image on the laptop or PC client and re-dimension it as a pukka document and then OCR scan it and save it to a OneNote Notebook. Just what I was waiting for.

[IainB]

Somebody recently asked me if I knew where to download some of the PowerToys that would work in OneNote 2007, specifically:
 * DailyJournal
 * SearchReplace
 * WordCount

These and other PowerToy files and MLO (My Life Organised) files can be downloaded from here (click on link) - file names and sizes as below:

• OneNote 2007 MLO - DROE tool v04 beta (not much good).zip   (610.8kB)
• OneNote 2007 MLO - DROE_Tool_Source_Code.zip   (1.9MB)
• OneNote 2007 MS Labs - CanvasForOneNoteSetup (not all that good).msi   (4.2MB)
• OneNote 2007 PowerToy - DailyJournal.1.1 (excellent).msi   (446kB)
• OneNote 2007 PowerToy - SearchReplace (works well).zip   (396.1kB)
• OneNote 2007 PowerToy - SortPages (not tried).zip   (317.8kB)
• OneNote 2007 PowerToy - SortSections.zip   (355.3kB)
• OneNote 2007 PowerToy - TemplateManager.zip   (3.6MB)
• OneNote 2007 PowerToy - WordCount.zip   (329.2kB)
• Send To OneNote 64bit XPS Print driver install - XPS2OneNoteSetup.msi   (962.5kB)

Note:

• The DailyJournal and other OneNote PowerToys apparently can only work on OneNote 2007-formatted Notebooks. The DailyJournal has not been replaced by a OneTastic macro (but see post about this, below).
• There are a Search & Replace and a Search & replace in hyperlinks macro in the current OneTastic set of macros, but I am unsure whether they will be backwards compatible for OneNote 2007.
• Similarly, I suspect (though I am not sure) that there is (or will be) a OneTastic macro for WordCount also.
• Most of the other PowerToys will probably have been replaced by a OneTastic macro, and these macros are currently under steady development/support.
• The PowerToys are apparently no longer available (original website is defunct/scrubbed and there seem to be no Wayback or other public archives that have them).
• The MLO tools are still available from the blog at http://manage-this.com - though the blog itself generally seems to have fallen into disuse a couple of years ago, apart from a more recent post (difficult to establish the date) giving the DROE Source Code (script for an interesting and potentially useful tool for a Daily Record Of Events, using AutoHotkey and Visual Basic).

[IainB]

This follows on from the immediately preceding post, and poses the questrion: How does one use OneNote as a daily journal?
The implication was that the defunct OneNote 2007 PowerToy called DailyJournal enabled OneNote to be used in this manner.

However - and by way of background - that PowerToy may be redundant:

There is an old question (from December 2012) on the MS Community forum that applies to Office | OneNote | Other/unknown | Office 2010:
Using OneNote as a daily journal

CR Craiglea asked on  December 3, 2012
Hi.
I've recently been upgraded to Office 2010 on my work PC and think it may be time to retire the daily journal I've kept in Word for the last few years. My issue with the Word version is that I previously used macros to create new entries, format text etc, all using a specific template that added a custom toolbar for these tasks. I generally use this to record actions, estimates, include images and tables and occasionally embed data such as Excel or Visio diagrams.
 
I reckon OneNote should be a better tool for this job but I've not found any easy way to create a new journal entry tagged with the correct date and with space for a title. Ideally I would want to do this automatically or from a trigger. I've tried the "Daily Journal" PowerToy but could not get this to work with OneNote 2010.
 
Do you have any advice on how to achieve what I am after?
_________________________________

The reply that was selected as "the answer" was:

Entegy replied on  December 3, 2012
MVP  Insider  Wiki Author   Completed Training   MCC: Content Creator
When you click New Page, the page is automatically created with today's date, the current time and a space for the title. Is this what you want or is there more to your template that you want?
_________________________________

The question related to something that is discussed earlier in this discussion thread (above), where I had mentioned the "Daily Journal" PowerToy 2007 as something that I missed - it was "broken" by later versions of OneNote and is now defunct, and no downloadable links for it seem to be available on the Internet or via Wayback or other public archives.
This PowerToy is mentioned here: OneNote Tips - PowerToys, where it says:

Daily Journal for OneNote 2007 - Another great tool from TabletDev.  NOTE: If you're using OneNote 2010 you'll probably have to leave the notebook you're using the Daily Journal add-in with in 2007 format in order for it to work.
_________________________________

However, we don't actually need the DailyJournal PowerToy, or even a OneTastic macro for it, now - if we ever did. I mean, we might have thought we needed it, but, as it says above: When you click New Page, the page is automatically created with today's date, the current time and a space for the title.

In any event, I have long used an AutoHotkey macro that, on pressing Ctrl+Shift+D outputs the date/time string - e.g., 2016-12-08 0832hrs - and I use that as a bulleted heading prefix for every single entry that I make in OneNote, with the actual entry indented below that, so it looks something like this on a new page with a blank title:
_________________________________________________________
(Blank Page Title)
Date/Time page was created.

