Daniel Escapa lists a handy tip for OneNote 2007 users who also use Office Communicator 2007.

OneNote joins the party: Communicator and your phone have never been closer; in fact, for some, they are one and the same. Since no phone is ever far from a notepad, we integrated Communicator with Microsoft Office OneNote. If you have OneNote installed on your computer, you can launch it from any conversation; the conversation context will be automatically stamped into the note page, and the notes you take will be linked to the conversation. If you later restart this conversation, click the OneNote button to find your notes, which you can review or update. Similarly, if you open a previous conversation from the Conversation History folder in Outlook, click the OneNote button in the toolbar to open the notes for this conversation. 

Sounds like a handy productivity tip.

Any aspiring writers out there in GottaBeMobile land? DailyWritingTips, a blog I thoroughly enjoy, has some really good tips for keeping a writers notebook, which is an essential tool for collecting thoughts on that budding article, story, or novel. Of course, we highly recommend using Tablet PC tools like InkSeine, OneNote, Evernote, and others for keeping the notebook. Any way you choose to do it, though, is up to you. The important thing is that you write - frequently. Personally speaking, I always try to carry a small Moleskine with me for those times when an idea suddenly comes to mind and I don't have my Tablet PC handy or fumbling around with stand-by and starting the app would be too slow.

Writing every day

One of the best uses for your notebook is to get into the habit of writing every single day. There are lots of different ways to approach this; some which have worked for me (not all at once) are:

• Write first thing in the morning
• Spend five minutes writing at some point in the morning, and five minutes in the afternoon
• Write just before going to bed
• Jot down some notes before starting on your “proper” writing session of the day

Of course there’ll be days when you feel uninspired, when you have nothing you want to write about, or when you’re hectically busy. But if you’re going to stick with writing fiction long-term, it needs to become part of your daily life.

A short while ago word came down that there would not be a fix for those running Vista X64 machines for the missing Send to OneNote functionality until the next release of OneNote. Daniel Escapa of the OneNote team has posted a workaround that he uses that sort of kinda offers some help in the matter.

Essentially you install a converter program to output image files when you choose to “Print” and use this method to print a TIFF file into OneNote. The downside? The TIFF file isn’t OCR’d so if there is text invovled it won’t be searchable.

I’ll have to give this a try on the HP tx2051.

More details on Dan’s OneNote Blog

Already added to my RSS reader is the new OneNote Tips and Tricks Blog.  Starting off with an introduction and a tip, the blog was created by Jeff Cardon from the Microsoft OneNote Team.

OneNote's user base has been steadily increasing over the years. So I thought this would be a good forum to share some of the useful tips and tricks in this fantastic software application that have made people's lives more productive.

Head over and check out the first post and the first Tip about screen clippings.

In addition to the work I do at GottaBeMobile.com, I also have a side project I've headed up from the early days of Tablet PCs  - TabletBible.com, which brings inkable Bible texts, and other popular texts, to the Tablet PC for free.

In partnership with Nelson Bibles, I'm pleased to announce the availability of the New King James Version for OneNote 2007. It is now available for download at TabletBible.com for free.

Each book in the Bible is a separate OneNote section, with each chapter in the book belonging to a page within that section. Using the built-in functionality of OneNote 2007, you can insert your own ink notes, view the Bible text and notes in full screen mode, search your ink and text notes, sync your Bible notes between multiple computers, record the audio of sermons and play it back in time with your notes (with permission of course !), and insert additional pages and sections. The text has been specially formatted to allow plenty of space for marking up and taking ink notes: wide margins, double spacing, and more.

In addition to the NKJV, the English Standard Version for OneNote 2007 is also available.

If you would like to contribute financially to this effort, click here. All donations help offset licensing fees, hosting costs, and the time it takes to produce these texts and keep them up to date with current software versions. I'm currently working on bringing all GoBinder formatted texts current with OneNote 2007.

There have been a couple of posts recently about lack of support for certain functionality in 64-bit Windows environments. 

James Kendrick pointed out that the Send to OneNote feature is missing in the 64-bit version of the OS.

GBM provided the bad news that there is not going to be a fix for the current version of Office.

David Rasmussen provided some valuable context around why the Send to OneNote feature is not there on the 64-bit OS and why it is not going to be fixed in this version.

Drivers must be fully ported from 32 bit to 64 bit to work on 64 bit OSes. 32 bit Application code works on 64 bit OSes on top of an emulation layer (called WOW64 or Windows on Windows 64), so getting the application code to work is not too hard. Drivers are a whole different story though because they hook into the OS at a lower level and can't run on WOW64 emulation. Also, older drivers tend to contain a lot of low level code and often assembly code that is not easy to port.
Given the size of the code, and the issues above, porting the MODI print driver for OneNote 2007 would be a LOT of work. Work that we would have to trade off directly against other improvements, and features that many users such as yourselves have been asking us for. That makes it a difficult decision. One we thought about a lot.

