Microsoft Office

Fellow MOONies (MicrosOft OneNote), if you have OneNote Mobile installed and are having problems, try this.

Althought OneNote Mobile hasn’t been developed for Symbian (and my Nokia 9500), alot of you may have the application on your WINMos and iPhones, like this unfortunate man. John Guin over on the OneNote team blog has this great hint:

A quick “what to do” about dropping a phone with OneNote Mobile installed

“I have a Palm Pro which was syncing beautifully with OneNote on my PC. Then tragedy, my Palm was dropped. I received a new one and Active Sync restored everything. No matter what I try however I cannot get the info in OneNote on my PC to sync to the Palm.”

My first thought was to suggest he install OneNote Mobile on the device. It turns out he already had done that, and then mentioned that the replacement device came with OneNote mobile already installed.

A quick check with the ON Mobile team came up with these three steps:

1. Uninstall the OneNote Mobile version installed from PC since he already has one on his device. He can do this by going to Programs –> Remove programs. After uninstalling, he should only have one version of OneNote Mobile on his device.

2. Delete (all) Active Sync partnerships between this device and his PC.

3. Create new partnership and try syncing again.

This makes sense. I could see scenarios in which two different installations of ON Mobile on the device could be conflicting. Plus, deleting the Active Sync partnership would likely be necessary since he is using a new device at this point.

I forwarded these steps to the fellow and he replied that deleting the partnerships and recreating them worked fine. He can sync now and is back to using OneNote.

Nothing Earth shattering here. I liked the way this person explained the problem and mentioned what he had already tried in his attempts to get sync working again. That avoided problems with suggesting steps he had already taken and saved some email time back and forth.

This was a nice little fix for restoring sync and I figured I should pass it along.

Attend a Webinar, fill out a questionnaire and get a free copy of OneNote 2007 (and become a MOONIE, that is, MicrosOft OneNote).

From Mike Tholfsen’s Blog:

Next Tuesday, (January 20th, 2009 from 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm PST) Microsoft Solution Specialist Tony Franklin will be presenting a Teacher Tech Tuesday webinar on OneNote 2007 in the classroom. I’ve had the opportunity to work with Tony a few different times, including the Philadelphia School of the Future and the Freedom Writer Teacher event. Tony works extensively with the Philadelphia School of the Future and has been a proponent of OneNote and education for many years. I highly encourage you to sign up for this free webinar and engage with Tony for his presentation.

Microsoft will also be giving a free a copy of OneNote 2007 for any teacher that views the webinar and completes the survey at the end! If you missed the last one, now’s you’re chance to get a copy of OneNote. More details on how you get your free copy are listed below.

So round up as many teachers as you can and watch this webinar on Tuesday.

Go HERE to register. Get as many of your fellow Teachers to participate! Encourage everyone to become a MOONie.

Get tips on how OneNote can help you organize class materials and class work, create collaborative work environments, and share workspaces. In this webinar we will cover:

- Getting Started with OneNote
- How to get organized with OneNote
- Organizing class materials & class work
- Creating collaborative work environments

Well, my fellow MOONies (MicrosOft OneNote), John Guin, of OneNote Testing fame, has some great posts about his OneNote configuration and powertoys, that I thought I’d bring to your attention.

He states he uses multiple laptops and desktops daily to test programs, OS’s like Vista, XP and win 7, Servers, Office and, of course, OneNote. He uses a Sharepoint server on a few.

The powertoys he lists that he’s fond of are, in no particular order:
OneNote Favorites addin, Sudoku!, Object Model, A Calendar/Planner Agenda Maker (that I blogged about recently), Embedded File Finder, Double hyperlinking powertoy, and the OneNote Karaoke Machine (raised eyebrow).

Since I’ve had an almost overwhelming amount of no comments, questions and statements, I thought I’d share what I have on my system. My main (and only) computer is a TC1100 Slate Tablet PC, with XP. The pgms I have are Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007, which has ten programs, of which I use mostly Outlook with Business Contact manager and Outlook connector and Microsoft Word 2007. Tomorrow or Saturday, I’m receiving a 1G RAM module so my poor little tablet can run the programs without crashing. The powertoys I have used are tablet calculator and tablet search tool. I’ve tried the meeting with the Virtual Earth mapping powertoy with outlook, but it’s never worked properly.

What is your favorite Microsoft program and what, if any, powertoys do you use?

MOONies (MicrosOft OneNote-ies) should love the idea of combining and sharing thier OneNote notebooks all on one Server

The Microsoft Norwegian MCS IW team has developed a way to share OneNote notebooks over a SharePoint server. This article discusses how to upload and configure OneNote notebooks across a SharePoint servier for your coworkers to view, synchronize, edit and log onto the server.

For businesses, individuals, and I imagine anyone with a pressing need to share information, projects and notes, this SharePoint idea is a great one. The configuration looks quite simple, they provide a step-by-step guide with images to help you along the way. In detail, their post will show:
This post will explain:

How to create a shared Notebook
How to access a shared Notebook in SharePoint
How is the OneNote file structure within the SharePoint document library
How to configure SharePoint to search OneNote 2007 content on SharePoint sites

The different ways to use and share OneNote is just mind-boggling. OneNote can be shared across SharePoint, Groove, Microsoft Office Online, Live Skydrive just to name a few of the many ways you can share your notebooks.

