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Microsoft OneNote - some experiential Tips & Tricks
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 The DailyJournal has not been replaced by a OneTastic macro (but see post about this, below).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* Most of the other PowerToys will probably have been replaced by a OneTastic macro, and these macros are currently under steady development/support.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?
_________________________________
--- End quote ---
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?
_________________________________
--- End quote ---
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.
_________________________________
--- End quote ---
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.com/watch/11cozfm92ddmg?autoplay=1
* my second Snip: https://mix.office.com/watch/uga0rj5k4yaa?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... :o
This is a screenshot clip of the above Snip toolbox "Library":
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