There have been other examples uncovered recently - I learned that the Ink Analysis API currently only supports 32-bit architectures.  This means that any application that uses this API will have to run in the WOW64 emulation.

Personally I would like to see 64-bit support throughout the OS, the APIs and the applications that Microsoft produces, but it is simply not there yet.  So the question has to be asked - if I have a machine that supports the 64-bit OS?  The answer - in fact - is no.  Here's why I say that. 

First - some background.  Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation of what 64-bit is all about.

One of the key benefits of a 64-bit Operating System is the ability to address more than 4GB of RAM.  From Wikipedia:

A 32-bit register meant that 2³² addresses, or 4 GBs of RAM, could be referenced. At the time these architectures were devised, 4 GB of memory was so far beyond the typical quantities (0.016 GB) available in installations that this was considered to be enough "headroom" for addressing.

However - for most mobile PCs today - this is quite irrelevant for two main reasons.  The first reason is that the vast majority of mobile PCs shipping today have either one or two physical slots on the motherboard.  Since, AFAIK, the largest RAM DIMM you can buy for a laptop today is 2GB most mobile PCs therefore have a maximum memory capacity less than or equal to 4GB.

The second (and much more important) reason that for the mobile PCs on the market today, even if you install 4GB of RAM you will not see it all with either a 32-bit or a 64-bit OS.  The reasons for this were described in great detail about a year ago by Hilton Locke:

Due to an architectural decision made long ago, if you have 4GB of physical RAM installed, Windows is only able to report a portion of the physical 4GB of RAM (ranges from ~2.75GB to 3.5GB depending on the devices installed, motherboard's chipset & BIOS).

This behavior is due to "memory mapped IO reservations". Those reservations overlay the physical address space and mask out those physical addresses so that they cannot be used for working memory. This is independent of the OS running on the machine.

Significant chunks of address space below 4GB (the highest address accessible via 32-bit) get reserved for use by system hardware:

• BIOS – including ACPI and legacy video support

• PCI bus including bridges etc.

• PCI Express support will reserve at least 256MB, up to 768MB depending on graphics card installed memory

What this means is a typical system may see between ~256MB and 1GB of address space below 4GB reserved for hardware use that the OS cannot access.

The other major benefit of a 64-bit OS is that the memory bus is 64-bits wide.  The performance of a computer is going to be partially influenced by both the speed of the bus and the width of the bus.  However - that benefit is only realised if the application running on the 64-bit OS is actually a 64-bit application.  If not it is going to run in the Windows on Windows emulation and is only going to put data on the bus in 32-bit chunks.  Because the majority of applications that are available today are not 64-bit applications there will be minimal performance gain by running 64-bit OS.

So the upshot is that while you can run a 64-bit OS on many of the Tablet PCs and Mobile PCs available today, there will actually be little benefit in doing so.  Lay on top of the the pain you will encounter trying to find 64-bit drivers for hardware and missing features in applications like OneNote and it is just not worth running a 64-bit OS.  By all means buy hardware that is 64-bit capable for the sake of future proofing, but if it is a mobile PC, install the 32-bit OS for now.

Last week, I posted an update on the OneNote 2007 Send-To printer not being available on 64-bit OS, and the fact that Microsoft wouldn't be releasing a 64-bit version of the printer until Office 14 releases.

I wasn't at liberty to go in to details, but David Rasmussen, the Group Program Manager for OneNote, just posted a reply about why they made the decision they did. I've pasted it below for everyone to read.

My name is David Rasmussen. I am the Group Program Manager for OneNote. Before you all decide we should be burnt at the stake, let me explain a little. We fully understand how important the print to OneNote feature is, and we apologize for this transition period.

For the print to OneNote feature in OneNote 2003 and 2007, we are dependent on a piece of technology called MODI, or Microsoft Office Document Imaging component. It's a very, very large amount of code, and quite an old piece of code that is difficult to support.

Drivers must be fully ported from 32 bit to 64 bit to work on 64 bit OSes. 32 bit Application code works on 64 bit OSes on top of an emulation layer (called WOW64 or Windows on Windows 64), so getting the application code to work is not too hard. Drivers are a whole different story though because they hook into the OS at a lower level and can't run on WOW64 emulation. Also, older drivers tend to contain a lot of low level code and often assembly code that is not easy to port.