>2016-12-08 0847hrs: text summarising this 1st entry:

• 1st line of entry details
• 2nd line of entry details
• 3rd line of entry details
• etc.

>2016-12-08 0850hrs: text summarising this 2nd entry:

• 1st line of entry details
• 2nd line of entry details
• 3rd line of entry details
• etc.

(and so on.)
_________________________________________________________


The title of the page can be changed to be a holding summary page for the relevant year-month, and the entries can be collapsed, thus:
_________________________________________________________
Diary: 2016-12
Date/Time page was created.

>2016-12-08 0847hrs: text summarising this 1st entry:
>2016-12-08 0850hrs: text summarising this 2nd entry:

(and so on.)
_________________________________________________________

Subsequent entries for 2016-12 can be made on new blank pages, and these can periodically be copy-pasted, or dragged and dropped, or moved to the holding summary page for that year-month, so that at the end of the month, all the entries for that month will be on a single page called:
Diary: 2016-12

All this note creation has been taking place in the Quick Notes section of my main working Notebook. If required, the holding summary pages for each of the 2016 year-months can at some point be moved to (say) the Journals Notebook under (say) the OneNote Section named "2016".

So, all of the entries are treated as Journal entries, with precise and unique date-time flags (could be used as Zettelkasten index keys!). No content can be lost/buried, as material within the entries is fully indexed and may also have been tagged and hyperlinked. Sometimes I may wish to (say) pull together all those entries that relate to notes I have made about Malwarebytes having quarantined PUPs over the year. I can do that by locating them with a simple search for such notes and then moving (or copying?) the relevant entries to a separate page in a Malwarebytes section in another Notebook, with the date-time flags intact/unchanged.

So you can have the Daily Journal by default - literally have your cake and eat it. There is some icing on the cake as well, in the form of the seriously useful OneTastic add-in OneCalendar:

Here is the OneCalendar display:



Now, look what happens when I hover the mouse over the calendar entry of 8th December for "Diary: 2016-09" (it's actually the year-month title of an older diary page that I was working on, on that date) - see how a mini-view of the contents of that page pop up?

[IainB]

For those that might still prefer things in OneNote to emulate a "Diary" or a "Zettelkasten" , there are now two potentially useful OneTastic macros: (click on the links)

• Diary Pages: Create Group Section ( Diary 2017)->Create month TAB ( January )->Macro will create diary pages for a given month.
• Create new page with an ID for a Zettel

I am not recommending these, as I consider them to be largely superfluous for all pragmatic purposes, but if people wanted something like that, then they might be just the ticket.

[IainB]

I have mentioned in this thread the very useful/clever features of OneNote. Of particular relevance is OneNote's use of audio as a datatype.
If you don't know what the heck I am talking about and if you'd like to find out more, there is a good introduction from PCworld.com - here: How to record audio with OneNote to supercharge your note-taking

EDIT 2017-01-07 0131hrs: See also my notes on page 1 of this discussion thread - Searching for information in audio notes in OneNote.

[IainB]

After reading this about how a Microsoft "Garage" experiment changed things:
Lynbrook Public Schools digital journey and the unexpected app that changed everything

 - I downloaded the Snip app from: https://mix.office.com/snip

This Snip would:

• seem to be a potentially very nifty tool - and not just for OneNote users either.
• seem to not only create some disintermediation, but also bypasses the incessant drive for "monetisation", so is potentially disruptive too.

I am trialling it now. I rather like it. My first attempts at sharing:

• my first Snip:     https://mix.office.c...zfm92ddmg?autoplay=1
• my second Snip: https://mix.office.c...0rj5k4yaa?autoplay=1

Note: Try opening the links in a new tab, for best rendition. The snips seem to be fed to the viewing browser as two or three separate streams(?) - image, video and audio - and the video part seems to always play, whilst the static image and the audio part might not play. Thus, seems bit buggy in some browsers.
Opening the links in a Chrome incognito window seems to work first time, indicating that it could possibly be a cookie problem.
Interestingly, they seem to work just fine in MS Edge and IE, for some reason...   

This is a screenshot clip of the above Snip toolbox "Library":

[dantheman]

Section Groups creation tutorial i borrowed from recent article on Makeuseof.com
Don't think it has ever been posted about here and do think it's worth knowing about.
https://www.youtube....=2&v=SGCLlXWJprc

[IainB]

...Don't think it has ever been posted about here and do think it's worth knowing about....

-dantheman (February 10, 2017, 03:11 PM)

I think I have pointed out previously that there needs to be quite an investment of time made in OneNote, just to learn how to use the thing reasonably effectively. This video is a tutorial about one little bit - and it's Office 365 OneNote as well, which is not necessarily the same thing as the Desktop version. I've only used Desktop Office 2007, 2013 and 2016 - never used Office 365. I have used the free web-based version of OneNote, though I'm not sure whether it's the same thing as Office 365 OneNote - in fact, I suspect it isn't. Creating section groups in Office 2016 OneNote is a lot faster, though one can do it the way the video shows, if one wants.

