This is where Side Note comes in. What is Side Note you ask? It’s a smaller, compact version of the same OneNote you’ve grown to love over the years. Think of it as a sticky note. It’s there when you need to take a quick note. Just press the <Windows + N> keys on your keyboard and you’ll see a new clean surface appear where you can jot down that quick little note and not have to worry about where to file it. Then close the application and continue about your business. Each time you press <Windows + N> you get the same experience, a compact, clean surface for which to take your notes.

When you finally get that extra minute and you’re ready to organize your notes, just go to your Unfiled Notes section and you’ll see your notes there. You can then organize them by moving them to the section/notebook of your choice.

With SkyDrive and many other means of storage available, you can access your notes in the cloud and get to them from anywhere.  Your PC at home or at work, your Windows Phone, or at the kiosk on your college campus.  This makes it even easier to get notes into OneNote from anywhere.  But there’s a catch!  Unfiled Notes in OneNote 2010 does not come preconfigured for the cloud, so there’s a little bit of work you’ll have to do if you want your Unfiled Notes to be accessible from anywhere.

1. Make sure your Unfiled Notes section lives inside a web notebook (by default, the Unfiled Notes section generally lives at the root of all your OneNote notebooks, not inside of an existing notebook).  This can be any web notebook you choose, but for simplicity sake, you may want to create a new “Miscellaneous” notebook on SkyDrive.
   • Click File –> New, select Web and sign into SkyDrive, (you may have to create a new Hotmail or Live account first).
   • Then type “Miscellaneous” into the name field and click Create Notebook.
2. Move the Unfiled Notes into the Miscellaneous notebook.
   • Right-click on the Unfiled Notes section –> click on Move or Copy –> select the Miscellaneous notebook –> click Move.
3. Point OneNote to the Unfiled Notes section in your web notebook.
   • Click File –> Options –> Save & Backup –> select Unfiled Notes Section –> click Modify –> select Unfiled Notes in the Miscellaneous notebook.

You can also set your Windows Phone to point quick notes to the Unfiled Notes on your web notebook by following these steps:

1. Go to the Notes area of the Office hub.
2. Tap the Notebooks button.
3. Go into the Miscellaneous notebook.
4. Tap and Hold the Unfiled Notes section.
5. Select Set as Default.

Now that you’ve completed these steps, anytime you press <Windows + N> or tap the New button in the Notes area of the Office hub to create a new note, it will automatically be synced to SkyDrive and accessible from anywhere.

Setup.zip

Happy Holidays!

-Jeff

TemplateManager.zip

OneNote 2010 has an intuitive and powerful instant searching capability.  I’ve found myself, on more than one occasion, thankful for the advantage of instant search in OneNote.  It has saved me on numerous occasions.  You just type a search string into the Search box and you get back a wealth of information, all in a neatly packaged little display.  You can narrow the scope of your search to a notebook, section and now in OneNote 2010, the current page.  OneNote will even find occurrences of the search string in pictures and audio you have in your notebook too.

By default, the search scope is set to All notebooks, which means that when you type in your search string, OneNote will search across all notebooks you currently have open.  If you want to change the scope, click the Search Scope arrow next to the Search box.  You can then set the limitation of your search to the current page, section, section group current notebook or all notebooks.  Then enter your search term.  OneNote will immediately begin displaying a list of the results of your search and navigate to the first hit.  You can click on any of the results to have OneNote instantly take you to the page where it’s found.  Each search result is highlighted in Yellow for easy recognition.  OneNote even keeps a list of your most recent searches handy so you don’t always have to type it in. 

If you prefer, you can open the Search Results pane by clicking on the Open Search Results Pane link found at the bottom of the list of results.  It will open the pane with all the results listed inside for easy navigation.  Simply click on a result to have OneNote navigate you to the hit.  In the Search Results pane, you can easily change the search scope by clicking the Search dropdown at the top of the pane.  You can also change the sort order by section, title or date.  In addition, you can sort by ascending or descending order.

