#55: Quick access to fave notes

Posted on November 29, 2024 (Updated November 29, 2024) by ewand

A few themes have re-appeared on Tip of the Week over the years … saving time by using keyboard shortcuts, finding useful but somewhat hidden bits of Windows or Office apps, etc. One of the most prominent seams to mine, however, has been an undying for Onay-no-tay.

The UX Paradox of Office Apps

Usability research into Office applications once found that 87%* of the new features users asked for, were already in the product – they just didn’t know how to find them. As more and more features were added to apps – Excel particularly, it seems – end-users just didn’t know how to “discover” them. By Office 2000, dynamic “intelli-menus” basically hid options which were more obscure or which an individual just didn’t use, and while it made things look simpler and less cluttered, it made the problem worse.

A wholescale UX rethink in Office begat the “Ribbon”, which is now pervasive in other apps; if you’re interested in such things, check out Jensen Harris’ 2008 presentation on what led to the Ribbon being conceived. The talk offers a great historical perspective but also goes over the thought processes on how these things come about.

* statistic is made up but the story holds true. Who cares if facts and figures are correct as long as the lies are well presented? How do you think Excel charts and PowerBI got so successful?

Not Just Another Toolbar

Even with the Ribbon to make things more ordered, sometimes it’s good to be able to jump straight to a feature you use commonly; the customizable Quick Access Toolbar on the top left of many apps gives you the ability to pin certain commands, and can be an invaluable way of getting to functions you like without delving into Ribbon tabs and menus.

Click the down-arrow to the right of the toolbar and you can pick from a set of suggested functions, or by customizing it, you can delve into any part of the extensive menus and pin just that one feature there. There are commands which are not even on the Ribbon, but you could pin them to the QAT if you like them…

The QAT is present in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook (classic) – but not New Outlook, to some users’ chagrin. It’s not uncommon to find a similar UI feature in 3^rd party apps from the mid-2010s.

OneNote Favo(u)rites (again)

New Testament Tip of the Week #39 covered saving Favourites in OneNote: #39: OneNote Shortcuts, Favourites and Pins. Despite some of the guff being taken up with browser and mobile favourites, the good stuff in that tip was in (once again) recommending the fantastic OneTastic.

As well as providing an extensive macro capability, the OneTastic addin lets you pin a page or section to “Favorites”, and you can later go back to the same menu used to manage the pining, in order to access your previously pinned pages.

For extra goodness, try customizing the QAT and looking for Pin to Favorites…

Select it, click Add >> and hit OK. Now you’ll be able to access the drop-down for Favorites right there from the top left corner…

Happy Friday!

#39: OneNote Shortcuts, Favourites and Pins

Posted on August 9, 2024 by ewand

Regular ToW readers may share in a collective for OneNote – and there have been plenty Tips over the years to celebrate. There are other note-taking apps out there, of course, but if you have invested time and years of notes in one, it’s hard to shift.

OneNote comes in a variety of versions spanning web, mobile, Mac & PC, and you have the ability to organise pages of notes in sections, groups and whole separate Notebooks, should you wish. Notebooks can be shared with other people and could be used to contain stuff that’s specifically for one particular project or role.

Personal vs Work

If using OneNote on the web (which needs you to be online to access it), you could have different browser profiles for work and home, and therefore all your work notebooks would be in one and your home-related ones in another. The PC version of OneNote lets you mix notebooks from different accounts, so you could have them all open in one app – handy for some, though it can lead to lots of notebooks being open and searching right across them can be bothersome (see Classic ToW #646 for help with that).

If you keep going back to a few pages for shopping lists or the likes, it’s quite easy to grab a link directly so you can find it again quickly. Go to a section or page in the web version and you can right-click to copy a link to it, forming a simple https:// URL to wherever the source is stored (on OneDrive if you’re using a personal Microsoft Account or in SharePoint if using a M365 login).

Save that URL to wherever makes sense for you and it will launch directly to that page in a new browser upon activation.

Desktop vs Web

If you’re using the PC OneNote app, however, you’d want to have the page open in that app rather than in the browser. In the old days, you could drag a OneNote page to your desktop or some other Explorer folder, and it would create a shortcut to it – but not any more.