Given the size of the code, and the issues above, porting the MODI print driver for OneNote 2007 would be a LOT of work. Work that we would have to trade off directly against other improvements, and features that many users such as yourselves have been asking us for. That makes it a difficult decision. One we thought about a lot.

The solution we have is we think a better one for OneNote users in the long run. We will be moving the print driver component to a new technology in our next release of OneNote. One that has several benefits including the quality of the users experience, the quality of the printout rendering and some others I can't detail right now. This new technology also supports 64 bit natively, so we kill two birds with one stone. We're quite confident that is the right decision, but unfortunately because of the nature of this technology, we couldn't back port it to make it work in OneNote 2007. That left us in a difficult position. We could either do lots of work to port MODI AND transition to this better, easier to maintain technology for the future, but that would have been at the cost of perhaps most of the features and improvements you've all been asking for.

Ultimately, given the current market data on take up rate of 64 bit client OSes, we concluded we were better off aiming for the best experience for the next release of OneNote when 64 bit OS penetration will start to be significant. The benefits of running 64 bit OSes at the moment are pretty slim. There are very few desktop applications yet that need or can take advantage of the address space (servers sure can though...). So you won't really notice a performance improvement with a 64 bit OS on your desktop, but that will change over time, and we want to be ready for it with the best possible solution.

Unfortunately, great software development is full of such difficult trade offs. We're not idiots (we hope). And we're not malicious (we love our product and want our users to love it too). We just have finite resources, and are trying to make the best trade off decisions to deliver the best possible product.

Thanks,

David Rasmussen

We received several inquiries from our readers to ask the Microsoft OneNote team about when 64-bit support would be coming for their Send-To printer in OneNote 2007.

64-bit support for the Send-To printer will not be coming until OneNote 14 releases to the public. There are no plans to address this with a patch or service pack. So, if you rely upon the Send-To feature in OneNote, I'd recommend sticking with or going back to 32-bit Vista.

I guess Warner will be going back to 32 bit Vista on the HP tx2133z as it came with 64-bit Vista pre-installed.

Read more here and here.

A bug irritating lots Latitude XT Tablet PC owners has been picking up quite a bit of steam in our forums (here and here). It revolves around some problems navigating OneNote notebooks, click tabs, and various windows within Outlook.

Jason and Ilya, some OneNote developers, got a hold of a Latitude XT and decided to find out what was causing this strange behavior. It turns out that it revolves around the N-Trig applet and some registry settings the application sets.

Fortunately there is a fix, which you can read about here on Daniel Escapa's blog, and follow below. Daniel tells us that Microsoft and Dell are in communication regarding this issue.

Be sure to back up your registry before making any modifications!

1. Click Start, Run, type regedit, and click ok (acknowledge the Vista UAC prompt if it comes up).
2. In the registry editor, navigate to "Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop"
3. Locate the DragHeight and DragWidth values in the right hand pane
4. Select the DragHeight value, click the Edit menu, and select Modify (you can double click as well to modify)
5. In the Value Data field, type 4 and click ok. IMPORTANT! You need to do this step even if the registry editor already shows the value as 4!
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 with the DragWidth field.
7. Logoff or reboot your computer.

Many thanks to forum member rjo for passing this along.

Dan over on the OneNote Blog put up a great tip last night that sometimes people tend to forget.  There are 2 features  up for discussion here: 1. Open note in new window 2. Show windows side by side.

I've used this in the past to try and get my chicken scratch handwriting converted over to text - or at least to try and compare what was recognized to what I really meant...  Yes, my handwriting is that bad.

This is a great tip so take a look over on his blog for a full set of instructions

Hector Gomez, a GBM reader, has come up with cool way to use Word 2008 for Mac like OneNote.

1. Open a new Word document and go to view and choose Notebook Layout and you get a notebook style on the view; you could also choose if you want the rings to show or not by clicking on appearance on the Icon above the notebook.
2. The layout gives you a view of a college-ruled page, complete with colored page tabs, that also you can rename etc... You can enter text notes, images, digital handwriting from stylus, and audio from your Mac’s microphone.
3. As you enter notes, you can also rearrange them by clicking and dragging to place at different areas of your notebook, or move them between tabbed sheets. When you reach the bottom  of a notebook page, Word instantly lengthens the page for you.
4. When you click on the Audio icon on the toolbar to record a voice note, you then simply hit record to start recording.
5. One thing though is that the audio note doesn’t show unless you move your mouse on the left side of the notebook and you’ll see a speaker icon pop out. This tells you that there is a voice note there and you choose to play the audio.
6. If you look very carefully you’ll notice that there will be a break in the line of the notebook which is where the audio note is at. You could also add a quick text label to identify your recording on the page, and you could also move it around the page. So far I don’t see a highlighter to mark notes or text but I’m looking to see if there is one.