Tips:

• To begin a search by using the keyboard, simply press <Ctrl + E> and begin typing your search string.
• You can also press <Ctrl + F> to narrow your search scope to the page you’re currently viewing.
• If you’re using an older operating system that does not currently support Windows Desktop Search, your searches might be slow.  To speed up searches you can install WDS.  To install or verify whether WDS is installed, click File –> Options –> Advanced.  Look at the Install Instant Search button beneath the Search category.  If it’s enabled, you don’t currently have WDS installed.  Click the button to install it.  If it’s disabled, it means it’s already installed and functioning.
• When searching for a word, OneNote will search for all forms of the word.  For example, if you are searching for the word jump, OneNote will find jump, jumps, jumped, jumping, etc.  If you encapsulate the word in quotes, it will only find the exact match of the word.
• To step through the hits while the results are visible, press <Ctrl + F>.  The following search control will appear at the top-right of the window, just above the page tabs.    Click the forward/back buttons to navigate through each occurrence of the search string on the page.  To get back to the original search results, press <Ctrl + E>.
• You can use the following operators to filter your search results: OR, AND.  They must be entered in ALL CAPS.
• Due to a limitation of Windows Desktop Search, OneNote cannot support substring searches or wildcard searches.
• Due to slow performance reasons, the searching capability in audio and video is disabled.  If you would like to enable it, be aware that it may slow the results.  Click File –> Options –> Audio and Video –> click the Enable searching audio and video for words checkbox.  If you’ve previously recorded audio or video before, you may have already seen a prompt asking you if you want to enable this functionality.

Tips:

• A style is applied to the entire paragraph.
• You can select multiple paragraphs and apply the style to each of the selected paragraphs.
• You can apply the style by clicking on the desired style in the Home tab.
• Any of the following styles can be applied by pressing the appropriate keystroke:
  • Heading 1 <Ctrl + Alt + 1>
  • Heading 2 <Ctrl + Alt + 2>
  • Heading 3 <Ctrl + Alt + 3>
  • Heading 4 <Ctrl + Alt + 4>
  • Heading 5 <Ctrl + Alt + 5>
  • Heading 6 <Ctrl + Alt + 6>
  • Normal <Ctrl + Shift + N>

• With the exception of the Normal style, none of the styles are customizable.
• To customize the Normal style, click File -> Options -> select the desired font, size and color.

OneNote is often used as the birthplace of a document’s origin, which will eventually become a published work of some kind.  No matter how free-flowing your thoughts are, OneNote has a way of adapting to your own personal style.

However, one feature that OneNote lacks inherently is a word counter.  If you ever find yourself wishing you knew how many words or characters you’ve created before you’re ready to move your notes to that next level, you have to count them yourself, or take the content into another program such as Microsoft Word and run it’s word counter.

Well, no more…because I’ve written a OneNote add-in that does just that.  It counts the number of words, characters (with and without spaces), outlines, paragraphs and ink words on a page.  If you find yourself wishing you had this feature in OneNote, try installing this add-in.  Once it’s installed, click on the Review tab where you’ll find the Word Count button.

Enjoy.

OneNote Wordcount.zip

You can also achieve the same behavior by pressing <Ctrl + N>.  There are several ways to increase/decrease the page level after you’ve inserted it too.  To increase the page level, press <Ctrl + Alt + ]>.  Similarly, to decrease the page level, you can press <Ctrl + Alt + [>.  Or, by clicking the arrow next to the New Page button, you can add a new subpage to the end of the section.

In OneNote 2010, we’ve added a new 3rd page level.  When you add a new page using the button described above, it always gets inserted at the end of the section, and it gets inserted as a 1st level page. 

So, what if you want to add a new 2nd or 3rd level page?  And what if you don’t actually want the page to be added to the end of the section, but instead you want it inserted somewhere in the middle of your list of pages?

Welcome to OneNote’s newest UI element, affectionately known as the Page Tab Floatie.   This little gem appears whenever you hover your mouse pointer over your list of pages.  It remains visible and follows your mouse movement as long as your mouse pointer remains on the page tabs.  Then,

once you move your mouse pointer over it, it displays a bar in your list of page tabs indicating where a new page will be inserted when you click on it.  We tried to make it smart enough to know whether to add a 1st, 2nd or 3rd level page, based upon what page level appears above/below the new page location.  For example, in the picture to the left, the bar appears between a 3rd level and 2nd level page.  Clicking on the Page Tab floatie, will insert a new 3rd level page in the location indicated by the bar.

