BIG LIST OF ONENOTE POWERTOYS

It’s a cold and rainy day here in Seattle (Yuk) which makes it the right time to hunker down and learn about some of the rocking powertoys (aka add-ins) that are available for Onenote.

Click here to get the clickable list:

Calendar Add-in gives a view of all of your notes, allowing viewing by when they were created or modified. A preview pane allows you to view your notes. (From MSDN & MSDN)

Calendar/Planner Powertoy create’s a custom calendar, by selecting a start date and # of days

Canvas – navigate & edit notebooks by providing a high-level canvas-view of all your content

Export Outlook Notes to OneNote.

Favorites PowerToy 1 or 2 works like Internet Explorer’s “favorites” by saving the paths and locations of your OneNote Notebooks. (From MSDN & MSDN)

Image Rotator PowerToy rotates ink or drawings

Learning Styles Pamphlet provides an overview of how educators can use OneNote to complement students’ learning styles in the classroom

Windows Journal to OneNote Importer.

MakeSubpage PowerToy takes the the currently selected page(s) and makes them a subpage(s). (From MSDN)

Media Fine Tuner Powertoy for taking notes while recording audio, allows “moving” the start time of the notes you typed and aligning them with “where” in the audio you want the note to play
Merge Pages PowerToy merges selected pages together by “selecting the pages you want to merge and click the merge toolbar button.” (From MSDN)

Notebook Cleaner & Privatizer PowerToy prepares a “shared” notebook for distribution

Printout Manager take slides decks printed to OneNote and break them up into one slide per page

Outlook To OneNote PowerToy adds the capability of sending yourself email with a certain SUBJECT keyword and have Outlook automatically create a new page in OneNote’s Unfiled Notes section when that mail item arrives. Outlook then deletes the email

Project Gutenberg: ImportText PowerToy imports “Project Gutenberg” texts into OneNote

ReadOnly Selection Add-in makes the currently selected section ReadOnly

“Search and Replace” PowerToy.

Send to Mobile sends selected pages from different OneNote notebooks to your Mobile device

Send to OneNote – RightClick file(s) s& elect “Send To OneNote
Sort Pages & Sort Sections PowerToys

Sudoku (game)

Table of Contents PowerToy creates list of most recently changed pages

Table Sum Powertoy sums columns of a table & adds new row to the bottom (ignoring non-numeric values)

Task Requests from OneNote Meeting Notes Powertoy assigns Outlook tasks to others during meetings
Template Manager Powertoy manages your customized OneNote templates

TextImporter PowerToy – navigate to a folder and import all the TXT files. It creates a new section with the name of the folder, as the section name

THE PowerToy (Text, Highlighted, Extractor) – highlighted text from the current page is copied to a new page.

Web Exporter Plug- in exports OneNote notebooks as an interactive web site
Word Count counts the number of words on a page

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Here’s a post that is way out of my comfort zone, so, please don’t be asking me any questions about it. (I told you I’m lying low today).

It turns out that Microsoft has a scripting environment call Powershell and that people (at lease one person, anyway) use it to write PowerToys or add-ins for OneNote – which is exactly what Brian Dewey has done. He has created a OneNote PowerToy that sends an email when pages in a shared OneNote notebook change.

Here’s how it works:

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There are two pieces of Microsoft technology that I’ve been using recently and I love. The first is OneNote, which is the first program that I think can replace my cherished paper notebooks. Not only is OneNote a great place to write down all of those thoughts I don’t want to forget, it’s also turning into a wonderful tool for collaboration. Starting in OneNote 2007, OneNote has incredible “shared notebook” functionality. With OneNote 2007, you can have a team of people all contributing information to a single notebook. It’s a great way to build a common repository of knowledge.

The second piece of Microsoft technology I love is PowerShell. This is the ultimate geek-chic tool. It’s a powerful command line / scripting environment.

I now use these programs all the time. And like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, I wondered if these two great technologies would be even better if brought together? So I’ve tried to bring them together in the form of a OneNote PowerShell provider. This is a PowerShell extension that lets you create and manipulate OneNote notebooks, sections, and pages from PowerShell. You can use provider to do some interesting automation using OneNote.

Here’s an example: One thing I wanted was a tool that sends email when pages in a shared OneNote notebook change. This turned out to be pretty easy to do in PowerShell. With the OneNote PowerShell provider, the following lines of script get all of the pages that have changed after a particular time — I use this line in the script to find all pages that have changed since the last time I ran the script.

