Microsoft sharpens note-taking tool

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import/export capabilities: Import ---
* Copy/Paste does a good job with text, pictures, audio, video, ink and HTML. With HTML there's a caveat - since OneNote doesn't yet support compliated tables it works great if the HTML is "document-ish" (like the HTML that other Office apps put on the clipboard) but can lead to surprising results if you try it with complicated (say, tables full of sliced images) web pages.
* There's a new feature in SP1 to allow you to import other Office documents (Word and PowerPoint are the primary scenarios for this) as a picture. Or as a series of pictures, one per page. This is to support, for example, the case where you go to a meeting and someone passes out PowerPoint slides which you'd like to use as your note-taking surface.
* There's now an API to allow third-party apps to push chunks of data into your notebook. It's very simple (it basically automates the act of turning to a fresh page and pasting some text, ink, or HTML) but I've already seen some surprisingly useful tools enabled by it.

Export ---
* You can publish notes to HTML.
* You can email notes via Outlook (both as "HTML-mail" and as a OneNote attachment in case the recipient has OneNote as well and wants the original data).
* You can create Outlook appointments, contacts, and tasks from your notes
* You can send notes to Word (presumably as a step on the way to cleaning them up into a full-fledged document).
* Rather than create yet another opaque "container", OneNote uses the file system to store the heiarchy of your notebook. This means that whenever you record a meeting (audio or video) or drag a Word document onto a page or import a document "as a picture" we just put the actual file (*.wma, *.doc, whatever) in the folder that contains that part of your notebook. This means you can access such data without having to run OneNote at all.

Peter Engrav
OneNote Dev Manager
peteren@microsoft.com; Posted by: PeterEn Posted on: 04/21/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use