Great work, Hector!

It's OneNote Notebook day today on GottaBeMobile.com, or at least you might think with the other post form Rob this morning. :)

Email management has been something I've been working on for a few weeks.  One item that has helped me has been this OneNote notebook I found on the MSDN blogs network.

This book outlines a suggested way to help you manage your email, tasks and priorities in Outlook 2007. It happens to be the way that I manage my Outlook Inbox and my tasks in general. The course will take about 30 minutes to complete - including setting up Outlook for the appropriate setting. Hopefully you'll find it of some use.

Give it a try and see what you think...  I have been using most of this process for a while and it's really been helping!

The Office Online training team has just published a new training course designed to educate new users about OneNote 2007. In addition to the training course, there is a short quiz to make sure you know all the basics of this popular Tablet PC application. Check it out! ( via Michael Oldenburg and OneNote Extensibility blog)

In addition, Clifford Brooks, a GBM reader, just let me know of a OneNote Notebook designed to teach you how to use the Enterprise version of Office 2007.

The OneNote Team has done it again, this time with another Powertoy.  This powertoy is a must have for any OneNote user, especially for somebody that has a bunch of different places they need to be quickly.

In this InkShow I go over all aspects of the powertoy.  Starting out with a look at the menu's and functionality.  After that, I take everyone through a live demo of this powertoy to show it in action.  Then as a surprise to me - they show up in a different place all together as well!!  But you'll have to watch the show to see that one :)

• Show Length - 9 minutes 33 meg
• Direct Download
• Johns site for the powertoy download

Click To Play

 

John is posting about another OneNote Power Toy - wonder what it could be...  what is that surprise??  Huh - it links back to our site...  I don't think I have any idea what he's talking about... :)

We are all about secrets these days aren't we...

Paper, paper, paper. There just seems to be no way to get away from stacks of pictures and resumes when it comes to auditioning actors and keeping track of which ones we're interested in. I try to do so, but there are just to many layers and things move too quickly to be efficient with the tools we now have.

In any regard, here's a GBM Shortcut on the tools I do use when I'm participating in large cattle call auditions. They don't get rid of the paper, but they do help me keep organized as the process moves along.

Here comes a crazy mobile week. The big trip this week is to head to Memphis for auditions at the UPTA conference. That’s a 5 day conference where we will audition over 600 actors and then interview about 200 or so for possible jobs in our next season which begins in June. More on that later. (Note some of the links in this post are affiliate.)

In the State Capitol

But before we head off to UPTA, I am spending a day doing some political lobbying on behalf of the Arts in our state (and my theatre in particular.) I, and other members of my team, leave this afternoon to head to Richmond. (We’re leaving early enough so we can get into our hotel and watch the Super Bowl.) Early tomorrow morning, we’re off to the state capitol and a day full of appointments. We’ll be using our mobile phones (both voice and text messaging) to keep in touch throughout the day, as appointments often change due to the legislators’ schedules. I’ve planned out the day in MindManager and will be using my Tablet PC to keep track of our progress throughout the day. It will be a fast moving day and interestingly enough most of the work will come in the follow up that we have to do the next day, so keeping accurate records of conversations is a must.

On to the Auditions

Mid-week we head off to the UPTA conference. For this conference (and another one in March) we basically carry a small office with us. The tools I’ll be using will be the Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet PC, the HTC Mogul, the Canon Pixma i90 Printer, a LogiTech webcam, and, for brief bits of relaxation, the iPod Touch. I’ll also be carrying a video camera to tape some auditions. I primarily use OneNote 2007 in keeping track of interviews and auditions. I’ve chronicled how I do that in the past, but it has been awhile, so I’ll be updating my process some this year. It has been a successful method of keeping track of actors and interviewees.

Twitter: A Different Communication Method?

Not only do we audition and interview at the conference, but I also do much of my ongoing work for the theatre there as well. In essence a big portion of our office moves to Memphis for the week. Communication is the key as we have a number of big pressing issues (we’re in the middle of renovating the theatre) and there are some issues coming up that we know in advance are going to require relatively immediate responses by me. Auditions are like attending a public event. Cell phones are turned off for courtesy (if an auditor’s cell phone goes off during the audition he/she pays the fee for that actor’s audition!) but the WiFi is plentiful. We are going to try something different this trip as far as a communication method. In the past we’ve used SMS messaging at these events when the folks back home have to reach me. But the buzz of a cell phone in stun mode can still distract. So, I’m going to be using the iPod Touch to follow direct messages from the home office on Twitter. I could just as easily use the HTC Mogul for that, but I’m experimenting, and I want to see if the Touch will do the trick here. We’ll see how that works.