If you repeat the above process of right clicking / copying a link when in the app, then paste the resulting link into Notepad or similar, you’ll see there are actually two links – firstly, a https:// formatted URL and a second beginning onenote:https:// and finishing &end.

Select and copy the line(s) beginning onenote: to the end, then you can create a shortcut elsewhere – it’s a bit of a palaver, but…

· right-click on desktop or in your chosen folder,

· choose New > Shortcut and paste the onenote: link in there… hit Next,

· give it a meaningful name and save it

· now you could launch OneNote directly to your chosen page, with a simple tap or double click on that icon.

OneTastic to the rescue

A simpler way is to use the Pin to Favorites (sic) feature in the most excellent addon, OneTastic; this lets you create and pin links to a variety of locations, perhaps most usefully within the “Favorites” section of that menu itself – and to recall a Fav in future, just go to that menu to quickly navigate to several pinned OneNote pages and sections.

The “Favorites” location can be accessed in the file system if you like, too – just press WindowsKey+R to get the Run command up, then enter %appdata%\OneTastic and you’ll find the folder in there.

Pin it on the move

Mobile users have a simpler way, at least Android users do. Within OneNote, select the 3-dot menu on the top right of a page, and you can Add to Home screen; this will try to pin a shortcut to whatever kind of homescreen / launcher you have.

iOS users might need to rely on a Widgety solution instead.

646 – Finding stuff in OneNote

Posted on September 2, 2022 (Updated September 1, 2022) by ewand

Many people ❤️ OneNote. It has evolved much over the ~20 years since it sprang from the “Scribbler” project at the turn of the century and was released in the Office 2003 wave, under the name which the developers disdainfully referred to as “Onay-no-tay”. A recent update to the OneNote strategy for Windows was covered in Tip #632.

There were other OneNote tips a few weeks previously, in Tip #617, including OneTastic, a great addin to the traditional desktop app – the ~~Metro~~ Modern app never had an addin capability.

As well as powerful macro capabilities, which can do things like generate tables of contents or sort pages and other works in ways that the base app doesn’t offer, the OneTastic addin includes the OneCalendar application – also available to install separately – which lets you see which OneNote pages were edited on each day.

If you keep a note of every meeting, stored in different places – by topic, by customer etc – then this is invaluable when it comes to finding notes, as you can see what you last wrote on a given day.

Of course, OneNote has searching capability where you could look across notebooks for key words. There is the ability to Tag notes too, and you can search across notebooks for tagged content.

A powerful yet somewhat hidden search capability in desktop OneNote is also available – you can press CTRL+F to search on a given page, or CTRL+E to run a simple query across multiple places, for where a particular word is mentioned.

Look, however, at the “Pin Search Results (Alt+O)” option at the bottom – it opens search results in a pane to the side, and lets you sort by different criteria, e.g. date modified.

This ALT+O option can only be invoked from within existing search results, so if you want to find all your recent notes with a searched-for word, press CTRL+E to start, then ALT+O and search by date modified to see the results clustered by month.

617 – OneNote online & off

Posted on February 11, 2022 by ewand

Much digital ink has been spilled over OneNote on ToW previously. The original OneNote application shipped with Office 2003, then it was made available for free download before being supposedly superseded by a new-look Modern app version which was developed to share user experiences with the more recent online web version. OneNote apps were geared for offline use, synchronized to a private OneDrive (via your Microsoft Account) and/or a work SharePoint/OneDrive on Office 365.

The plan was to ditch the original Office app version in favour of the shiny new world of the cleaner but substantially less functional Modern app, but that decision was later unwound and instead the better bits of the Store version (still called OneNote for Windows 10) will migrate to the desktop app during 2022 or thereabouts.

While the OneNote offerings continue to evolve ahead of the quickening, we’re seeing some small improvements to both the offline client and the online experience. A simple example is the ability to sort pages in the desktop OneNote app – i.e., not the store app, which already had that capability. See the latest features added to the OneNote for Windows 10 store app, here.

It is possible to use both clients at the same time – perhaps partition work stuff in the more capable OneNote for desktop, and then keep your home notebooks in the store version. Doing so makes it easy when searching, so you don’t end up with shopping list items mixed up with your meeting notes. The icons are very similar, though – you might find it easier to differentiate the apps by changing the icon of the desktop one (since you can’t edit the icon of the Store app).

