Formal Meeting Minutes from OneNote

[owlex424]

Hello All,

I discovered OneNote 2003 months ago, and remain very impressed with
it. I use it to scribe meetings for our company. I have one major
hangup though - I can't find a good way to make ON produce a formal
report. It can "publish" to Word, but this is little more than an
automated copy-and-paste. Right now I end up publishing to .doc, then
doing a copy-paste for each minute into the formal format. It's very
labor intensive.
The template for the formal Memorandum of Conference (MOC) is posted
here: http://home.comcast.net/~owlex424/FormalMinutesTemplate.doc.

I know ON wasn't really designed for this, but it seems like a
reasonable and high-demand feature for the business world. Is there a
better way to do it? Otherwise I may have to revert to just taking them
straight in Word. Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Thanks,
Alex

 

[Olya Veselova (Microsoft, OneNote team)]

You can create a OneNote template that looks very close to the .doc template.
Use Format > Stationery, then set up the page the way you like, and click
Save current page as stationery at the bottom of the pane. Then you can set
this stationery as default for your meetings section in OneNote
However, with OneNote 2003 you will have some trouble if you try to send
such OneNote pages to Word, because the send process does not preserve the 2D
layout structure of the page.
Here you have two options:
You can get OneNote 2007 Beta 2, which supports tables, and use tables to
create your template layout (and then turn table borders off).
The other option is to publish the OneNote 2003 pages as a web page (.mht
file) instaed of a word doc. The .mht files will preserve the exact look of
your OneNote page and can be opened in Word too. To save a page as an .mht
file, click File > Publish Pages and select the .mht file type.

Hope this helps,

 

[owlex424]

Thank you Olya, I will give that a try. The 2D formatting will be
important (i.e. centering text), so I may opt for the Beta. Have a good
day.

Thanks,
Alex