It should be an interesting, but exhausting period of time. As a side note, my participation here on GBM will be light during the auditions. I’m also trying out a couple of new (to me) gadgets and accessories and if all goes well, I’ll be reporting about that either from the road, or after I return.

Checkout this list of some pretty cool and productive OneNote add-ins, all courtesy of Microsoft's John Guin and the OneNote Test Team. Wow! I've got some serious playing to do this weekend in OneNote. I had no idea they had released so many.

Migrating to OneNote:

1. Journal import
2. Text File Importer
3. Export Outlook Notes to OneNote
4. Import books from Project Gutenberg

Outlook Addins:

5. Outlook Email to OneNote
6. Task Request
7. Use OneNote instead of Outlook Notes

Working with data on page:

8. Audio Fine Tuner
9. Table sums
10. Image Rotator
11. Printout Manager
12. Word Count

Working with Pages:

13. Make a Page a Subpage
14. Merge Pages
15. Copy to Mobile Device

Notebook level addins:

16. Privatizer
17. Template Maker
18. OneNote Favorites
19. Table of Contents

Shared source addins

20. The Shared Source OM
21. CRM for OneNote here and here

Via Channel 10

Here’s my take, hunches, best guesses, and coin flips for 2008.

• Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) will dominate the conversation for the first half of the year. What happens in the 2^nd half is anybody’s guess.
• Call it Ultra-Mobile PC, call it UMPC, call it Origami. Call it what you will, but by the end of 2008 call it in its dying throes. The ultra mobile vision will remain, but in other devices. 
• Unlike Rob, I don’t see Dell re-evaluating their price point on the XT Tablet PC so soon. The high price point is consistent with the markets they have been targeting from the beginning. If the prices drop it will be a year from now at the earliest.
• Apple will not market a Tablet PC in 2008.  Instead it will be a communication device that takes advantage of the iPhone’s features as well as the Back to My Mac features for users to grab their data on the road. Because it will have a touch interface and be able to take advantage of InkWell, Tablet PC aficionados will call it a failure.
• Touch will again be a dominate feature and news story. The real question is will anyone develop an application that makes it more than a fancy way to play media, turn pages, or manipulate photos. Or is that enough?
• Multi-touch is still a ways off. Someone, somewhere, needs to develop a real use for it on the Tablet PC and mobile devices.
• With the exception of the MID and whatever Apple will do in 2008, next year’s headlines will be about technologies that change or provide new content delivery methods, similar to the Amazon Kindle.
• Microsoft’s marketing will continue to be mediocre at best and miss the mark more than it will hit.
• DRM will continue to cripple operating systems and content delivery methods. Most consumers won’t notice. Those that do will root for Amazon, Walmart, and Independent music producers to keep putting the pressure on.
• New releases of new products across the board will slow down in 2008. Some consumers will remember Apple’s iPhone price drop form 2007, companies will try to get a better handle on delivery inadequacies. Consumers are starting to notice that their voices can be heard, and companies will start to slow things down a bit, to hopefully improve on what they eventually release.
• The word “open” will get bandied around a lot. As in Google’s efforts to make mobile devices more open with its Google Android mobile OS. The word open will lose all meaning in the marketing miasma.
• OneNote 2007 will continue to remain a secret.
• The Asus Eee PC story is just getting started. It will have much more impact in 2008.
• The companies to watch in the mobile space who will have the greatest impact will be Apple, Nokia, HTC, Asus, and Google.
• HP, Toshiba, and Lenovo will continue to dominate the consumer Tablet PC space, although we probably won’t see anything really new until 2009. Fujitsu nees to make some noise here.
• Inking on Tablet PCs will continue to remain the ultimate niche in a niche product.
• There will be a major Internet outage or Bot Attack in 2008, prompting all sorts of chaos and howling. This will lead to a renewed interest in client apps vs. the cloud.

If you use OneNote a lot, then having a calendar at your fingertips can be really handy.  Now you can have that feature by downloading a 2008 Calendar Notebook from Office Online that is ready to go!  This isn't only for those using OneNote 2007 either, there are also 2008 Calendar Notebooks for OneNote 2003. 

Also, don't forget about the OneNote Calendar from Einstein Tech if you want to view your notes by when they were created.

For OneNote 2003 or later:

• 2008 monthly calendar
• 2008 monthly calendar (Mon-Sun)

For OneNote 2007:

• 2008 calendar (Basic design)
• 2008 calendar (Classic Blue design)
• 2008 calendar with room for notes (1-pg)