Try pinning the desktop icon to your Taskbar and right-click on the icon; on the pop-up menu, right-click on the OneNote label, choose Properties and then click the Change Icon button to select a different one.

The web UI has evolved considerably too – go to onenote.com and sign-in with either your Microsoft Account, for your own personal notebooks, or your work/school M365 account, for the content associated with your job or school. The same web application is also the view that you see when accessing OneNote from within Teams.

The recently improved web client includes some new capabilities like having a Read Only / Edit mode, akin to other Office web apps, as well as some improvements in handling embedded content, inking and more. There’s a short video showing the new capabilities in both desktop and online versions.

If you’re a fan of desktop OneNote, make sure you get OneTastic, a suite of addins and macros to make OneNote more productive. Some of the macros plug gaps in OneNote functionality that have somewhat been filled – like sorting pages – but there are still many useful ones, like creating a table of contents for a large notebook.

OneTastic also includes OneCalendar, which shows you all the pages – across any of your notebooks – which you have edited, on a calendar view. It sounds simple, but try it out and you’ll realise how useful it is to find notes based on the day you took them…

OneCalendar is also available as a separate app which can be run alongside OneNote, pinned to the taskbar or launched separately.

572 – simple OneNote tricks

Posted on March 30, 2021 by ewand

OneNote has been part of the Office suite since 2003, and has been freely downloadable for much of that time; it’s an invaluable tool for note taking or just capturing information that you’ll want to recall at some point. There have been a few sideways turns in the roadmap, though – as well as the Office application (on Windows and Mac), there is OneNote for mobile devices, OneNote the web experience and OneNote the “Modern” Windows app.

To try to simplify the roadmap somewhat, the app formerly known as OneNote 2016 is now just “OneNote”, and the Store app that shares more of its UX with the mobile and web versions, is OneNote for Windows 10. For more detail on the differences between all the versions, see here.

At one point, the plan was to discontinue the more functional desktop app, and shift development to the simpler Store version, however that plan was rowed back and OneNote (the Office app) will continue to be part of Office, even though it wasn’t installed by default in 2019. The perpetual version of Office (as opposed to the subscription service that is Microsoft 365) will be updated later this year, and OneNote will still be part of that. Probably.

There’s not a lot being published on the Roadmap for OneNote, though, so it may not be getting hosts of new features… See here for a list of some recent updates to OneNote for Windows 10. You can jump to the latest What’s New from the Help menu in the Store version.

As has been covered on ToW passim (here, here), you can start OneNote from the Run command, by pressing WindowsKey+R then onenote <enter> for the desktop version, or onenote: for the modern Windows 10 version. In the latter, you can also pin particular pages to the Start menu, handy if you want to jump to a particular page of quick notes or ideas.

Any version of OneNote is just great at noting down lists – perhaps by using your pen (though if you’re a big inker, you might want to also check out Journal by Microsoft Garage – it’s a notebook intended for “ink first”).

Or maybe by typing a quick few lines at first, and formatting as a list once you’ve got some text. There are some shortcuts to help that formatting; in both OneNote and OneNote for Windows 10, to quickly select what you’ve just typed, hold the shift key and press the up arrow to grab a row at a time.

If you press CTRL+ . on selected text, it will turn into a bulleted list, or press CTRL+ / to make it numbered, and the same combination will remove the list formatting.

To create a table, just press TAB to turn whatever you’ve just typed into the first column, and keep pressing TAB to create new columns, or CTRL+ENTER to accept the column layout and start adding extra rows, or to insert a new row into an existing table. Once have content in your table, you can easily move rows around by simply putting your cursor in the row you want to shift, and hold ALT+SHIFT then use the up / down arrow keys to move that row. Much simpler than faffing about with copy & paste.

On the full-fat version of OneNote, you could also select your list and by using the somewhat obscure-sounding menu option “Link to Pages”, OneNote will create a new page for each item in your list and then make a hot-link to it. Hover the mouse over to see the link.

You can manually create links to any page by selecting the text you want to hot-link from, and press CTRL+K; then either select the destination in the dialog box, or paste the link to the page (or paragraph) if you’ve already copied that link to the clipboard.