[IainB]

I just came across the OneNote Tagging Kit project in Codeplex: https://onenotetaggingkit.codeplex.com/
Here is the OneNote Tagging Kit User Guide

It seems to have been running for a couple of years, though I don't think I had come across it till today.

If anyone reading this tries it out - or has tried it out - could they post their comments here please?

I think I shall give it a trial.

Update: OK, I gave it a trial (Text in spoiler below)

Spoiler

Notes on 1st installation of OneNoteTaggingKit Add-In 3.0
2017-02-21 1101hrs: Installed OK, and the TaggingKit COM Add-in came up just fine one the ribbon, but it broke quickly, as soon as I had tried to Refresh Tags in the Settings | Suggested Tags.

See error panel below:
   • Maybe the cause was there were no tags shown in the panel of suggested tags, thus nothing to refresh?
   • Clicking on OK took me to the "Known issues" on the Codeplex website, but I had already read that and knew there was no such issue recorded.

I tried restarting OneNote and removed and reinstated the TaggingKit COM Add-in via the Options panel, but the same error occurred.
At no point did OneNote crash.
I ended up by disabling and removing the TaggingKit COM Add-in via the Options panel.
Pity. Looked like it could be quite useful.  :-(

[image]
---------------------------
Severe OneNote Tagging Kit  Add-In Error
---------------------------
Creation of dialog window failed! »Failed to save settings:
Unable to save config to file 'C:\Users\[UID]\AppData\Local\Microsoft_Corporation\DefaultDomain_Path_v32dbj0nyizgiwlbdihluefpg3ev3a0j\10.0.14393.0\user.config'.«

Click OK to browse troubleshooting tips and known issues. Click CANCEL to continue.

If this is a new issue, please consider reporting it. Describe what you were trying to do and attach the add-in log file
»R:\Temp\taggingkit_8D45A472A9FEF34.log«

Sorry for the inconvenience!
---------------------------
OK   Cancel   
---------------------------

[IainB]

Using the embedded YouTube (and other) in situ viewing window in OneNotes seems to work flawlessly:
(The window is draggable to a larger/smaller size, but does not go "full screen".)

[dantheman]

Problem here on Android.
If something is clipped to ON it is sent to "unfiled" tab which is fine.
But! If you have a dozen clips all sent to "unfiled" that makes a huge amount of tabs to classify.
In my situation, i would like to have just one "unfiled" tab receive all "clipped" items via Android into one single ON "unfiled" tab that could be eventually tagged. Can this be done?

[IainB]

@dantheman:
Just a quick response.
The collecting tab - the "Unfiled" tab - has been renamed to "Quick Notes" in OneNote 2016 (Desktop), but seems to fulfil the same functions as the previous "Unfiled" tab did.
The settings in OneNote 2016 only allow the setting of a single standard/specific tab as the collector for all stuff sent to OneNote from any/all devices. Quick Notes seems to be the default.

Regardless of what the collecting tab is called, every single item sent to OneNote - from the desktop client or  a handheld device - seems to be sent to a separate Page within the Quick Notes tab - with the exception of sending from a Windows phone, where I have noticed that if one sends a few images/clips at the same time in quick succession, they will sometimes appear on the same page, one below the other. This is probably because OneNote creates a unique page for the image(s)/clips it is sent, based on the date-time stamp of when it receives them (which is why I consider that date-time could be useful as a unique Zettelkasten key).

So you are probably stuck with all those discrete pages, each with a separate and differently date-time-stamped clip.

[dantheman]

@IainB:

The folks at Microsoft should find ways to contract those "Quick Note" pages.
Perhaps a quick game of Scrabble could help them at finding contractions!

[IainB]

Sorry for my mistyped English in the above comment. Corrected to "...if one sends...".

[IainB]

This video might be worth a look. I happened across it in one of my BasQux feeds and watched it all, though fast-forwarding through some bits. It could be regarded as being a tad elementary, but I reckon it's probably just about right as an educational/training talk and as an introduction to some of OneNote's functionality, for newcomers to OneNote.
Interestingly, the guy (Scott Skip Concilla, a Microsoft Certified Trainer) giving the talk seems to have arrived at some of the same conclusions as I had arrived at, in my long-time trialling/use of the software - e.g., there seems to be no "right" way to use containers on a page. He does a good demo of Tags and Tag summaries too. There seem to be quite a lot more OneNote training videos available "near" that one.

[IainB]

@dantheman:

@IainB:
The folks at Microsoft should find ways to contract those "Quick Note" pages.
Perhaps a quick game of Scrabble could help them at finding contractions!
_____________________________

-dantheman (July 08, 2017, 05:26 AM)

I forgot to respond to this. Sorry.
As a confirmed Scrabble-player, I have learned that the idea is not so much to go for word "contractions", but "expansions" - the longest words! And with lots of high worth letters (e.g., X, Y, Z) for higher scores!