OneNote

OneNote 2007 API looks great

H. Steele Price, IV — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 12:51:00 GMT

The API for OneNote 2007 look terrific from the What's New description.

Hopefully I can spend some time with this soon and write a “Publish to Blog” Add-in that I have been putting off forever. If I can just figure out where IOneNoteAddIn is located... its doesn't appear to be in the Microsoft.Office.Interop.OneNote library.

OneNote 2007 Beta 2 - First Impressions

H. Steele Price, IV — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 19:02:00 GMT

First Impressions... Well, ok Second Impression, I used Beta 1 too, but had some wierdnesses that I wanted to wait for Beta 2 before mentioning anything, they are all resolved.

Nice upgrade... Not earth shattering (well, maybe a little) but, extremely useful missing features have been added.

I also don't quite think this is on par with the rest of Office 2007 in terms of major changes, it seems like this was thrown into Office 2007 when it looks more like it fits into Office 2003... Oh well, that's just a visual thing because of the toolbar changing to ribbons in the rest of Office. Another strange visual effect was the change in the default skin and no way to get the old one back... I liked having my Title Block in a separate color, but c'est la vie, not that big of a deal, I'm sure there were complaints about having more space available... Can you say F11? (full page view... nice)

One thing I pleaded for is in here <HURRAY> Drawing Tools </HURRAY>

This means that you can have photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one... inside OneNote (if you don't get that go here...) Additionally you can draw perfect lines, rectangles, diamonds, triangles, parallelograms and cartesian grids with ease. I use this feature constantly.

Secondly, Synchronizing Notebooks between two machines was sort of a hassle, I was doing it with a 1g SD card (and I still do, but it is easier to prevent overwriting beacause OneNote now does a real sync... I tested it with editing the same line in the same Notebook on two offline machines then syncing and it worked perfectly, I did NOT expect that, AWESOME!

I will be installing the Beta for SharePoint 2007 soon so we will see how that integration works. Shared Notebooks were a HUGE missing feature that I wanted way back when... You can store Notebooks in Document Libraries now and they will autosync or allow shared live editing.

While browsing around the new info I stumbled on this:

What is that I see? a WinAmp Icon in a Microsoft Help Document? I pretty much guarantee that will disappear quietly before production... :-) It's on the OneNote Mobile page of “More Cool Features“

OneNote Mobile... I can't try it because I have an Audiovox VX6600, I would love to have this, but it looks like it is rather limted, I will just have to settle for the improved “Copied From Device” function. This works really well for me, except for one thing, ink from the phone mysteriously disappears if you edit a note and undo doesn't bring it back, text is all fine.

ONM doesn't support ink anyway so I don't see how that would help. Who the heck really takes notes on a smartphone... That is why I have a PDA Phone!

Also, I have to rely on TimeStamps to move pictures off the phone into OneNote, there is no way to browse thumbnails, in fact, I have to either do a copy/convert when accessing “Mobile Device“ which is a hassle... OR pull the Storage Card out of my phoine and put it in my laptop which is also... You guessed it, a hassle.

Since I have Activesync running under bluetooth it would be a heck of a lot easier if I could just browse the device and drop a picture into OneNote. Make Text in Image Searchable Rocks! this is really useful, but only if you have a really good image to work with, 640x480 doesn't usually cut it.

Dragging and Dropping pages is greatly improved! Using select page/move page to/another section was always an annoyance.

Calculator - This feature is great, I no longer have to switch over to one of my dedicated Tablet calculators unless I want to handwrite calculations.

Attaching a file in a note is now a bit more intuitive, it was fixed in an earlier service pack, but not as nicely as it works now, with all 3 options (link/copy/embed printout) presented when I drop a file onto the note.

Send To Word is nicer, Save to PDF is AWESOME! (hopefully this isn't removed by litigators), almost no one knows what an XPS even is yet, so I won't go there.

Unfortunately copying Code from VS2005 STILL DOES NOT RETAIN COLOR INFORMATION... major bummer, I still have to copy to Word, then Cut from Word and Paste into OneNote, the problem is bizarre to says the least... if Word can retain that info from the Clipboard, OneNote certainly should be able to as well. I am so used to doing it now its almost intuitive, but it could save me alot of grief for when I do Code Reviews if I could eliminate this step.

Overall, after using the new Beta 2 for a few days my impressions are very positive, sure there are a few more things I would like to have in OneNote, but for what it is and what it does, I feel it is BY FAR the most useful, friendly and snag-free notekeeping program out there.

OneNote 2003 SP1 has wrapped

H. Steele Price, IV — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 09:54:00 GMT

The OneNote Team has officially wrapped it's first Service Pack.