If you’re going to be doing much with tables, it’s probably better to use the OneNote app rather than the Store one; the older tool has much richer table formatting capabilities, and it also has an Addin architecture which is completely absent from the OneNote for Windows 10 version.

The fantastic OneCalendar addin shows you all the notebook pages you’ve worked on by date, so if you spread your note-taking across a variety of sections or even shared notebooks, then it can be invaluable to jump right to the notes in question.

Its big brother, OneTastic, also allows using pre-written Macros to automate tasks like custom sorting of sections and loads more.

506 – OneNote 2016 reprieve

Posted on December 2, 2019 by ewand

OneNote is, for a lot of fans, the best application that Microsoft makes, especially in an educational setting. About 18 months ago, it was announced that the venerable and extensible (especially if you’re a OneTastic / OneCalendar user) desktop version was being put out to pasture, in favour of the more modern, erm, Modern version.

Office 2019 was no longer going to ship with OneNote – the desktop app was not being developed beyond OneNote 2016, but it would still be freely installable if desired.

Efforts would be focussed on the Modern / Store / “OneNote for Windows 10”, which shares a lineage with the mobile apps; there’s a lot to be said in favour of this strategy, since it would bring the UX of the Windows Store, tablet, phone and web apps into alignment. For regular ToW readers, this has been covered ad nauseam.

Well, blow me down, a brilliant Ignite session from @Ben Hodes only went and wound the clock back (and simultaneously painted it forward)… [Check out Union Jack Man at 42:18 in the video stream if you want a laugh]

OneNote 2016 is getting some CPR, and will be installed by default with clean Office setups again, early in 2020.

Point of clarity – a clean Office2019 / Office 365 install doesn’t currently include OneNote 2016 … but upgrading from an existing Office install that already had OneNote, does. If need be, go to http://aka.ms/installonenote to install OneNote 2016.

Some new features are coming, too – like Dark Mode, @mentions, To Do integration and more. The OneNote for Windows 10 code base is being back-ported to the older Win32 version; in time, the same underlying code will exist, even if there remains two versions of the product. It was previously reported that across the Office suite on Windows, the Win32 codebase will be favoured going forward, even though Modern versions were released for several of the traditional apps. We will have to wait and see.

Of course, lots of functionality exists in common between the two current versions of OneNote, even if the level of detail and the way to invoke and use it is a little different – take Record Audio, for example.

Did you know that if you insert an audio recording into your OneNote page, that any handwritten or typed notes you take while the recording is underway, will be linked to the corresponding place in the audio?

Later, if you click on a block of text or handwriting, you can play back the recording at just that point, or if you just start playing the audio, the notes you took will be highlighted as the playback progresses.

In OneNote 2016, you can also have the application index the contents of audio recordings, looking for keywords. Enable it at File > Options > Audio & Video.

No such function appears to exist in the OneNote for Windows 10 app; maybe that’s a good thing. After all, OneNote 2016 only lets you turn it on after an ominous-sounding warning…

Tip o’ the Week 336 – Onetastic Update

Posted on July 15, 2016 by ewand

As has been covered repeatedly on previous ToWs, OneNote – for some people – is a life-blood app that is more heavily used than many others, and when people depend on it, they tend to care about it. And though there are a variety of addins and templates available for OneNote users to get more from the tool, the best addin is Onetastic, and has just been updated.

The version 3.0 of Onetastic introduces some subtle improvements to the OneCalendar function – possibly the most obviously useful part of Onetastic, as it shows a calendar view with a list of which pages were updated on each date, hot-linked so you can jump straight to each. If you have lots of different OneNote pages, sections, notebooks etc, then this can be absolutely invaluable.

The OneCalendar function is activated from the toolbar in OneNote, though you can create a shortcut to the separate executable if desired:

· Press WindowsKey+R and enter %appdata%\Onetastic

· Right-click on the OneCal.exe file and choose Create shortcut

· Right-click on the new shortcut and choose Cut, then try running %userprofile% and Paste the shortcut in there.

· Rename the shortcut to just “OneCal”. Right-click it to Pin to Start if you like, or open the app and right-click on its Taskbar icon to Pin it there if you’re truly devoted

· Now, you can quickly start it by pressing WindowsKey+R and entering OneCal

· Or you can install just OneCalendar on its own, should you insist.

