My love-hate relationship with onenote

[Sam Iam]

Hello all,

I've been lurking around, trying to gather tidbits of info about how to get
most out of this app. First of all, I should tell you that I'm one of those
so called open-source nut. I have Linux as my primary desktop and use
OpenOffice for anything that involves exchanging MS documents with others
(I teach at a university). Two weeks back, I got a tablet PC (Acer C110)
and like working with it. I was hoping to use Windows journal to take all
kinds of notes (research/admin meeting minutes, class preparation etc).
Much to my dismay, I found that WJ is not good at organizing things.
Dabbled with Franklin-Covey planner eval version that came with it and then
I came across OneNote. Even though I've consciously tried to avoid MS apps
(and succeeded for most part, until I got the tablet), this is one little
app that seemed to do everything that I wanted to do. I just couldn't
ignore the time savings that this will bring me and will be buying it
before the trial version expires.

At first, it was like love at first sight. I was in organizational heaven.
You all have discussed all the things that this app can wonderfully do.
Like all marriages, now little things are starting to bug me. Let me count
the ways (decreasing order of frustration):

1. Why oh why does the font size for handwritten ink seems to jump all over
the place. I can never get it to a reasonable size (like 10pt). It started
out at 16.5, but then jumped to 22. I can  never predict it and that bugs
me to no end. A UI design that the user cannot predict or is inconsistent is
a bad design. An app that the user cannot (seemingly) control, leads to
lots of frustration. Please let me set the font size of my handwriting and
don't second guess it. you will get it wrong more often that not. After all,
that's what the default font setting is for.

2. Once I ink something, it is as if set it stone. Often I write something
and then I have to change a word here or there. Some times my brain is a
step ahead of my hand and I miss a word. With journal, I can shift ink
around. But for some reason ON won't allow me. The whole advantage of
electronic ink is being able to do things that cannot be done with normal
ink.

3. I desperately (well, that may be too strong a word, I'm not that
desperate need a way to colour code the section tabs. At first, I thought
if I change the background colour, it might be reflected in the tabs. But
doesn't seem to work.

4. I'd love a way to automatically insert date and time. I know the notes
containers seem to have this info, but not as nice as seeing it up front.

5. Did I mention the handwriting font size

6. A diagramming mode a la corel grafigo would be really handy. Now I'm not
asking for the full capabilities of Grafigo (although that would be really
nice), just simple conversions to straight lines, circles and joints,
underlining etc.

7. Another vote to collapsible sub-pages

Well, even with all this minor irritations, I still (mostly) like it. Kudos
to Chris Pratly's team for a wonderful app.

Sam

 

[Kathy J]

Sam,
I can't help with all of these, but do have some SP1 related answers to
certain ones:

3) Position your mouse over the section tab. Right click--> Section Color-->
(select the color you want).
4) Alt- Shift- F inserts the current date and time. If you want to change
the date and time in the header, right click each piece. A clock or calendar
icon will show that lets you change it.
6) Would love to see this myself. Meanwhile, check out the stationery page
on OneNoteAnswers.com. There is a set of pages there that have various
colors of a wide variety of autoshapes. Copy and paste them as needed.
(Clunky, but better than nothing.)

Hope this lessens the pain a little

--
Kathryn Jacobs, Microsoft MVP PowerPoint and OneNote
Co-Author of Life on OneNote - Coming Fall 2004 from Holy Macro! Books
Get OneNote answers at http://www.onenoteanswers.com
Get PowerPoint answers at http://www.powerpointanswers.com

I believe life is meant to be lived. But:
if we live without making a difference, it makes no difference that we lived

 

[Erik Sojka]

You'd better not show your face around Slashdot after
making this post, mister <g>

Some of the things you mention can indeed be done. You
should first upgrade to SP1. Go to
http://www.microsoft.com/office/onenote and follow the
links to download the update.

1) Are you converting the ink immediately? You don't
need to do that necessarily. OneNote will automatically
index probable conversions of your handwriting, so that
searching, etc. can occur against your handwritten text.
Given that, you can in most cases keep the Ink as it is.
Assuming that's what you're doing, the font size of the
text (after conversion) is determined by the font size of
your handwriting. I know I have horrible and
inconsistent handwriting and as a result get different
font sizes within a sentence when I convert.

2) It's a different series of steps, but this can be
done. If I need to insert ink in a sentence, I select
the ink that I want and drag it outside to create a new
Notes Container. Then I insert the new ink and then
cut/paste the old Ink in at the end.

3) Right-click the section (or tap and hold with the Pen)
and choose a color from the "Section Color" menu.

4) With SP1, there is a timestamp function under the
Insert menu (which has a KB shortcut and the ability to
create a toolbar button for easy access via the Pen).
I'm not sure how familiar you are with the UI
customizations available in MS-Office - if what I said in
the first sentence doesn't make sense, ask and I can
clarify.

