Mike Tholfsen, OneNote Ninja!
It's been awhile since I have posted anything here, and for that I feel shame. It's just that Dan and John and others are doing such a great job.
Another guy who's doing a great job but isn't blogging yet (he's shy) is Mike Tholfsen. Mike is the test manager of the OneNote team, and he's also a tireless (and I mean tireless) OneNote promoter inside Microsoft. You may remember Mike as the guy who wrote "My One and only OneNote".
Microsoft is getting to be a pretty big company these days, and we make so many things that it is hard for people to keep track of it all. So as odd as it may seem, teams that make products that are not already ubiquitous (like Outlook or Windows) sometimes have to remind others that they exist.
Actually OneNote is in broad usage in the company already - it has taken off virally and in any meeting or lecture I go to, if a laptop is open more often than not OneNote is there as people keep track of what is said and what they need to do next. In fact the usage data shows that for people who have it installed (more than half the company - pretty good!), they use it more than PowerPoint.
Where Mike comes in is in expanding people's perceptions of what OneNote can do. When you first use it, it seems like a way to organize your stuff, but it can be so much more. For example, my new team uses many shared OneNote notebooks to collaborate and share ideas like a really capable wiki. OneNote notebooks can also be packaged up as a single file to email or download which will "unpack' inside OneNote when you open them. This may sound like nothing special, but the effect is that you can distribute entire "courses" or books of material to a broad set of people, replete with cross links and organization, tables of contents, etc. Plus the content can be added to or annotated by the recipients (unlike a PDF). and these materials can be searched and arranged with all your other material so they become part of your stuff in a way isolated PDF or Word docs or random web pages can't. The other day I got an email inviting me to download an entire course on how to manage email and tasks effectively (something everyone in corporate settings struggles with), and it came as a OneNote notebook.
What Mike has done is make a point of meeting with all the right executives, sales people, and so on to get across to them that OneNote can be more than a note-taking tool. He's made videos internally and externally, like this one to show the power and ease of use of OneNote, in particular focusing recently on this "content distribution" aspect of OneNote to replace paper for green corporate or academic initiatives. He's helped the Office marketing folks see this potential in OneNote too.
He's worked with the people who do internal training at Microsoft to get them excited, and through them connections have been made to customers who also are interested in training. It's been amazing to watch. He even demoed to Bill Gates! He's also been active in the academic world, visiting a local school where the staff and kids were independently using OneNote, and even going to a conference in Finland on technology trends in teaching with one of the teachers. There's a neat video of what the school has done here.
So hats off to Mike. Now we just need him to spend a few cycles on his day job :-)
Comments
Anonymous
January 11, 2008
PingBack from http://geeklectures.info/2008/01/11/mike-tholfsen-onenote-ninja/Anonymous
January 14, 2008
I love your product--it's amazing how easy and useful it is. The only catch is, it's hard to evangelize OneNote to other people when there's not a good sharing path. I read this post of yours: http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/archive/2006/12/06/onenote-viewer.aspx Unfortunately, I'm not seeing an PDF export path shy of buying the full Acrobat. HTML and Word Export are one page at a time....and I'm not going to win anyone over by giving them 25 documents and telling them to re-order them all. :) Isn't there some way for your team to use/borrow the Publish engine in FrontPage? Or some Visual Studio trick? It would seem that you could create some sort of cross-linked output file set, given how well your program retains that kind of information when the user performs operations like copy/paste in OneNote. Publishing a simple HTML file/folder structure with links would make the recipient better able to see the content of a Notebook...and maybe want to have the better organized structure of the full product. fingers crossed Just thought I'd share that--keep up the good work!Anonymous
January 14, 2008
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January 15, 2008
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January 15, 2008
Leslie, Is the notebook on a file share or a sharepoint server? If file share, then sync should just be a few seconds, provided people are on the network. You should only get a conflict notice if two people edit the same paragraph in that brief period. If sharepoint, there are a number of issues that can arise. The biggest one is that the sync interval is more like 10min than 5sec, so there is a larger window to have these conflicts. The other issues with SharePoint which you may not be hitting (they show up as "section is read-only", or "section can't be accessed") are being addressed in Vista Service pack and 2007 Office Service pack 1. Most changes get merged without your noticing. You get the message you saw when you have edits on exactly the same paragraph as I mentioned. If you click on the page tab to open the "Conflict pages" you will see the paragraph that couldn't be merged. You can copy any content you like from the conflict page to the main page, then delete the conflict page. If you are seeing lots of conflcts, that is abnormal...Anonymous
January 16, 2008
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January 16, 2008