There have been articles and posts showcasing the versatility of OneNote, from recipe clubs, students, engineers, managers and writers. Many have said that OneNote is the most versatile program to come out of Microsoft in years, and I must agree, that it has been proven to be easy to use, understand and share.

Are you a MOONie? How do you use Microsoft OneNote?

Learn what Microsoft Office can do to make your everyday life easier.

Microsoft Presspass has a great interview with Michael Schultz, Microsoft Office Live Director of Marketing.

There are millions and millions of people around the world using Microsoft Office to help manage their lives. They use the Office products to help schedule carpools, grocery shopping, design party invitations, write reports, just to name a few of the many helpful ideas Microsoft Office helps.

This week, Presspass (of the Microsoft network) spoke to Michael Shultz at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Schultz talked about how using traditional desktop software in conjunction with services such as the upcoming Office Web applications (lightweight, Web-based versions of Office applications expected to be released as part of the next version of Office) could change how consumers work and play, as well as about how parents, students, and home-based businesses can use Office 2007 to make life easier.

In part, here’s what Shultz and Presspass had to say:

Office 2007 can synchronize with Office Web Online to help search for ideas, products and reports. This can help students with school products, businesses with employees online and many other applications. Office Web applications, such as one being developed for Microsoft Office OneNote (becomea MOONie–MicrosOft OneNote!).

Office 2007 can help with tracking your exercise. Says Schulz: “After each daily run, you can post your time to a personal fitness workspace in Office Live Workspace and compare it to previous times. If you share that workspace with your teammates, they’ll get an e-mail every time you update the workspace and will be able to see how you’re doing, and whether they need to step it up.”

Use one of the many online options to share your information: from Office Online, Web based applications, Groove, Infopath, Outlook, for starters. The options are limitless on how you choose to share your information.

Families, businesses, schools and friends can keep in touch instantly with all the available technology Microsoft Office has to offer.

If you use Calendar Templetes to create your own Calendars, look no further than Michael Oldenburg’s site, Nota Bene .

There looks to be quite a few available via a OneNote templete, for which Michael posts a video ‘how-to’. If you’ve created your own templetes, be sure to share and let Michael and your fellow MO-ON’s (MicrOsoft OneNoters) know.

Personally, I use my Nokia 9500’s PIM (personal information management) calendar, which is pretty basic, but suits my needs. I can sync it with my Outlook calendar, if I so choose, but I carry it with me everywhere anway.

The Calendar templetes on Michael’s site look impressive and the video shows detailed how-to’s.

On the download page, there are eight downloads available for your OneNote program. There is the January 2009, Feburary 2009, March 2009, April 2009, May 2009, June 2009, 2009 calendar with room for notes, and the 2009 monthly calendar.

There is also available daily, weekly, appointment and note calendars to download. And remember, you aren’t tied to that particular style, font, color, etc on any one calendar templete. Feel free to change any area. You can also add your own pictures, use clipart, basically any image, gif or jpg you feel is appropriate for your needs.

Making a calendar for your office? How about creating your own uplifting sayings with pictures alongside and showoff your work here. Just post a link so everyone can see and download your calendar templetes. Who knows, you may be the next that is in-demand.

John Guin has an update for OneNote:Over the in the OneNote Discussion Group, Mike made this request for a change to the Table of Contents Powertoy:

“I have downloaded and used the TOC power toy. Again a great thing!
However, is there any way to make the power toy produce a table of contents
which reflects the actual order of the pages rather than by the date last
modified?
I know I could force the power toy to do it by manually making a change to
each page (which can be deleted) in the reverse order that they appear in the
section.
It would be nice to be able to flip a switch to change the power toy’s
default behavior to this one
–Mike”

This brought up a conversation Nani (the creator of the original powertoy) and I had when she was working on the original. I also wanted a table that was unsorted since I believed that I could get more pages listed on the table than the page tabs showed at the right. She thought about it, but decided against implementing that “feature” since it would have distracted from the intent of the powertoy. The “efficiency” you gain from having more rows in the table than in the page tab view is also pretty small - I only get 5 extra rows (up from 35) for a 14% boost. And even then, I had to shrink the font to 8 point and resize some of the columns to get my table to look like this:

Still, it was nice to see someone else asking for a feature I had proposed, so I added a registry key to control whether you wanted to turn off the sorting by date and simply create a table of the pages which exist in the section. I also fixed a type in the title of the page created - it now says “Table of Contents” (plural).

The details for the registry key are in the readme.txt file included in the setup. As usual, you can download the new version by clicking the link below my signature at the end of the article, and the new source code is here.

