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Microsoft OneNote - some experiential Tips & Tricks
superboyac:
The latest changes/updates in MS Office 2013 (including especially OCR features in OneNote) have helped to make life easier for notetakers.
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-IainB (October 25, 2014, 03:42 AM)
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wow
superboyac:
So far in my experiment, I am liking Onenote. I am warming up to it, and I can see myself committing to it long-term.
IainB:
@superboyac:
Audio data: Yes, my "discovery" of OneNote's the indexing of detected words/phrases in audio clips, and syncing of the playing of the audio clip with a transcript took me by surprise. The indexing also includes when (in mins and secs) the phrase occurs.
Syncing OneNote Notebooks to OneDrive: I started off with all Notebooks being Client-based, and I kept it that way until MS offered their "free" crippled OneNote, trying out the web-based Notebook they provided in my account. It seemed to work fine, so I selected Notebooks one at a time to "locate" them on OneDrive. Results as described in comments above. Even though Cloud-based, they are still backed up (backup files are) on the Client.
In playing about with Notebooks, I experimentally merged most of them into one very big one, then split that up a bit later. Some of my Notebooks are a few Gb large now, as they contain lots of text, images and multimedia (audio and audio-visual) files, as well as program and document files.
What I learned is that file/database size seems to be a non-issue, as Cloud-based OneNote files are automatically synced with changes on the Client at the .ONE file level - so whole notebooks are not being repeatedly updated/synced, but only the changed elements.
I have the concern noted above where my first experience of (so far) a single corrupt Note page in a Notebook was one too many. The Client-based Notebooks worked flawlessly, and were actually faster in use (no bandwidth-sucking downloading/caching/syncing of parts of a Notebook stored on OneDrive).
OneNote OCR functionality and search: Ruddy brilliant IMHO.
I don't know who they had in the OneNote development team, but from MS Office 2007 and onwards, there seems to have been some very cogent thinking going on - and not just for OneNote. Respect. :Thmbsup:
superboyac:
interesting. I'm not ready yet to start cloud unifying everything, so I'm still in the phase of multiple client notebooks on 2-3 devices.
I just became annoyed at the web clipper...which doesn't allow me to save clips to a local/offline notebook. what the hell? this is using the extension for firefox. i'm going to try with the desktop clipper.
IainB:
interesting. I'm not ready yet to start cloud unifying everything, so I'm still in the phase of multiple client notebooks on 2-3 devices.
I just became annoyed at the web clipper...which doesn't allow me to save clips to a local/offline notebook. what the hell? this is using the extension for firefox. i'm going to try with the desktop clipper.
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-superboyac (February 16, 2016, 05:47 PM)
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Using client-based Notebooks:
I suspect that your experience of setting up and using client-based OneNote Notebooks will only be good for PC clients. Other devices, not so good. Bound to be constraints. There's only so much functionality you can develop, maintain and pack into smaller capacity processors.
Getting to understand the clipping functionality in different modes of working:
I, like you, was initially "...annoyed at the web clipper...which doesn't allow me to save clips to a local/offline notebook."
Then I realised, after thinking about it, that that's the only way it could work, since it has to access one's account. So the only Notebook it can save to is a Cloud-based one - i.e., it can't know how to network back from the Internet to your PC-based Notebook. By the way, that functionality can also send a perfect scrollable web-page snapshot (image file) to your web-based Notebook. Once in your Notebook, the image is OCRed and that content then gets indexed and becomes searchable, and thus becomes part of your knowledge base (make sure you have set the switch to auto-OCR images ON, as it might not be on by default). This is the only product I have found that takes better and quicker snapshots than Screenshot Captor, and it OCRs everything too, and all perfectly done (so far). So one does not need to worry about ensuring the capture of all a web page's text...Hmm. Trouble is, any embedded hyperlinks are lost, so the Firefox add-on Scrapbook is not made redundant.
Otherwise, if you want to clip something from any application to a PC client-based Notebook, then one has some very useful alternative approaches:
* (a) Select-->Copy-->Paste: Use the conventional Select-->Copy-->Paste, directly into the Notebook on the PC that you are using.
* (b) New Quick Note: Select/bring up a New Quick Note from the Systray icon (hotkey is Ctrl+Shift+M from within OneNote, but be careful as this hotkey does something quite different in Firefox!), which pops up a narrow window on the RHS of the screen (RHS is by default, and I think can be changed). The New Quick Note is quite nifty as it provides you with automatic source-linking (a bit like Clipboard Help & Spell) and options for setting that. You need to use this to understand it and get the hang of what it is doing, or could be doing, depending on the settings/options you select.
* (c) Screen Clipping Tool: Take a screen clipping from the Systray icon (hotkey is Win+Shift+S). You need to use this to understand it and get the hang of what it is doing, or could be doing, depending on the settings/options you select.
* (d) Send to OneNote or OneNote Linked Notes: In IE use the Send to OneNote or OneNote Linked Notes buttons/functions. This demonstrates superb integration between IE+OneNote. You need to use this to understand it and get the hang of what it is doing, or could be doing, depending on the settings/options you select. There are/were extensions to do similar in Firefox, but I gave up using them as my Firefox beta updates kept breaking things and they wouldn't work.
By the way, if not already done, consider installing OneTastic macros. There are now a few really useful macros - e.g., two of my frequently-used favourites are:
* Where am I +
This is useful when you have navigated by links somewhere into your Notebooks and need to know where you are currently "nested".
* TOC in Current Section
This is a handy macro.
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