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January 17, 2008
I have read and then skimmed almost of all of your blogs (found them last night) i have a headache trying to find on the internet a fix to the fact that I have OneNote2007 and a Wacom tablet input and everywhere I read says that handwriting recognition will not work unless I have xp tablet pc...and there is no guarantee that if I upgrade to Vista (running XP as my EVAULT is not compatible yet with Vista) that Vista will recognize the tablet. Point being: searching my handwriting in OneNote, right now OneNote only sees it as a drawing. I will do anything. Can I install Windows XP Tablet PC on a non-tablet pc? or Will Vista upgrading fix this and let me be able to search. I have LOVED Notebook for my ibook, and now am considering getting our small office to change to all macs so we can use that program and Office. I bought OneNote because it was comprable to Notebook for Macs... Any advice would be great! Thanks...Anonymous
January 17, 2008
Wacom tablets enable full tablet functionality in Vista, but only after the Wacom driver is installed. See http://www.wacom.com/vista/index.cfm Notice that you need any Vista edition EXCEPT Basic. XP Tablet PC Edition, like Media Center, is an OEM-only product, and not available to consumers directly. There are places to buy OEM licenses legally, but you will NOT have support if you choose to install it. Get Vista instead.Anonymous
January 17, 2008
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January 18, 2008
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January 20, 2008
Does anyone know how to crop images within one note?Anonymous
January 22, 2008
I want to use Onenote to organize my project. One problem here is I'd liekt to list each contact and BMC job and have it keep up with the items I inser. It seem showever everythign i insert from outlook is placed in Onenote and then left dumb. A finish the task, add a note,etc and it is not kept up to date in my outlook . If it doen't sync it don't work. Is this note/audio/video package?Anonymous
January 22, 2008
Right now I have a directory of Letters, Billing, Documents, CAd Files etc. I either need a smart onenote that does not double my work or a smarter file exploer. Onenote is nice in that it sees everythign but it sure takes a long time to get all that date into onenote and then it is just a ocpy liek a paper notebook and not an active file that stays up to date. Maybe that is good as I get a picture at that time. But it does not keep up with this data automatically. And it does not keep up with all my files automatically. Am I missing something. I want to use onenote to organize each job I have. It seems like we have internet ecplorer, Outlook, BCM and Onenote, each doing something the other can;t and none doing anything completely. HELPAnonymous
January 23, 2008
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January 23, 2008
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January 23, 2008
Paul t: sorry there is no image crop yet, but a powertoy provides rotate: http://blogs.msdn.com/johnguin/archive/2007/12/14/image-rotator-powertoy-for-onenote-2007.aspx Eric: that's a lot of requests, I don't think I can respond to all. It seems like you have a very particular way of working that you would like to replicate in OneNote. What I can say is that soe fo your requests already are possible. For example, there's no requirement to have all inserted documents on one page. Check out the choices in Tools/options, in particular under Outlook integration and Send to OneNote. for the "live" files request, what i do is put files in onenote and when I want to change them, I just double click them in onenote, modify, save and close. The version in onenote is updated. You could also use "insert link to file" when you insert files if you want to store the files outside the notebook. Outlook has tags and Outlook tasks. out look tasks are just what outlook uses, so you can assign Today, tomorrow, etc and a task is create din outlook with that settings. The state of the task (done/undone) is linked to Onenote. Onenote tags can add adiditonal value if you want to mark soem text as having a category or priority or whatever. Insert PDF should work regardless of quickbooks being installed. have you run office diagnostics? (Help/Office Diagnostics) Ilya and Tiffany: if you want to presevre the original notes and clean up a copy, I would copy the page (right click on the page tab and copy), not copy the content of the page to an already created page. For the inserting space issue, th extra writign apce tool moves down thigns that are completely below it, so try to find a spot on the page that has a clean break all the way across the page for you to add more space to. if you can't find a place like that, you can experiment a little to understand how the tool adds space when you use it on top of existing things like diagrams. Sorry, this is a hard one to explain without specific examples and diagrams.Anonymous
January 24, 2008
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January 30, 2008
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January 30, 2008
Ilya, can you send me the OneNote section that has this page in it? (just attach the section file to a mail and send it to chrispr(at)microsoft.com.Anonymous
January 30, 2008
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February 11, 2008
I have a wish item for the next release of OneNote. While I think it's wonderful for quickly taking notes and much more, it lacks the ability to easily associate note items with other notes/boxes/etc. When I take notes on paper, there are arrows, lines, etc. that show relationships between notes. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have links say from a master list on one page to detailed notes either on the same page or other pages? I know we can insert a hyperlink, but that's too cumbersome. A form of click-and-drag to associate two items would be much preferred (perhaps [Ctrl]+drag)... Kind of like cognitive maps. Hope you can influence adding such a feature in the next release.Anonymous
