NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, June 2011
Microsoft program stores all types of data
By John Weigle, Editor,
Channel Islands PCUG, California
January 2011 issue, The Outer Edge
March 2011 issue, Drive Light
http://www.cipcug.org
jweigle (at) vcnet.com (click to email author)

Microsoft’s OneNote was one of the subjects discussed by Toby Scott, Channel Islands PCUG Technical Advisor, at their December 2010 program in December.

OneNote has been compared to a three-ring binder as a place to store all types of information in a searchable form. But it’s far more useful than just a binder full of paper, as Scott showed in the demonstration.

OneNote first appeared in the Microsoft Office suite in 2003, but not in all versions, he said. It was in most of the versions of Office 2007 and is in all of the 2010 versions, including Home and Student. It is also available as a stand-alone purchase for about $75.

OneNote is the perfect place to store “a tremendous amount of random stuff” in notebooks that can all be examined with a single search, Scott said. Each notebook can have tabs to further divide the information.

Notebooks are listed on the left, and the tabs for a notebook run across the top of the program. Pages can also have sub-pages.

“I probably have 10,000 notes of one kind or another I’d like to be able to get to and some of them I can’t find anymore,” Scott said. OneNote becomes a central depository for this kind of information, he said.

A notebook could cover plans for a trip, he said. When the trip is over and you don’t need it anymore, you can delete it with a right click.

The program is quite flexible, he said, because “you can enter data into OneNote almost any way you can get information into a computer.” You can cut and paste information, import Word and Excel documents and copy and paste text from an image (for example, a screen shot). Text in an image is searchable.

OneNote wants to tie into SkyDrive, Microsoft’s “to the clouds,” he said. It gives you 25 Gig of storage but you cannot store files larger than 50 Meg. Stored items can be personal (private) or shared. Users who put information in a shared folder are immediately asked if they want to send e-mails to notify people that the information is there. Anyone can see the shared files, but they can be password-protected to limit access, he said.

It’s also possible to copy entire Web sites, and, while the format of the page does not remain, all links remain live. Those who put data in a shared file can give users permission to edit it, but they, not those who visit the shared folder, have the power to limit and grant access permissions.

The cloud version of Office, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, can be used from SkyDrive.

Information entered in OneNote is saved immediately so users don’t have to remember to save before closing the program.

A search in OneNote looks through all notebooks, lists where the term is found and highlights it in the opened notebook.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of templates are available for OneNote users, including ones for home, school and business. But, Scott noted, “Not all free template downloads are useful.”

Text can be saved from many pictures, such as a screen shot of a DOS box, and copied to another spot in OneNote. A search will find the information in the image whether you’ve copied it out to text or not (the highlight was hard to see on the DOS screen shot, however). This does not work on heavily artistic graphics, like the CIPCUG logo on the society’s Web page, however. “There are limits on what you can pick up,” he said.

OneNote also defeats attempts to make copying a Web page impossible, Scott noted. In Vista and Windows 7, you can use the clipping tool to mark the portion of the Web page you want and paste it into OneNote, where it’s instantly searchable.

Scott also showed a notebook for work where he stores information on problems that are repetitive but don’t come up often enough so fixing them becomes automatic. He stores fix-it information in the notebook and can then search for words matching the problem. He can store registry fixes and similar information, keeping the links live all the time.

Another use, he said, is to gather pricing information from a variety of websites for airline tickets and so on, paste it into OneNote and compare all the data in one place. OneNote also adds a “Pasted from …” tag with information you paste from a website.

OneNote does not pick up CSS formatting and the background images on a Web page so it won’t display the information the way you see it on the Web page. Information can also be copied from a PDF file, he said.

Spreadsheets imported from websites are readable, but they don’t necessarily import in a spreadsheet format. Scott said that if he wants material from a spreadsheet to be imported into a different spreadsheet, he copies the material into Note Tab Pro. He then does a search for two spaces and replaces them with a tab. He then pastes that material into a spreadsheet, and Excel uses the tabs to create new columns.

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