6) You can treat Ink as a drawing but I agree that other
Office features such as AutoShapes and the other drawing
features in the other Office programs would be neat. I'm
sure that in the next version of OneNote more Office
integration will be there. There are some non-editable
shapes available for download from some blogs. Google
for "OneNote Shapes".

-----Original Message-----
Hello all,

I've been lurking around, trying to gather tidbits of info about how to get
most out of this app. First of all, I should tell you that I'm one of those
so called open-source nut. I have Linux as my primary desktop and use
OpenOffice for anything that involves exchanging MS documents with others
(I teach at a university). Two weeks back, I got a tablet PC (Acer C110)
and like working with it. I was hoping to use Windows journal to take all
kinds of notes (research/admin meeting minutes, class preparation etc).
Much to my dismay, I found that WJ is not good at organizing things.
Dabbled with Franklin-Covey planner eval version that came with it and then
I came across OneNote. Even though I've consciously tried to avoid MS apps
(and succeeded for most part, until I got the tablet), this is one little
app that seemed to do everything that I wanted to do. I just couldn't
ignore the time savings that this will bring me and will be buying it
before the trial version expires.

At first, it was like love at first sight. I was in organizational heaven.
You all have discussed all the things that this app can wonderfully do.
Like all marriages, now little things are starting to bug me. Let me count
the ways (decreasing order of frustration):

1. Why oh why does the font size for handwritten ink seems to jump all over
the place. I can never get it to a reasonable size (like 10pt). It started
out at 16.5, but then jumped to 22. I

can never predict it and that bugs

 

[Chris H.]

In addition to what Kathy and Erik said, are you running Tablet PC Edition
2005 and the Windows XP SP2 upgrade on your Tablet PC yet? If not, I'd
suggest you set up Windows Update to download it or order the CD for it when
it becomes available from
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/sp2/cdorder/en_us/default.mspx
There are pretty good improvements in the Tablet Input Panel and handwriting
recognition.
--
Chris H.
Microsoft Windows MVP/Tablet PC
Tablet Creations - http://nicecreations.us/
Associate Expert
Expert Zone -

 

[Sam Iam]

In addition to what Kathy and Erik said, are you running Tablet PC Edition
2005 and the Windows XP SP2 upgrade on your Tablet PC yet?

Is that out yet? I was at MS site yesterday, looking for it, but couldn't
find it. I'm running ON SP1 with XP SP1.

Sam

 

[Sam Iam]

You'd better not show your face around Slashdot after
making this post, mister <g>

Heh. I'm not a MS convert (yet), but I do use the tools that help me best
with the caveat that I'm willing to put up with some lack of
polish/functionality in favour of OpenSource.

Some of the things you mention can indeed be done. You
should first upgrade to SP1. Go to
http://www.microsoft.com/office/onenote and follow the
links to download the update.

I downloaded the trial version last week. I was assuming that it already
contained SP1. Am I mistaken?

1) Are you converting the ink immediately? You don't
need to do that necessarily. OneNote will automatically
index probable conversions of your handwriting, so that
searching, etc. can occur against your handwritten text.

My usual workflow (its only been a few days) is to take minutes at my weekly
meeting and then before every meeting, go through minutes, convert them to
text and clean it up so that I know what questions to ask about progress.

Given that, you can in most cases keep the Ink as it is.
Assuming that's what you're doing, the font size of the
text (after conversion) is determined by the font size of
your handwriting.

This what I was arguing against. While it seems like a good idea at first,
it only gives headaches to power users. These are the type of features that
take a lot of effort to implement, but gives very little return (sometimes
even becomes an irritant, like in this case)

2) It's a different series of steps, but this can be
done. If I need to insert ink in a sentence, I select
the ink that I want and drag it outside to create a new
Notes Container. Then I insert the new ink and then
cut/paste the old Ink in at the end.

Ugh. It is probably less time consuming to rewrite the whole darn thing
again.

3) Right-click the section (or tap and hold with the Pen)
and choose a color from the "Section Color" menu.

I think I made a mistake here. What I meant to say was to colour code the
page tabs (vertical tabs) within a section.

4) With SP1, there is a timestamp function under the
Insert menu (which has a KB shortcut and the ability to
create a toolbar button for easy access via the Pen).

I'm already doing this. So, scratch one off my list.

6) You can treat Ink as a drawing but I agree that other
Office features such as AutoShapes and the other drawing
features in the other Office programs would be neat.

I was talking mor along the line of converting hand drawn shapes
automatically. If you haven't seen Corel Grafigo on a TPC, take a look at
that. Quite nice.

Thanks for all the help. I'm sure I'll be posting more as I begin to use it
heavily. Semester begins in two more weeks

Sam

 

[Chris H.]

Take your pick of the information:
http://search.microsoft.com/search/results.aspx?st=b&na=90&View=en-us&qu=Service+pack+2
There are instructions on how to set up Windows Update for download, or
obtain the "network" package for multiple computers.
--
Chris H.
Microsoft Windows MVP/Tablet PC
Tablet Creations - http://nicecreations.us/
Associate Expert
Expert Zone -