$changedPages = dir $Notebook -recurse |

    where-object { ([datetime]$_.lastModifiedTime -gt $targetDate) -and (!$_.PSIsContainer) }

The dir -recurse command gets me a listing of all of the pages, sections, and section groups in the notebook. The where-object clause is then used to whittle the list down to only pages (that’s the !$_.PSIsContainer bit) and only pages that have changed after $targetDate.

Then, I can use the following pipeline to export the changed OneNote pages to MHT format and remember the resulting filenames.

$exportedFileNames = $changedPages |

    export-onenote -output $outputDirectory -format mht | get-propertyvalue ExportedFile

Finally, I use the Send-SMTPMail cmdlet from the PowerShell Community Extensions to send the email containing all of the changed pages.

While the core of the script is just those three pipelines, there’s a lot more to the script (217 lines more, to be exact) to do things like parameter validation, formatting, etc. But still, writing and maintaining 220 lines of script was a lot easier than maintaining the couple of thousands of lines of code it would otherwise take to accomplish the same task.

If you want to play with the OneNote PowerShell extension, I’m making it publicly available under the Microsoft Community License. You can find the binary files here: OneNotePowershell.msi. The source files are here: OnPsProvider-1158.zip.

If you install the provider, it will install several sample scripts as well, including the script I’ve been discussing here (Get-OneNoteDigest.ps1).

If you just want to read the documentation that comes with the provider and the scripts, it exists in OneNote format: OneNote PowerShell Documentation.

If you want to use PowerShell with OneNote to build useful tools, let me know. I’ll be curious to see how you use it.

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OneNote Favorites PowerToy

If you have a lot of ‘stuff’ in OneNote Notebooks, you should definitely check out this OneNote Favorites powertoy. It works much like the IE favorites model.  You click the star icon with a green plus sign to add a page, section or notebook to the favorites list, and click the star to open the favorites list or navigate back to it.  Pretty simple!

This powertoy is a must have for any OneNote user, especially for somebody that has a bunch of different places they need to be quickly.

Here’s the basic UI to add a page to the favorites list:

Page is the default choice, but you can choose the section or notebook as well.

Once added, it looks like this when you open the favorites list:

This view is still modeled after the OneNote notebook structure.  You can also click the “List view” button near the bottom right to make it a little more “table-ish”:

WATCH THE DEMO

In this InkShow guys from GottabeMobile.com go over all aspects of the powertoy.  Starting out with a look at the menu’s and functionality.  After that,  You’ll be taken through a demo of this powertoy to show it in action.

DOWNLOAD IT NOW

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Take your OneNote on the Road with your IPHONE!

Iheart member katnchains broke the news about the new OneNote iPhone app being called MobileNoter:

That’s right!  Somebody finally made an app for syncing your beloved OneNote with your just as beloved IPhone.  If you’re not an IPhoner please forgive me and move right along to the next blog.

But for those of you that have an IPhone and really wanted your OneNote to go everywhere with you, then MobileNoter is for you.  MobileNoter, created by The MS Team, is now available in the appstore with a windows client to download for $1.25 per month from their website.

But don’t take my word for it.  Check it out https://www.mobilenoter.com/

I sync’d about half of my notebooks and there are a couple of things that I’m hoping they’ll fix in upcoming versions but overall I think it’s a fantastic companion program.  It was fast and easy to set both of the programs up and it was pretty fast to sync my notebooks from my pc to the iphone.  The two bugs I’ve got are, it doesn’t seem to handle images in pages yet and it doesn’t sync sections that are password protected.  I’m not sure the second is really a bug, for security purposes it probably makes sense not to touch those.  But the images thing is a pretty big problem for me as I have many pages with screen clips or things I’ve printed into onenote.

Here’s what their website says:

MobileNoter is an iPhone note-taking application that is able to sync with Microsoft OneNote notebooks. Do you use OneNote on daily basis on your laptop or PC and dream to be able to sync it with your iPhone? Then MobileNoter is just what you are looking for.

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Instant Navigator PowerToy for OneNote

Happy Monday! I hope you all had a great weekend and are tackling the work week with gusto (yeah, right!). I had to be lured to work today by the memory that our Admin, Cherie, buys Top Pot doughnuts for everyone on Monday mornings. It’s amazing what a strong incentive free baked goods can be. But then, Top Pot’s Old Fashioned doughnuts could motivate me to build a spaceship in the middle of Antarctica.