February 12, 2008
Helio, It's an interesting idea. I can see how it would work for different note containers on a page. A little harder to see how the drag gesture would work across pages a lot quicker/easier than "right click to copy hlink, then back button, paste on original page", but I see the value. A nice feature you might consider is when you are taking notes on one page, right click on any word and choose "Create linked page". Click the reuslting link to add the related notes, then use the back button to get back to main page. Another neat trick is to select all the pages in a section, click on one to select, then Shift-click or ctrl-click other pages. Right-click on that selected set of page tabs, copy hyperlink, then on a page surface use paste. You get a table of contents list of links to all those pages.Anonymous
February 13, 2008
Eric, you made the comment that the different shades of pink tags are hard to tell apart. I had the same problem - lowering the gamma setting of my video card fixed it. Details are at http://blogs.msdn.com/johnguin/archive/2008/01/07/tracking-a-bug-with-video-and-seeing-it-change-into-a-tip-for-onenote-users.aspx John Guin OneNote Test TeamAnonymous
February 23, 2008
I use OneNote 2007 during lectures and for studying but I have problems with how slow it is running, especially when it freezes in the middle of lecture! There is a significant delay in drag and drop when I'm moving text boxes around and the pages scroll very slowly. Do you know of anyway to make it run faster? I thought compressing pages that I am not currently using might help, but I didn't find any options for that. I have a tablet PC and I am happy with OneNote because the handwriting recognition and having everything in one place, but I will have to go back to Windows Journal if it is going to run so slow.Anonymous
February 26, 2008
Robin, first question - do you have SP1 of Office 2007 (OneNote 2007)? (Help/About should say 12.0.6211.1000). Second question - what is on these pages? lots of ink? pictures? Third question - what OS are you on - Windows XP or Vista?Anonymous
February 26, 2008
OneNote version 12.0.4518.1014 and MSO (12.0.6017.5000). Windows XP tablet edition The pages mainly are pdfs and powerpoints that have been printed to OneNote. These are very long pdfs (100 to 200 pages each, about 4 of them) but mostly contain text. They have a lot of ink on them. Some of the powerpoints that have been printed to OneNote have lots of graphics with them, others I have printed as 6 slides to a page in black and white. Thanks for your help.Anonymous
February 27, 2008
Robin, when you print any document to OneNote, an image is made of each page. The amount of graphics doesn't matter for the slowness (only for storage) since the images are decompressed in memory for display so they take up the same space regardless. I wouldn't put hundreds of images of pages on a single page in OneNote - it is very hard for any program to manage that many large images. You could print one large doc to a page or split them across pages, which woudl help a lot with performance (anything to reduce the number of printed pages on a single OneNote page below about 100 - the number varies with the power of your system) An alternative is to use ink annotations on the document in its original format:
- For PDF you can download "PDF annotator" (http://www.ograhl.com/en/pdfannotator/) and ink all over those PDFs. You can insert (not print) the PDF file as an embedded file in OneNote to keep track of it with your other notes. To add annotations, just double click it to open and view, make edits, save, and close. The file embedded in OneNote will be updated with those changes.
- For Word or PPT, as with PDF you can make ink annotations directly using the ink annotation capabilities (In 2007, these are on the "review" tab, or in reading view in Word in the upper right). You don't need extra software to enable this - just your tablet PC. Of course you only need to do this when you are in the hundreds of pages and experiencing the slowdowns. For shorter files you should be able to do what you are doing without any problem.
Anonymous
March 03, 2008
"The other day I got an email inviting me to download an entire course on how to manage email and tasks effectively (something everyone in corporate settings struggles with), and it came as a OneNote notebook." Wow! How can we get a copy of this notebook? Please say it's not proprietary....Anonymous
March 03, 2008
Cirocco - if you still have the email, why not download the linked notebook package and save it locally? I'm afraid I don't understand what is preventing you from sharing the link or the package. Have you lost the link? I saw a similar mail internally to MS and the notebook was pretty awesome...a great example of how to use OneNote to distribute training materials.Anonymous
March 06, 2008
I am looking for a cheatsheat to give new 2007 users.Anonymous
March 06, 2008
Steve: Have them read the "OneNote Guide" notebook that is installed as part of OneNote 2007. It is one of the notebooks in the list on the left. Another nice thing to have is the list of keyboard shortcuts. That is in Help/Keyboard shortcuts.Anonymous
April 01, 2008
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May 25, 2008
Mike Tholfsen is an energetic and dedicated senior test manager at Microsoft, and I've had the pleasureAnonymous
May 31, 2008
It's been awhile since I have posted anything here, and for that I feel shame. It's just that Dan and John and others are doing such a great job. Another guy who's doing a great job but isn't blogging yet (he's shy) is Mike Tholfsen. Mike is the test