Continue previous paragraph

[afalciani]

In OneNote 2003, there was a feature to right-click on an ink (or text)
paragraph and get an option to "continue previous paragraph" (or something
similar). In OneNote 2007, this apprears to be gone. Has this feature been
removed? If so, how can one paragraph be combined with the one above it? The
problem is mostly related to using ink. While writing with the Tablet PC pen
interface, OneNote interprets some lines as a continuation of the paragraph
above and some as new paragraphs. There is no ability to control this.
Without the ability to combine paragraphs, tags and actions are associated
with the wrong information. The only work-around I have been able to find so
far is to convert the ink to text and manually combine the text into a single
paragraph (very manual process).

 

[Erik Sojka (MVP)]

Hold down the Shift key while you drag one container into another and it
will merge the two containers.

When you apply a Tag, it should be applied to the current full line of
text. Just curious - how is the orphaning of certain containers causing
Tags to apply to the wrong information?

 

[afalciani]

Merging containers does not address the issue I raised. The orphaning I
described was related to paragraphs within the same container, not across
different containers. See my other posting about the feature "continue
previous paragraph" removed to understand the problem. Since the new parsing
engine does not keep ink together as intended 100% of the time and the
"continue previous paragraph" feature is gone, the tag associates with a set
of ink that might not be the entire thought from the user's persepctive (me
in this case). For example, starting inking on a line, continue inking on the
line below and possibly more lines below that. First, the handles identifying
the ink paragraphs are not available unless you switch back to text mode so
you cannot tag ink directly (another feature lost). Second, once in text
mode, you will see how the parsing engine interpretted the inking, some in
the same paragraph and some not

 

[Grant Robertson]

In OneNote 2003, there was a feature to right-click on an ink (or text)
paragraph and get an option to "continue previous paragraph" (or something
similar). In OneNote 2007, this apprears to be gone.

As far as I know we are screwed on that one. Maybe they have relented and
put it back in the RTM version of 07 without telling anyone. We can only
hope. That is one of the biggest things I miss from 03. With "continue
previous paragraph" we could at least more easily fix it when OneNote
couldn't figure out where to end a paragraph. With the abysmal end-of-
paragraph recognition in 07 compared to 03 that one feature would have at
least made things bearable. Now, I have had to just give up all hope of
having a coherent paragraph structure when using ink in ON 07.

It all looks fine, which looks good on a video demo, but it really just a
mess.

 

[Erik Sojka (MVP)]

That does clarify, thanks. I don't know what the reason was with the
removal of that feature.

If you tap one of the Tag icons while Inking, it will tag the current
paragraph, as detected (and as you point out, misdetected) by ON.

 

[Rainald Taesler]

Grant Robertson shared these words of wisdom:

It all looks fine, which looks good on a video demo, but it really
just a mess.

Unfortunately your are rightyright once more :-( :-(

Rainald

 

[afalciani]

Unfortunately, I was using RTM so I think we are out of luck for now. Maybe
someone from the product teamwill see this and relent - do I hear OneNote
2007 SP1?? It is one of the few times in my long history (24+ years) as a
Microsoft customer where a feature was just flat-out removed. Most of the
time, legacy features are just downplayed in the UI, not completely removed.
I am extremely disappointed; I have been reduced to selecting the entire ink
section, converting ink to text, manually fixing the paragraphing, and
tagging. What a huge waste of time and productivity.

 

[OneDave]

I have exactly the same problem. If I write down a definition during a
lecture, for example, and it requires more than one line of ink, I can't tag
the definition as a "Definition'' for later printout. Instead, I have to tag
each line separately. It gets ugly when I try to collect all of my
definitions together.

Has this been submitted as a bug?

In a related matter, if I ink a line of text and then later want to continue
that line, without creating a new paragraph and container to the right of the
original, how would I do this?

 

[Grant Robertson]

In a related matter, if I ink a line of text and then later want to continue
that line, without creating a new paragraph and container to the right of the
original, how would I do this?

Try switching to text mode and placing the cursor just after the last
word of that line. Then switch back to ink mode and start writing pretty
close to where that - now invisible - cursor is. If you tap anywhere else
in the interim then you will move where OneNote considers the active
cursor location to be and hose things up again.

 

[afalciani]

I received an automated message on the internal boards stating that this was
not being considered and it would be closed. If anyone reading this has any
pull, I'd love to have that reversed. I guess being a lowly customer does not
have any weight.

 

[Grant Robertson]

I have exactly the same problem. If I write down a definition during a
lecture, for example, and it requires more than one line of ink, I can't tag
the definition as a "Definition'' for later printout. Instead, I have to tag
each line separately. It gets ugly when I try to collect all of my
definitions together.

I just realized that my One-Cell Table trick works for this problem too.
I cut all the handwriting I want to tag, create the one-cell table, paste
the writing into that, select the entire table using the paragraph handle
to the left of the table, then I tag that. The whole one cell table will
show up in the tag summary.

I have also noticed that, if you convert handwriting to text it tends to
join the lines together better. So you could just convert to text then
tag that.

 

[OneDave]

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm sorry to lose this feature of 2003. Does
OneNote 2007 have a macro or programming interface that someone could use to
make this procedure easier ?

 

[Grant Robertson]

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm sorry to lose this feature of 2003. Does
OneNote 2007 have a macro or programming interface that someone could use to
make this procedure easier ?

It does have an API but I don't know anything about it. There is a
newsgroup about developing apps and add-ons for OneNote but I don't know
where it is. It doesn't seem to be in the microsoft.public list of
newsgroups. It has been mentioned several times in this newsgroup though.
Perhaps you can find it.