Review what's been changed on a page or make a page read-only

[gp.kiwi]

If your notebook is shared with others, or even if it's not, is there
any way to make a note or a page read-only or to revert to or review a
previous revision of the page. Is there any way to tell if
something's been changed on a page and who changed it? e.g. in MS
WORD, if you have track changes on, you can see if something was
changed and with a collaborative tool like twiki you can revert to
previous revisions.

If your notebook has valuable information in it, it is desirable to
know when something's been changed and also to get back to previous
revisions of a page. Does onenote provide anything for this at all?

Thanks

 

[Rainald Taesler]

If your notebook is shared with others, or even if it's not, is
there any way to make a note or a page read-only or to revert to or
review a previous revision of the page. Is there any way to tell if
something's been changed on a page and who changed it?

Right-clicking on an object in ON shows who last changed it and when.
Check it out.

Rainald

 

[gp.kiwi]

Right-clicking on an object in ON shows who last changed it and when.
Check it out.

Rainald

Ok, thanks, but that's no help with finding changes because you have
to right click on every individual sentence to see when/ who/ if/ it
was changed. Since OneNote obviously stores the information
internally (date/ time and who), it ought to have an option to
highlight or search for text/ sentences that were changed since a
particular time date, and it should also have an option to open up the
corresponding page from a backup in a side by side window - I know
you can do this manually, but it's slow.

I've also discovered that you can save a page as a WORD doc so you can
actually see what was changed by opening a backup file and saveing the
same page from the backup, then use MS WORD compare/merge function to
see the differences.

 

[Rainald Taesler]

Ok, thanks, but that's no help with finding changes because you have
to right click on every individual sentence to see when/ who/ if/ it
was changed.

Yes it's anything but comfortable.

Since OneNote obviously stores the information
internally (date/ time and who), it ought to have an option to
highlight or search for text/ sentences that were changed since a
particular time date,

IMO it might be asking too much when you say "ought to have".
Which software - other than Word - do you know providing this feature?
Version control is an important thing but anything but easy to
implement. Therefore it's simply missing in most applications.
Nice to have for sure. And important in many situations.
But we must always remember what ON is and what not.

and it should also have an option to open up
the corresponding page from a backup in a side by side window - I
know you can do this manually, but it's slow.

Slow?
Not really, IMHO. Clicking in the Explorer, then the second window is
just one keystroke away. Not too comfortable, for sure! And not really
safe (depending on how recent the backups are).

I've also discovered that you can save a page as a WORD doc so you
can actually see what was changed by opening a backup file and
saveing the same page from the backup, then use MS WORD
compare/merge function to see the differences.

Yes, this comes handy. Even far more important is the *internal*
version-control in Word. There's no need to compare with backups if this
feature is enabled.
But as said: Remember what ON is and what not. We can not expect to get
the most sophisticated features of a fully fledged word-processor in a
small all-purpose application.

If version control for documents is a really important thing for you, I
would suggest not to go the way to copy things from ON to Word and
compare with backups there.
It would be far better, IMHO, to just leave the editing of documents
where version control is needed to Word natively and just link the
documents in ON.

Sorry for not being able to help you

Rainald
P.S. If you want to make your ideas known to the developers, you may
post this as a suggestion for the next version in "Connect", the place
for submitting suggestions and bug reports to the developers team:
http://connect.microsoft.com/onenote/
When done, pls drop a note with the URL in here so that we can jump in
and vote for your suggestion

 

[John Guin [msft]]

One power toy to try is the Table Of Contents addin at
http://blogs.msdn.com/johnguin/archive/2007/07/19/favorites-for-onenote.aspx

It creates a table on a new page with the top most entries sorted by which
pages were added or modified most recently. It might help (but will still
come up short of what you are asking).

 

[Rainald Taesler]

One power toy to try is the Table Of Contents addin at
http://blogs.msdn.com/johnguin/archive/2007/07/19/favorites-for-onenote.aspx

It creates a table on a new page with the top most entries sorted
by which pages were added or modified most recently. It might help
(but will still come up short of what you are asking).

Oh, sorry, I forgot this in the list of my recommendation. The tool is
really most useful.

As I my have your ear (as you replied to *me* instead of the OP <g>):

A long while I ago when I had just installed TOC for the first time, we
had a discussion on how to get an *icon* into the IconBar instead of the
big Text used.
You were most helpful to me and showed me a way how to do that with a
registry hack.
Meanwhile I have changed systems and OS and so I lost my custom icon
:-( :-(

And - bad enough - I can not find the recipe you kindly mad up for me
nowhere {siiigh}.
It should have found it's place in my ON but it's not there and the
postings have long been scrolled from the board :-(

May I kindly ask you to help me again?

TIA
Rainald

 

[John Guin [msft]]

Here's how to manually change the icons or text captions for addin buttons:

http://blogs.msdn.com/johnguin/arch...ote-toolbar-buttons-for-installed-addins.aspx

 

[Rainald Taesler]

Here's how to manually change the icons or text captions for addin
buttons:

http://blogs.msdn.com/johnguin/arch...ote-toolbar-buttons-for-installed-addins.aspx

Thanks a lot, John!
I'll check it tomorrow.

BTW: You seem to have changed the website.
Really nice new look.
Congratulations!!

Some parts might need a bit of re-doing (many things just too *big*),
but I'm sure get this fixed rather soon.

As said: Congratulations!

Rainald

 

[Andy Tynan]

Is there a way to make a page read only?
I don't think that was answered in the thread.
I could do with this as I copied a page earlier and then managed to edit
*both* of them half-and-half. :-S

BTW: As this is my first post, I must take the oppurtunity to say that
OneNote is the first genuinely exciting, paradigm-shifting,
productivity-enhancing concept i have seen in my career since I installed
Visio in 1994. That's fourteen years...

Andy Tynan

 

[Rainald Taesler]

Is there a way to make a page read only?
I don't think that was answered in the thread.

No. *Pages cannot be made read-only.
One can secure *SECTIONS* with a password, but not pages.

I could do with this as I copied a page earlier and then managed to
edit *both* of them half-and-half. :-S

Sorry, I do not understand this :-(

BTW: As this is my first post, I must take the oppurtunity to say
that OneNote is the first genuinely exciting, paradigm-shifting,
productivity-enhancing concept i have seen in my career since I
installed Visio in 1994. That's fourteen years...

I share your praises.
For me ON is a fantastic piece of software. And the synching feature is
unique.

Rainald