Task Requests from OneNote Meeting Notes powertoy

The “Week of OneNote 2007 Powertoys” continues…

One of the most frequent requests we hear for new OneNote functionality is “more integration with Outlook Tasks.”  Frustratingly, it always seems like no two people agree on what this means.  A few users have wanted a method to assign tasks to others during meetings.  The scenario is something like Alice and Bob meet, Alice takes notes on the meeting and wants to assign some of the action items to Bob.  Today I present an addin to integrate this functionality into OneNote.

This will add a task request button to the Outlook Tasks toolbar in OneNote.  You can enable that toolbar via the View | Toolbars | Outlook Tasks menu command.  If you are in a meeting notes page, you can click that icon to create a task request with this functionality:

1. It will have the TO: line populated with the attendees of the meeting
2. The original body of the message will be added to the body of the task request
3. Any tagged text will be added to the body of the task request.

Since the task request will be sent, there is nothing to link it back to in Outlook.  I’ve seen a few variations of this which use the name of the recipient as the To: field, but this approach doesn’t depend on that rigid of a notebook naming scheme.  And since items 1 and 2 above come from the meeting notes table, you will get odd behavior if you use this on a non-meeting notes page.

Example:  here is a weekly meeting I have with Mike Tholfsen:

And here is the resulting task request:

Here is where to install it:

http://johnguin.members.winisp.net/Shared%20Documents/TaskRequestFromMeetingNotes.zip

Or

http://elhombre.members.winisp.net/api/TaskRequestFromMeetingNotes.zip

And the source files:

http://johnguin.members.winisp.net/Shared%20Documents/TaskRequestFromMeetingNotes_source.zip

Or

http://elhombre.members.winisp.net/api/TaskRequestFromMeetingNotes_source.zip

Let me know what you think!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticism always welcome,

John Guin

1. A template manager.  Yes!  Finally!  And it’s being developed by Jeff Cardon, so you know it is high quality.  Apply templates to currently existing notebooks.
2. Table summation (me).  Add columns of numbers in tables!  Earth shaking!
3. A privatizer (removes names from notebooks) and cleaner addin.  Helps fix random focus behavior in just published notebooks.  (Gary Nietzke).  Yes to privacy!
4. A Journal to OneNote Exporter (or importer, depending on your point of view) (Lin Wang).  Don’t stay with the Windows journaling tool!
5. Create Task Requests from Meeting notes (me) – More task integration with Outlook!
6. An audio fine tuner (Jeff) – make OneNote into a Karaoke machine!
7. An image rotator (Gary) – I’m turning backflips for this one!

OneNote Printout Manager

Yet another powertoy written by Jeff Cardon (*applause*) that will help you when you are printing a lot of documents to OneNote. I will just let his user guide speak for itself:

Installation:

• Download from here: ONPrintManager.zip
• Run Setup.exe and follow the prompts.
• Run OneNote and click on the following button:

UI and options:

Preview:

Changes made to any of the settings in the dialog are displayed in the preview pane. The preview pane will display up to 3 images per column. An elipses (…) is used to indicate that additional images may appear beneath the current set of images.

Printout size:

The Printout size slider control can be used to adjust the size of the printouts. The size range can be between 1% and 200%. 100% is the default size.

Printouts per page:

Use the Printouts per page option to specify that you want OneNote Printout Manager to separate a given number of printouts onto separate pages. The printouts per page can range from 1 to 99. When this control is checked, OneNote Printout Manager will create a new subpage after it reaches the image representing the value specified and continue execution. Each subpage will have the title of the original page with a sequential number appended to it. If the original page is untitled, OneNote Printout Manager will attempt to obtain the text inside the first printout on the page and use for the title. See Additional information below.

Set printouts as background:

Use the Set printouts to background option to set the printouts to be background images instead of floating images. When a printout is set to be a background image the printout is anchored to the page and notes can be added on top of the image without it moving or becoming selected.

Columns per page:

Use the Columns per page setting to determine the number of columns per page to organize your printouts in. The printouts are laid out in order from left to right. e.g. printout image #1 will appear in column 1, printout image #2 will appear in column 2, etc. Once the number of columns is reached, OneNote Printout Manager will repeat the process in the next row. e.g. printout image #3 will appear in column 1, printout image #4 will appear in column 2, etc.

Spacing between printouts:

Use the Spacing between printouts setting to specify the amount of space you want OneNote Printout Manager to put between each printout. The amount of space indicated will be used for both horizontal and vertical spacing. The value is expressed in points, where there are 72 points per inch.