Anyway. Whether or not you want to do the above steps, you can still find some cool stuff in the new Macroland functionality within Onetastic. The author, @Omer Atay, has completely rewritten the macro language to make it more like a number of regular programming environments. There are hundreds of macros to carry out everything from minor text formatting to wholesale changes like colouring or changing sections of the notebook.

Some of the most useful macros include the ability to create tables of contents, breadcrumb links or even lists of all the notebooks currently open.

If you’re a OneNote user and you don’t have Onetastic installed, you’re missing out.

Tip o’ the Week #288 – When I’m reinstalling Windows

Posted on August 7, 2015 by ewand

clip_image002

Now that Windows 10 is here, Whether you’ll be waiting for a new machine that comes with Windows 10, or whether you’ll be one of the millions that will upgrade, there’s lots to be thrilled about or to quietly look forward to, depending on your personal level of excitability.

If you’ve been running a preview version of Windows 10 then it may be best to install a clean build of the RTM, just to be sure there’s nothing left behind that might clog your machine up. Some say it’s probably best practice to wipe your PC every year or two, and reinstall only the stuff you need.

clip_image003 Fortunately, with OneDrive and Office365, reinstalling isn’t the major effort it used to be – with a huge mailbox, nobody should need PST files anymore and fret about whether they’re backed up properly. No need to worry about My Documents when OneDrive (on your home machine) can accommodate Terabytes of data, and OneDrive for Business (on your work PC) will sync all of your stuff too.

If you’re linking your MSA (Microsoft Account, ie Hotmail/MSN/Outlook.com etc address) then lots of other settings will be replicated between machines too.

There are a few things that don’t automatically get sorted out – Outlook Signatures being a particular annoyance, though moving them into OneDrive has been covered in ToW #267. Another is the list of notebooks which OneNote is configured to open – you may be able to select from your commonly used notebooks when you start the desktop version of OneNote up, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a quick shortcut to where they’re all stored, to make it easy to find them again?

OneTastic again

ToW regular contributor Stuart Leeks once again recommends a particularly neat trick, courtesy of the awesome OneTastic suite of extensions and addins to OneNote. OneTastic and OneCalendar come from the hand of Omer Atay, who’s part of the OneNote team but has built these tools on his own. There is form for home-grown extensions making it – more or less – into the product… maybe Omer’s product group will follow suit.
[Outlook Thread Compressor is long dead, btw; don’t bother trying to download it now]

Anyway, if you use OneNote in anything more than a cursory capacity, go to http://www.omeratay.com/onetastic/?r=download immediately and download the app.

clip_image005 OneTastic adds loads of functionality, including a macro language and the MacroLand repository of useful extra commands. One such downloadable is the List Notebooks macro which will generate a page at the current section, listing each of the notebooks you currently have open and with a hyperlink to reference the book directly. So when you rebuild your machine, even before reinstalling OneTastic, just click on each link to reopen the notebook.

The genesis of OneTastic was OneCalendar, an amazingly useful applet which shows you each page you’ve visited in OneNote arranged by date – so if you know you took notes on a call last week, you don’t need to navigate to the page or search for it… just go to OneCalendar, and the page will be listed on the day in question. If you’re using shared notebooks, then OneCalendar will even embolden pages that other people have updated – a feature which could be super-handy or super-annoying, depending on how collaborative your co-workers are.

clip_image007 If you use lots of notebooks, there’s a neat feature in OneCalendar, which might help – take a look in Settings clip_image009 and you can specify which notebooks OneCalendar will show you changes from – so you might want to restrict it to the less busy notebooks and all your own personal stuff, or maybe even get into the habit of turning some on & off when required.

There are lots of shortcut keys in OneCalendar, for the power user – CTRL and + / – will make the text larger & smaller, CTRL+ Left / Right arrow moves back and forth between days/weeks/months (depending on what level of zoom you’re viewing), CTRL+ 1 / 2 / 3 switches between the days/weeks/months, and CTRL+ S jumps to settings. CTRL+ 0 jumps to Today, and CTRL+ F lets you “find” so it will filter the view based on keywords.