Display of OneNote notebooks

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Revision as of 15:34, 25 July 2010 by ThePlaz (Talk | contribs)

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OneNote Web App

Newer notebooks are displayed on Microsoft's OneNote Web App, part of Windows Live Skydrive. Microsoft released this in June 2010, along with the desktop version of OneNote 2010. OneNote now has a nice sync functionality where notebooks can be saved online at Microsoft SkyDrive. This in itself should make it much eaiser for multiple computers to share a notebook vs. using Microsoft Live Sync. Microsoft also built a web viewer/editor for the OneNote Notebooks. It works fairly well in all browsers; the downside being it does not display ink objects.

This is unfortunate because Microsoft could have built ink display support in. When you go to "email" a page in OneNote 2010 desktop, the ink objects are converted to images. In addition, the Word Web App displays complex documents well, even though it can not edit them while preserving the layout. Microsoft could have converted ink to images in reading mode. Hopefully, Microsoft will add this in the future and automatically update existing notebooks.

I also tried to embed the OneNote Web App viewer on my website. I spent a few hours trying to get it to work, but I was not able to crack their code. In addition, they have a X-Frame-Option:Deny on some pages, which further prevents framing.

This solution should be the best going forward, especially because my tablet broke as of spring freshman year at MIT. This was not that bad, because I had realized during finals that I needed to put away my tablet and learn the material. I then bought a ScanSnap and began to write on paper and scan that instead. This works well with OneNote Web App.

I may go back and reinstall OneNote 2007/OneNote Web Exporter for ink heavy notebooks; the only other options would be PDFs. I am testing if Microsoft fixed the bookmark issue in 2010. --ThePlaz 11:34, 25 July 2010 (EDT)


OneNote Web Exporter

I use the OneNote Web Exporter tool to produce the online notebooks. Unfortunately it creates MHT files which only work in Internet Explorer and Opera (untested). I have spent a few hours looking for a way to make them work in Firefox. You can try to install the UnMHT extension. This didn't really work however in my tests. Or use IE or Opera.

I don't like that it is IE only. I've contacted the developer of the extension and he is currently hard at work at OneNote "14", the next version of OneNote which supports online notebooks. Hopefully this will be better and I will try to go back and republish notebooks if something better comes out.

It is good because it recreates the structure of OneNote notebooks. A down side is that it is not on the wiki, and is less SEO friendly.

I also tried using a MHT converter - no real luck here. I spent a few hours trying stuff. Email me if you have any suggestions. --ThePlaz 15:57, 25 January 2009 (EST)

Other Options

I have also explored other programs and options.

TOC PDF

OneNote2PDF is supposed to make a PDF with table of contents bookmarks. I spent several hours trying to get it to work.

PDF

OneNote comes with a PDF exporter built in. Unfortunately, it does not add bookmarks for the files so that it is really hard to navigate. I may choose to publish this as a backup.

Exporting as Image Files

For some of the 11th Grade work I did in OneNote (hint: very little) I exported a page (or section) as an image file. (Example). This is very time consuming and I need to recreate the notebook structure on the wiki. I like it since it still uses the wiki, but it would take a few hours to export a class.

Of course I could also spend a few hours designing an Auto-It script to do it automatically. I would need to:

  • Focus on OneNote
  • Export mht file
  • Switch to IE to use Snag it to make image
  • Name image
  • Switch to OneNote
  • Go to next page, section
  • Repeat
  • Upload to MediaWiki
  • Present structure I could use to link to

Actually as I write this it seems easy. Perhaps on a rainy day.

A downside is that the script would be flakey and that all of the content would be images.

Organization

see OneNote Organization