This is really great news since we are using it corporately much more than we ever thought we would when it first released. Personally, I find OneNote completely indispensible, I am learning new ways of utilizing it for common tasks almost daily.

Version 2 should prove to be amazing, I am sure there will be a big push for integration with other Microsoft tools like Visual Studio's Task List (for which I am thinking about making a plug-in to read OPML) and InfoPath.

Thanks and Congrats to Chris Pratley and his team for a job well done.

OneNote Session

H. Steele Price, IV — Mon, 24 May 2004 19:58:00 GMT

Again, not a lot of new material here, but I did confirm that the really nasty page scrambling bug has been fixed and it is IN the RC version of SP1! That is one bug that drove me crazy, I seemed to have to deal with it much more than I wanted to.

Another thing I took away from the session was the way that Folders work, Why did no one show me that before? I bitched about how OneNote can't open other folders easily and all you have to do is put a shortcut to your other folder inside the "My Notebook" folder. Duh, I immediately felt like an idiot and went and re-arranged my folders.

Folders within folders are perfectly fine.

OneNote API Preview

H. Steele Price, IV — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 15:02:00 GMT

At first I was excited, then totally let down...

Importing Content into OneNote 2003 SP1 Preview

You know I don't mind limiting the export capabilities, but not even allowing import to current cursor location was a bit of a shortcoming.

For example, I want to create an import for SVG files from Grafigo (or anything else) as either Ink or an Image (support for both).

With this API, I will have to create a scratch page just to get the graphic into OneNote, but then I am not sure if I'll be able to move it around to the section where I need it.

I don't need programmatic control of deletions, the user can do that themself in OneNote, what I need is some way to get things into OneNote that it doesn't natively support and allow the user to cut/paste/drag/drop it whever they need it in any notebook/section.

Perhaps allowing InsertObject (in addition to just image) would be the way to go on this, then an SVG Importer would be moot. It really surprises me that it's not avalable as an Office Filter by now (which seems to be what controls importimg images into office).

However, I would really like to insert SVG as INK, which I'm sure an Office importer wouldn't support anyway. The way I am thinking about doing it with this API is to make a scratchpad page, but I am going to have to test to see if cut/paste once it's in OneNote will work as expected since it will then be Ink and not an SVG.

When I get my Ink applications running the way I like them, everything is going to be saved as SVG because it just makes sense.

OneNote Service Pack 1 Preview

H. Steele Price, IV — Wed, 21 Apr 2004 11:36:00 GMT

Chris Prately has announced the availability of OneNote Service Pack1. While this is just a preview, it seems pretty stable and offer alot of new features.

Some highlights:

Drawings can be edited by selecting parts of them
Use pen as a pointer (very nice, and quite useful when demoing)
Simple API
Capture Screen Clips
Open Folder (this was a major annoyance of mine)
Insert MS-Office Docs (as pictures though, not as objects)
Import Pictures (was already there, but it's more robust now with from TWAIN)
Insert Date/Time (seems trivial but I really missed not having it)
Change Date/Time on Page Header (was a big annoyance for me...)
Sharepoint/peer-to-peer sharing of notes
Encrypted Notes

What is still missing :-( :

Insert Object
Import/Export to SVG (extremely useful for web and Grafigo integration)
(I really dislike converting ink to EMF)
Cut/Paste INK from other applications, this seems like something that should be supported easily, ink is built into the .NET framework and I would assume they are using these objects for all the ink.
Snap to Grid doesn't line up with the grid lines as expected
Line color (of the grid or rules) doesn't work... the colors don't change (sometimes they sort of change... this is a bug and is wierd, probably just a preview problem)
FULL API

This is a great step in the right direction and I am happy to see it released so quickly. Hopefully they will get an SP2 out the door in another 6 months or so. 6 months per Service Pack is about as long as they should go in product cycles.

MS Claims that their internal cycles are 18 months between major versions and that is nice, but we need at least 3 service packs to keep things flowing and improving to maintain interest and usability between those versions. Otherwise I start looking for replacement products that offer more/improved features.

OneNote is still weak on writing things like Math Formulas...

Try writing:

f(x) =	(x-1)²
	log₆(x+3)

You'll get 2 paragraphs which is no big deal until you try to make them one... if you choose add to previous paragraph, it reformats to look like:

f(x) =	(x-1)²
log₆(x+3)

When this is handwriting, I'd like it not to adjust my margins for me... (at least optionally)

When handwriting I am usually trying to place things where I need them to be, with text, you just add formatting styles like tabs, etc. but handwriting needs to be able to figure this out. I could just leave things in many paragraphs, but that doesn't always make sense since there is no other grouping option in OneNote. If there was something like a “Group and Move Together while retaining format” option then I wouldn't be bitching :-)

Someone else was requesting tables, maybe that would be an option to take care of this and some other formatting issues, but I have spent huge amounts of time ripping out tables in favor of CSS or SVG in all my web work, so it would make sense that Ink should be able to be treated as a floating graphic object.