From OneNote Blog: Every so often I’ll get a question from someone who has a need to find pages that have embedded files in them.
The reasons vary, but when you need that information, it is hard to get with OneNote 2007. The same question was facing me last week as we were testing notebooks on SharePoint, and I was thinking of creating a tool to identify those pages. I remembered someone posting the same question to the newsgroup many months ago, and figured if anyone else wanted this, I would give it away. Lo and behold, as I was in the process of adapting Nani’s Table of Contents powertoy to my needs, I got an email forwarded to me from someone who wanted the same functionality. And finally, about a year and a half ago, Kathy Jacobs, a OneNote MVP, asked if we ever used our powertoys to test with, and this is a great example of a tool we use for testing turned into a powertoy. Talk about getting a lot of bang for the buck.

Before I describe how this works, I want to point out this is an internal tool which I hope you find useful. It has a bare bones UI, and I did not try to optimize much to make it optimized for speed. It’s a tool that solves one specific problem and is aimed at people that need that particular bit of functionality.

To install it, click the download link below. Unzip the file and run setup.exe. Then when you start OneNote, you will notice a button named “FDO” in the toolbar, like this:

(You’ll notice two other addins installed here. Can you identify them?)

When you press the FDO button, the addin will look through all the pages in the current section - whatever section you are viewing - and identify the pages with embedded files or images. Since this is a test tool designed for our testing purposes, I needed to know which pages had those two specific types of information on them.

Some miscellaneous notes:

FDO stands for “File Data Object.” This probably only means anything to us, but I wanted to point it out to be complete.
If you click the FDO button and it turns gray and gets disabled, check this out to ensure you have the .NET programmability support for OneNote installed.
It’s not fast, and if you have a large-ish section (30 pages or more), it may take a minute or more to finish.

When we mention “Help” in the software publishing world, we don’t mean technical support or maintenance (that’s generally called “Support”). Instead, the collective term “Help” refers to the free published content that ships with most commercial or professional software programs. When we mention “Help” in the software publishing world, we don’t mean technical support or maintenance (that’s generally called “Support”). Instead, the collective term “Help” refers to the free published content that ships with most commercial or professional software programs.

What you may not have noticed before is that, regardless of the interface, the programs in the Office 2007 suites have two very different Help experiences. When your computer is connected to the Internet, and if you (or your system administrator) have given permission, the Help viewer will fetch and display the most up-to-date and complete content for the Office 2007 Help in each program. This experience is preferred because, in this so-called “connected state,” you’re sure to always see the latest and greatest Help content that’s available for your program(s). In this scenario, the Help viewer bypasses the Help files that were originally installed with each program because such disk-based content cannot be automatically updated and thus becomes outdated rather quickly.

If you yank the network cable from your computer or otherwise disconnect from the Internet for any reason, the Help viewer reverts to the offline Help files on your hard drive — outdated as they may be. All of the Help and How-to content that has been published since the launch of the product is then no longer fetched from the Office Online Web site. This is problematic when you need to look up procedure steps for a program task or feature and the corresponding Help topic exists only online. For example, imagine you’re traveling on business and finishing your big PowerPoint presentation on the plane. Your boss told you to insert an animation or video, but you don’t remember how to do this. If a specific article with the solution to your issue was not published as part of the original “offline Help” files on your Office CD or DVD, you’ll have to wait until you can next connect to the Web.

Tip: To make sure your Office 2007 Help viewer is configured to fetch the latest online content whenever you’re connected to the Internet, click the button in the lower right corner of the Help viewer window (in OneNote 2007 or any other Office 2007 program, press F1) and then choose Show content from Office Online from the popup menu. “Connected to Office Online” means that your Office program will automatically include the latest online content in the Help Table of Contents and in the Search results.

From Office Hours blog: As part of my work on Office Online content, I recently had the pleasure of meeting Jeff Raikes, the president of the Microsoft Business Division. When you work in the trenches like we writers and editors do, you don’t often get a first-hand glimpse of the work habits of senior executives. I was surprised to discover to what extent, as Jeff himself put it, he’s an information worker just like the rest of us.

The plan for our meeting was that Jeff would demonstrate how he uses OneNote 2007 together with other Microsoft Office programs. I already knew that Jeff was a OneNote enthusiast (”It has probably become my most-used application,” he told attendees at a recent executive briefing session), but actually seeing how he uses OneNote to personally manage a daily barrage of important, time-sensitive, and confidential information dispelled any assumptions that I might have had when I entered the room.

On his desk, Jeff had three large, widescreen LCD monitors, side by side, all rotated in portrait mode. Since he spends a great deal of his time looking at information in various page-like formats, this setup makes the most sense for him. In front of him was his Tablet PC — a laptop computer with handwriting capabilities. Jeff is a big fan of tablet computing, which is catching on in schools and universities across the country. Although OneNote does include several cool tablet-specific features, you don’t need a Tablet PC to use and enjoy OneNote. It works equally great on desktop PCs and laptop computers.

After noting his office and computer set-up, we talked about how OneNote helps Jeff accomplish three of his main business priorities:

Managing a personal information repository
Taking his whole office on the road
Using information seamlessly across multiple Office applications