There is a useful Firefox extension that allows you to send webclippings from Firefox to OneNote. It was developed by Gmx Lee for OneNote 2003. You can get it directly from his website. Even though it was developed for OneNote 2003, it also works with OneNote 2007.

Unfortunately, the latest Firefox version it supports is 1.5. To get it to work with later Firefox versions, you have to edit the file so that it will install in later versions. Editing the file isn’t everyone’s thing, so I decided to provide the edited file as download here.

Download the edited Clip to OneNote Firefox (up to V3) extension

Note: This is not my extension! You are on your own with it. I will not provide any support nor answer any questions nor help you using it!

My girlfriend and I have a shared OneNote 2007 notebook to keep track of our move to Germany. That particular notebook is stored on my desktop and available to use on my desktop, my tablet and my girlfriend’s laptop. Right now though, my desktop is sitting in a shipping container in a US port waiting for the ship to take it to Germany while its hard drives went over the Atlantic in my carry on luggage.

When I got to Germany, I realized that our notebook would not sync anymore because the server containing the notebook (my desktop) was not there. Considering that this is the notebook we use for our move, keeping it in sync is very important right now.

I figured I could ask my fellow OneNote MVPs and the members of the OneNote team if they had any suggestions what to do in this situation. The biggest problem was that changes had been made to the notebook on both computers, so the two copies were out of sync. If they had not been out of sync, I would have just created a new shared notebook (stored on my tablet) and copied the sections from the current one into it. But with them out of sync, I would have been forced to manually go through each section and page…

Thankfully, Daniel Escapa, a OneNote program manager, had a great suggestion that worked flawlessly:

1. Find a USB key
2. On you Tablet right-click on the notebook and choose properties
3. Choose to sync the notebook to a new location, and have it saved to the USB key
4. Try the same on the other machine

After following these steps, I now have the notebook synced again on both laptops via the USB stick. I could have chosen a network share (hosted on my tablet) instead of the USB stick, but then I couldn’t keep them in sync when both laptops are not on the same LAN (which will be the case while we are apartment hunting in Berlin).

So if you ever find yourself with several OneNote clients that hold the same notebook offline, but with no access to the server containing the notebook, now you know what to do.

Thanks Daniel for this suggestion!

OneNote and blogs have a special relationship. Not only can you turn any entry in OneNote with a few mouse clicks into a blog post, but the OneNote team also communicates heavily via blogs with its users. You need some proof?

Robert Scoble is a household name in the tech world. If you have never heard of him, don’t worry. The following intro to an interview he gave recently gives a rather good idea who he is:

“Robert Scoble has earned a place in the history of corporate communications. Starting at Microsoft Corp. in 2003, he became the first high-profile blogger within a large business, ushering in a new era of interaction among companies, customers, critics and the general public. Using his blog, called Scobleizer, and now-familiar tools such as podcasts, RSS and Web video, he helped give Microsoft a human face.”

In the interview, he talks about the impact of his blogging at Microsoft and companies in general, as well as his experience of being on the inside at Microsoft. During the interview, he referred to OneNote twice :

“The One Note team told me they got a lot of feature requests through their blog, features that they actually implemented in the next version of the product. They thought it was an important way to listen to customers and give them what they wanted.”

“The magic of search engines allows the blogging job to be distributed. The first hit on Google for ‘One Note blog’ is for Chris Pratley, who runs the One Note team, and he is the person who should speak about it. I’m really happy that’s what happened at Microsoft, that what I was doing grew across the company.” 

Now go and sign up for the OneNote team blogs:

• Chris Pratley, the man in charge of the OneNote team. His blog features official announcements, discussion of new features and is the original OneNote blog.
• Daniel Escapa is a program manager. His blog is all about OneNote Extensibility and is always good for news from and about the team, as well as the community. His blog also features a monthly collection of blog posts about OneNote.
• Olya Veselova is a program manager and started her blog just last week.
• David Rasmussen, another program mananger, is also blogging. You can find sync-related stuff and keyboard shortcuts there.

  The following two blogs haven’t had any new posts in the past few months, but there is interesting stuff on them nonetheless:

• Donovan Lange is a developer. His blog has some development samples on it.
• Owen Braun, who leads the team of program managers, had a few interesting posts on linking notes.

This morning, I became a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Microsoft Office OneNote. If you have no idea what an MVP is, take a look at the MVP website. You can also take a look at my MVP Profile.

Why OneNote?

On my blog and site, I mainly talk about customizing Office 2007. In the public newsgroups, I mainly reply to general Office, OneNote and Outlook questions as well as some PowerPoint and Word ones. In the private beta newsgroups, I am also somewhat active in the Access and Excel groups, and essentially read all client-related ones (with occassional replies). Yet, in my website update post, I announced that I will also focus on OneNote 2007 on this site and blog in the future. So…why OneNote?

• I simply love OneNote. It’s a great program.
• I always have three programs open on my computer: Outlook 2007, OneNote 2007 and Trillian (instant messaging client).
• There are lots of great sites dedicated to Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word, but hardly any dedicated to OneNote. The best resource for OneNote 2007 at this point is the OneNote team member blogs.
• OneNote 2007 is a much more complex application than OneNote 2003. The new synchronization mechanism alone has increased the complexity by a lot, and I have been spending lots of time simply explaining it in the public OneNote group.
• Without OneNote, I would have never ended up in the official Office 2007 beta and this site and blog would have never come into existence: Chris Pratley, the person in charge of OneNote, posted a message in a TabletPC forum asking for TabletPC users interested in beta testing the next version of OneNote. The first, and actually only time, that I decided to spend some time finding cool add-ons for OneNote 2003 and my TabletPC in general was shortly after he posted that message. I stumbled on it and sent an email saying I am interested to the posted address. I got an email back from Daniel Escapa, a OneNote program manager, that asked for some information about myself (address, email, phone number basically) and also told me that the OneNote 12 beta was part of the overall Office 12 beta. As a Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science who had watched an MSDN video not too long before that about the new Ribbon UI, I got very excited at that point in time. Two weeks later, I received the official email telling me that I got into the Office 12 beta, and believe me, I could not wait to get my hands on it
• A few hours after posting this, I received an email telling me that I am now a OneNote MVP. That would be another reason for this list

To summarize, OneNote 2007 is a great program that I use all the time and there is not too much information about it out there. I already had this site and post a lot in the OneNote public newsgroup, which made the decision to dedicate a part of my site and blog to it fairly easy.

A quick overview

OneNote 2007 is the one-stop location for all your notes, ideas, research and random stuff that would otherwise just end up somewhere on your hard drive. You can get content from any program directly into OneNote. Either via special add-ins that take content from a particular program and transfer it to OneNote (e.g. Outlook, IE, FireFox) or just by using the “Send to OneNote 2007″ printer. All content in OneNote is fully searchable (including text in pictures and printed content) with a fast instant search feature.

You organize your notes in as many notebooks as you want. Notebooks can be on your local hard drive, on a server, on a SharePoint server or a USB stick and OneNote 2007 has a great synching mechanism that will keep all those notes for all users nicely in sync, even if two users are editing the same page at the same time.

If you have a TabletPC, then you can make extensive use of your tablet pen everywhere in OneNote. You can also link your notes together via hyperlinks. And to top it off, you can convert anything in OneNote into a post on your blog with a few mouse clicks.

More on OneNote 2007 later…