Page size doesn't work very well!!

[google]

Hello,

I am just playing around with onenote. I have a meeting at which I have
to give a presentation, and I'm jotting down my notes in advance. The
idea is to get all the notes down, then rearrange and combine them
until they are coherent enough to use as a basis for the presentation.

What I would like to do is be able to print out the disorganised notes,
so I can read them off-screen. I tried using the page size in Auto
mode, but then the notes were split over two pages. As most of the
notes are small, there is no need to split them as they could easily be
moved around to fit onto the page.

I tried changing the page size to A4, but when I used the print
preview, it seems that onenote has allocated the white space to be A4,
ignoring the fact that the header takes up space as well. THis means
that if I have my notes arranged in the space offered, anything at the
bottom of the page falls off the bottom of the paper and ends up on a
separate sheet.

Can I make it so that the space shown on screen will fill A4 and no
more? At the moment, I am wasting a lot of time shifting notes around
and using print preview to try and work out if they fit on the page.
This is stupid as the point of setting the page size to A4 was to save
me the necessity of doing this.

I'm using onenote 2003, SP1. Any help would be gratefully received.

 

[b.ontask]

You might consider looking at Mindmanager for this task. You can take
notes (building a tree), easily move notes around and then print them
out in a traditional outline format.

Purchase from www.sabresd.com and receive a voucher for a free 2 hour
web training... http://www.sabresd.com

There's a trial on their site... try the x5 or x6 professional.

 

[google]

Thanks for the info. The product looks good, but as this is for
personal use, I can't really justify $200 for it. I could use Word, I
just liked the ease with which you could drop text anywhere on the
onennote page. It's just a shame that the product has such poor
handling of page size.

Do I presume from your reply that you also find onennote's handling of
page size lousy?

 

[Tim]

I would suggest that you are having problems with the formatting of the
material on a OneNote page. Unfortunately, OneNote does not do a lot of
formatting - That is Word's responsibility in the suite.

Why don't you export the OneNote page into Word, then format it onto one
page.

 

[google]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the reply, but with all due respect, you're missing the
point. Onenote includes a facility for you to set the page size. It
just doesn't work. Irrespective of whether or not I would be better
exporting the info to Word, the page size just doesn't work. As it
happens in this case, I don't want to export to Word, I want to keep
the info in onennote so I can keep working on it. Exporting to Word
just to print is a waste of time. I might as well just do the whole
thing in Word in the first place.

I'm not doing anything unusual with onennote, I'm just trying to find
out why such a basic function is completely broken.

Thanks again for the reply.

 

[RK Henry]

Hello,

I am just playing around with onenote. I have a meeting at which I have
to give a presentation, and I'm jotting down my notes in advance. The
idea is to get all the notes down, then rearrange and combine them
until they are coherent enough to use as a basis for the presentation.

What I would like to do is be able to print out the disorganised notes,
so I can read them off-screen. I tried using the page size in Auto
mode, but then the notes were split over two pages. As most of the
notes are small, there is no need to split them as they could easily be
moved around to fit onto the page.

Have you experimented with the Print Preview option? I don't normally
print my notes but your question prompted me to play around with it a
little bit. On the Print Preview dialog there are a couple of
checkboxes that might help. At the top of the right side of the page
is a checkbox specifying printing the page header on a separate page.
Below that is a checkbox to scale the page to fit on a single page. If
you haven't tried these, you might see if they help--and please do
report your results. You can then click the Print button at the bottom
of the box to take you to the Print dialog so you can actually print.

Now it might be considered a fault that these options are not
apparently on the Print dialog and are only available on Print
Preview. Most Windows applications have scaling and other options
available on the Print dialog. Considering the range of possible page
sizes in a OneNote note page, being able to scale the page for
printing is an important feature. OneNote is not firmly tied to a
standard page size like Letter so all the note pages can be all
different sizes. That's one of OneNote's strengths. However, that
feature can be a problem for users who want to print those notes on
standard sized pages.

RK Henry

 

[google]

Hello,

I have seen the scaling option, but as I explained earlier in this
thread, I don't want to use that, I want onenote to stick to the sizes
I specify, and use the page size I specify.

As far as printing the header on a separate page goes, that means
wasting an extra sheet of paper, just to persuade onennote to do what
it's supposed to be doing in the first place!!

I'm pretty convinced this is a serious bug. Seems a shame that a
software company who can produce something as complex as Word can't get
page sizing right in a simple application like this.

Thanks for the reply. I reckon onennote just isn't up to the job. Maybe
for some things, but not for this.