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OneNote's SP1: Worth the Download!
If you use OneNote, likely you have found that there are
things in the first release that weren't quite up to what we all wanted. In
fact, there were plenty of things in the first release that weren't quite what
anyone wanted. To help with the problems, the OneNote team at Microsoft got
special permission to do something practically unheard of in today's computing
world: Add functionality to an existing program via a Service Pack.
The Service Pack is now available from Microsoft via Check for Updates. You can get the update by going to Help, then Check for Updates. You can also get there directly from almost any Office Online product page.
Why I Recomend Getting It
There are so many improvements that have been made with the new version, that I can't cover them all in one article. Instead, I am going to tell you about the five changes I find most useful and a sixth change that will revolutionize notes creation. I will tell you about the others later.
Top 5 changes
- Date/time stamp: a simple change, a great improvement. If you need to date stamp a note, click anywhere in or near the note and press Alt-Shift-F. A textual date and time stamp will appear where your cursor is.
- Background graphics: Graphics on a note page can be sent to the background layer of your note page. Once on the background, they cannot be moved unless promoted from the background to regular content. This means that not only can you add graphics to your notes and have them stay
where you place them, you can also create stationery sets whose graphical elements stay where you placed them.
- Share pages: You can now share pages with other users without having to use SharePoint. Use File--> Share with others and you can invite people to join your notes session. You can share single pages or multiple pages. Each person can make changes on the notes pages they have access to, and everyone in the sharing session will see the changes on their local machine. Sharing is done using DisplayPlay
technology. Sharing can be done with local machines as well as over the internet via your choice of ports.
- Office integration: There have been so many integration upgrades that it may be hard to list them all. If you have Outlook 2003 on your computer, you can send notes as emails, as calendar items or as tasks. In each case, the integration is smooth and even. Notes can be published, saved as, or sent to Word. Documents from Word, Excel and PowerPoint can be added to notes pages as black and white pictures
using the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer (MODI). Once these documents have been placed on a notes page, you can mark them up and draw on them as you would any other note.
- Video notes: - Yes - you read that right - video! Just as you have been able to record audio notes and have OneNote keep track of where in the audio file you took your notes, now you can do the same thing with video recordings. Pop a video input device onto your computer, start recording the video and the audio and - voila - full
up records of meetings and more with the notes to go with them. There are so many possibilities to the video recording that it will take me a while to get through them. As I do, I promise to share!
Finally - OneNote Revolutionized
The other major change is an API for adding notes to OneNote pages and sections from outside the program. The API is still fairly rough and it only works to send stuff to OneNote, but there are already tools out there taking advantage of it.
The first one I came in contact with is a great tool from Jeff Borlik to send PowerPoint presentations to OneNote a file at a time, with the resulting graphics in color. Jeff has links to the exe on his blog. Check it out if you use OneNote and PowerPoint together.
As I learn of more tools using the API, I will share them both in articles and on the links page. Check back regularly for more information.
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