Margins:

Use the Margins settings to specify the top and left margins. These values are expressed in points, where there are 72 points per inch.

Save current settings as default:

Use Save current settings as default to remember any changes you make for the next time you run OneNote Printout manager

Additional information.

Undo is not fully supported with this utility. You’ll find that making simple sizing, margin, spacing, columns or background changes to the printouts on a single page can be undone. However, organizing printouts onto separate pages cannot be fully undone. Therefore, a mechanism to restore your page to the last state before running the utility is provided using the Restore utility. This utility (restore.exe) is located in the install folder where you initially installed OneNote Printout Manager. You can simply run Restore.exe to restore the original page back to the section you are currently viewing.

This is great for those people who have been asking for this on the newsgroups as well as the many students who use OneNote. Hope you enjoy and once again thank you to Jeff Cardon who developed & tested this, nice work Jeff!

Make Subpage icon…

• 
• Works for multiple pages as well

http://johnguin.members.winisp.net/Shared%20Documents/makesubpage_setup.zip

.

via John and Dan

Takes selected pages in OneNote and at the click of a button it will merge all of the pages together into one page.

A screenshot of what it looks like in the toolbar:

Direct download link mergepages_setup.zip

Some notes: there is a popup dialog which explains Undo is not supported.  You can disable this dialog if you want, and I recommend disabling it as soon as you get comfortable with the implications that Undo is not supported.  There is another warning if you merge more than 10 pages at a time.  Again, you can disable this warning.

 

The reason I suggest disabling those warning are this is another managed code addin, so we cannot control focus of the confirmation dialogs.  If you click the button and it looks like nothing happened, look “behind” OneNote to see the dialog.  It’s easier just to live without the dialogs when you merge pages.

 

When installing, as usual, exit OneNote, run setup.exe and choose to install for all users.

It creates a new Table Of Contents page for the section with hyperlinks to all the pages. It also shows the creation date, last modified date, and sorts them by last modified at the top.

Click here for a larger screenshot. (Demo section/pages based on krypticide’s X61 Review posted using the Web Export powertoy.)

Downloads

• Setup Files
• Source Code

What is this for?
The OneNote Web Exporter allows you to export a OneNote notebook as html files that anybody can view through a web browser.

How does it work?
You give it a OneNote 2007 Notebook and it will generate an html page and a folder containing all of the notebook data.

What can I do with it?

• Export a notebook when you need to send it to somebody who doesn’t have OneNote 2007
• Maintain a browser accessible version of your notebook by scheduling a daily export to a SharePoint server

How it works

1. Download the application from here: OneNoteSearchReplace.zip
2. Extract the application and run the setup.exe
3. You will now have a new toolbar button in OneNote which looks like this:
   
4. Click the button and you will see a window like this:
   
5. Now you can choose your search terms and what scope.
6. Click Preview and Replace to try it out!

Additional Note: Dan also included a disclaimer that PowerToys posted on his blog [and all other blogs too] are not supported by Microsoft and are use at your own risk.

Features…

•  Choose a Notebook (w/ tree navigation)
  • Includes some basic fuzzy-logic to guess one or it will default to Unfiled Notes.
• Status Bar and completion notification.

Limitations…

• Not all texts have the same delimiters and may end up garbled.
• John has tried to account for this and also left it extensible…
  • “I left this slightly extensible for users without Visual Studio who do not want to re-write or add to the code to get around the limitation of using the word “Chapter” to break out individual chapters. You can add new words to use as separators to the string registry key at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Guinsoft\GutenWin named “delim”. Just add your new keywords you want to use as separators to the end of the list, and use a comma as a separator.”

More Info on John’s Blog

Downloads:

• Setup Package
• Source Code

It will allow you to navigate to a folder on the hard drive and import all the TXT files in it to OneNote. It will create a new section with the name of the folder on the hard drive as the section name. And here I hit a snag. I never really liked the behavior of putting all new information into Unfiled Notes by default. While it makes sense most of the time, in this case I really saw a need to control where the imported text files would go. I decided to implement a tree control to let the user choose which notebook the files would be imported. So now you can choose into which notebook you want the imported files to go.

Here are the links.

For the setup program: http://johnguin.com/Documents/OneNote_Text_Importer_Setup.zip

And the source code (C#) http://johnguin.com/Documents/OneNote_Text_Importer_Source.zip