Speaking about Antarctica (or not), I was trying to find some notes I made a few months ago about Glacier National Park (I am going on a road trip there this summer) and realized again how much I like the InstantNavigator PowerToy for OneNote – it made it incredibly easy to find exactly what I needed (the directions from Seattle) without having to use a single braincell.
If you haven’t used this great add-in, here’s the scoop:

(BTW, there is a free trial, but if you like it, it costs $9.95 – clearly the person who built it has to eat too!)

Do you have thousands and thousands of items in your OneNote?
Do you spend a lot of time just to find a note in your huge hierarchy?

InstantNavigator is an add-in for OneNote which allows you to navigate through all your OneNote pages by typing the title. Pages matching your typing are filtered out as you type. The more you type the fewer matching pages that are displayed.

InstantNavigator is an enhancement plug-in for Microsoft OneNote. Once installed, InstantNavigator adds an instant search capability to OneNote, which works in much the same way as Instant Search in Windows Vista – you can instantly find the note that contains a particular word as you type it into the search box. It’s quick, easy and fun to do as compared to the native search capability in Microsoft OneNote. With InstantNavigator in place, you are never more than a few keystrokes away from the note you’re looking for!

• InstantNavigator vs. OneNote Search

  InstantNavigator searches for a word in section names more conveniently than the native OneNote search. The problem is that OneNote displays ALL instances of the word it finds everywhere – in the names of notebooks, sections, section groups and inside the pages. So it takes quite some time and efforts to find what you actually need. Certainly, you can configure the search – choose a range of search from the drop-down menu. Besides, the search range is not displayed in the search box, so the user often forgets that the search is set to “current notebook”, rather than the entire OneNote and fails to find the page he needs. With InstantNavigator, search is more convenient and less tiresome. Simply start typing in the word and voila! You find the note your need in a couple of seconds.

• InstantNavigator vs. Vista Instant Search

  As distinct from Vista Instant Search, InstantNavigator can find a word in the name of the notes, sections, section groups and notebooks. Vista Instant Search allows you to search only OneNote section names (as files), so the content of the notes is inaccessible for it but not for InstantNavigator.

• How It Works

  

  Once installed, InstantNavigator works right out of the box. To begin the search, click on the desktop icon or press “Windows” + “Q” hot key on the keyboard anywhere in Windows. By the way, the hot key is configurable and can be any combination of keystrokes you define yourself. In the search box that opens, key in a word or a phrase associated with the note you’re looking for. Similar to Instant Search in Vista, you only have to type in a few letters and InstantNavigator displays the matching results right away.

  If the results aren’t what you’re looking for, refine them – type in more keywords to filter down to the most appropriate matches, or enter other keywords. When you see the note you need, double-click it to load it into OneNote.

• Example

  Let’s say, for example, you are a journalist and take notes for your articles almost every day. Over time, your OneNote has accumulated thousands of them. Now it’s rather difficult to find what you need in one go. Not so if you have InstantNavigator! To get started, press the “Windows”+”Q” keys. The search box will pop up. Start typing whatever you are looking for, for example, the word – “iPhone”. You’ll see a subset of search results. To narrow down to the thing you are looking for, continue and type in – “presentation, CeBIT, March, 2008”. InstantNavigator will immediately return that particular page with the notes you need to write the article. Nice, isn’t it?

  
  

DOWNLOAD THE FREE TRIAL HERE

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OneNote Favorites Powertoy – links and demo

If you have a lot of ‘stuff’ in OneNote Notebooks, you should definitely check out this OneNote Favorites powertoy. It works much like the IE favorites model.  You click the star icon with a green plus sign to add a page, section or notebook to the favorites list, and click the star to open the favorites list or navigate back to it.  Pretty simple!

This powertoy is a must have for any OneNote user, especially for somebody that has a bunch of different places they need to be quickly.

Here’s the basic UI to add a page to the favorites list:

Page is the default choice, but you can choose the section or notebook as well.

Once added, it looks like this when you open the favorites list:

This view is still modeled after the OneNote notebook structure.  You can also click the “List view” button near the bottom right to make it a little more “table-ish”:

 

WATCH THE DEMO

In this InkShow guys from GottabeMobile.com go over all aspects of the powertoy.  Starting out with a look at the menu’s and functionality.  After that,  You’ll be taken through a demo of this powertoy to show it in action.

DOWNLOAD IT NOW

 

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