I'd love to see OneNote be able to handle SVG natively and be able to select ink and have it copy to the clipboard as SVG, but I really have my doubts that MS would even attempt to support a standard made out of Redmond in such a friendly way as that. I'm sure they will opt for some bizarre proprietary binary format that no one can do anything with. Hopefully when we get the FULL API creating friendly tools like this will be possible.

I want an API and Add-In Module support for OneNote

H. Steele Price, IV — Wed, 14 Apr 2004 11:25:00 GMT

Chris Pratley is writing about adding Blogging capabilities to OneNote.

I was wondering a while ago why OneNote has no support like the rest of the Office Tools for 3 things...

An API, Add-in modules and Scripting.

I understand this is a 1.0 release product, but really, it's billed as part of Office sytem, but acts totally like a stand-alone product that has no relationship to office other than it's made by Microsoft.

I would hate to see OneNote blow up into the typical bloatware many people expect from an Office App like Word and Excel. Part of the Appeal OneNote has for me is that it is a pretty clean organizer with tons of potential.

If they bloat it up and force a million options on me, then it will become really confusing and not allow me to do targetted note taking for specific tasks. I really want the ability to make Templates, and specific toolbars for different notebooks.

Many people seem to think there is only a single notebook capability in OneNote. Actually you can make dozens of notebooks targetted at different projects, they just hide that from you right now because there is no Open/Save menu option for different Notebook paths.

Make a new folder... go to Options - Open and Save

Change your “My Notebook” path to the new folder and OneNote will load a new Notebook with new Tabs (only after quitting and restarting).

What I would like to see is a way to change this in a much easier way. I use OneNote for Project Management and each project is its own Notebook, since Each Tab is a .ONE file, they can be linked to other Notebooks, but there is no simple way to change base folders. Scripting support could take care of that. I'd also like to see insert OBJECT so I could insert a live Excel Page into my notebook if I need to.

Harping on OneNote

H. Steele Price, IV — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 10:48:00 GMT

I have been using OneNote daily for about 2 months now, I Love it and Hate it at the same time. For Organization of Notes, it's pretty close to Ideal. For Pen Input, its pretty close to awful. I have tried every way possible to take accurate notes (I'm dealing with formulas and graphs right now) and it not only is difficult to make things line up correclty or recognize my handwriting, but besides that-- It has several times turned a page of notes into utter jumble with no way that I have

OneNote vs. Journal

H. Steele Price, IV — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 13:01:00 GMT

Added Chris Pratley's weblog. He is the Program Manager for the Office Team and the weblog seems to be mostly about OneNote.

Speaking of OneNote, despite my praise in previous post it really frustrates the hell out of me. I think it's a great app, just not very well implemented in some areas. See http://weblogs.asp.net/chris_pratley/archive/2004/01/31/65647.aspx for a little explanation of the OneNote/Journal differences. This is Frightening. I like Journal alot for drawing math functions, but getting them into OneNote is horrid it pastes them as pictures... BLAH! Ink should be Ink. I'm going to write my first ink enabled app in a few days and see why this is just so terribly difficult. The lasso in Journal is FAR superior to a selection rectangle for ink. Autogrouping in OneNote is really annoying the hell out of me.

OneNote

H. Steele Price, IV — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 15:33:00 GMT

I thought this was going to be just a standalone version of Journal and Notes combined from outlook.... Boy, was I ever wrong. I think this is going to be a constantly open, indispensible tool for me. I have this great little capture tool that I can use to snap portions of my app at runtime (or error dialogs...), add a snippet of my code, make some highlights and annotations, then spit the whole thing out as an html based document on how and exactly why I fixed an error in the code... Absolutely brilliant. I really am getting impatient for a Tablet PC now, however, I have been using this as a brain dump for coding notes and WOW, am i ever impressed. I can drag and drop code snippets, add pictures and diagrams, insert links to web articles about techniques in the function, etc, then dump the note to a single page Web file that I can us for sharing my notes with collegues or to add into my source directory for documentation. I can have notes for all my different programs seperated and searchable, but always avalable. This is probably the most impressive piece of software I have seen in a long time. I would love to see the ability to extend this a little bit but I really don't want to see it get bloated out of proportion to what it does like Outlook has become. With a little imagination this tool can really improve your ability to communicate your coding with other people. Now if I could just create blog entries from a note page my blogging would really explode. Maybe that is something we can program as an extension, I wonder if there will be an SDK released for this...