I think the designed logic is pretty good at getting it right most of the time, but it’s not fool-proof.  Occasionally, it’s just going to get it wrong.  So, we’ve added the ability to recover by dragging the page horizontally, left/right, to adjust page levels.  You can also drag the page vertically, up/down, to move the page to a different location.  Once you drop the page, the designed logic kicks in to determine what level to drop the page at.

Tips:

• You can use the keyboard to mimic the same behavior by pressing <Ctrl + Alt + N>.  A new page gets inserted immediately following the current page.
• If you want to insert a new subpage beneath the current page, just press <Ctrl + Shift + Alt + N>
• To disable the Page Tab Floatie click File –> Options –> Display –> uncheck the box ‘Show the floating New Page button near page tabs’

To use it, just click the Toggle All Groups button to collapse/expand all the page groups in the current section.  There is a bit of logic to determine whether it should expand or collapse the page groups.  For example, say you have a section where some of the page groups are already collapsed while others are expanded.  How should the tool determine what the proper behavior is?  Should it just reverse the current state of all page groups?  That sort of defeats the purpose, since the design of the tool is to display all or hide all of the subpages.  So the logic is to take the state of the first page group in the section, reverse it, then match all remaining page groups to it.

As a bonus, I added 3 additional buttons to do some simple tasks that are probably just as easy to do without this tool.  But I found myself on occasion wanting to do this without following the normal way of doing things in OneNote.

There’s a button to collapse only the current page group, rather than all page groups.  In addition, there are buttons to increase or decrease the indentation of the current page tab.

The buttons are installed under the View tab and are found in the Page Tabs group:

You can download the tool below.  I hope you enjoy it.

PageTabs.zip

OneNote 2010 has the following ribbon tabs: File, Home, Insert, Share, Draw, Review and View.  Each tab contains access to easily visible features.  The Home tab, for example, contains all of the most popular and common features, such as Copy/Paste, formatting and other features that you would most-often use.

As you can see, the buttons are large and easy to see.  In addition, the controls are all grouped by common feature sets.  For example, anything to do with text, such as bold, font color or alignment is found under the Basic Text group.  There are also some dropdown menus that make it easy to select a feature.  The ribbon tabs contain groups that that make sense.  For example, under the Insert tab, you’ll find any feature that has to do with inserting items into OneNote.

The Office Ribbon can be displayed in an expanded or collapsed state.  The view above shows the ribbon in its expanded form.  However, in order to conserve space, we decided to ship OneNote 2010 with the ribbon collapsed, like this:

To display a ribbon, simply click on one of the tabs to reveal all of its features.  Or if you prefer to keep the ribbon in its expanded state, simply double-click any of the tabs and the ribbon will remain open until you double-click it again.

If you’re a long-time OneNote user, you’ll no doubt find a few new features that we’ve added in this release.  I’ll be introducing some of the new features in the coming weeks.  In the meantime, here are the remaining ribbon tabs:

One of the the most noticeable changes is OneNote’s new page organization abilities.  Here’s an example of a set of pages in a OneNote 2007 section:

Notice how each page tab is either fully extended, or slightly indented along the right edge.  To learn more about pages in OneNote, click here.  The indented pages are called “subpages”, and really only differ in appearance, (slight indentation along the outside edge).

In OneNote 2010, we’ve changed the appearance of the subpages to be indented on the inside of the page tab rather than on the outside.  We’ve also modified the color gradient of the subpages to be slightly less than their parent pages.  Here’s a look at the same section as portrayed above, opened in OneNote 2010.

In addition, we’ve added a new 3rd level subpage and changed its indentation to be greater than it’s parent subpage, as well as a lighter color gradient than their parent pages.  Here’s a sample of what a section with 3rd level subpages might look like in OneNote 2010:

Notice the indentation of the level 2 pages (Transportation, Lodging and Sightseeing) and the indentation of the level 3 pages (Hotel A and Hotel B).  Also, notice how the level 3 pages have a different color gradient than the level 2 pages.

One final note, we’ve added the ability to collapse a page group in order to reduce the amount of clutter.  Here’s a look at the same section with the Destination A page group collapsed.