I can’t wait for OneNote 2007 – and the OneNote Mobile 2007 client that will come with the product. All during the beta of Office 2007, I’ve been using the mobile client with great success.
Its progressed from a rough form early on to a very usable tool as Kevin Tofel over at jkOnTheRun mentions. He also has a link to a Quick Start Guide for OneNote Mobile.
Check it out.
Via: jkOnTheRun – Microsoft’s OneNote Mobile 2007 Quick Start guide
I’ve realized something. I need all my posting tools, content creation ideas, and storage of all this to be online. While I currently do most of my writing offline in OneNote, I’m finding that I would prefer to have my tools online in some way.
A lot of work I did months ago was in Writely – and I’m starting to return to this tool instead of locally installed software. The nice thing about Writely (and Zoho Writer among others), is that your data is stored online, available from practically any browser. The online tools like these also have the basic formatting and all-important spell check (for me at least) features that make writing blog posts a simple task.
What’s missing from these types of online tools are research features. Now, I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking for here, because of course there is no shortage of places to look for information online. This is the place where OneNote shines, because you can Cut & Paste, clip, and copy all types of information into your OneNote notebook in all types of organizational structures. The online tools don’t have something like this.
However, even the abiltiy to aggregate the research notes for a post or article don’t make it easy to form that into a readable format. Of course that is where the creativity in blogging (or any writing for that matter) comes in.
The reality of things as I start to work on more and more writing chores comes into focus, and I believe that I’m going to end up with two different methods for blogging. One online with the Writely’s and Zoho Writers of the world, and one with local software like OneNote & Word. The reason for this is because of the differing styles of posts – long & short. Long posts really need supporting information like links, definitions, pictures, and more. Short posts are really in the conversational form that blogging has long been associated with and simply requires that I stay on topic – though it would be nice to spell things correctly. 😉
The really dirty secret of blogging with OneNote is that the HTML output from both OneNote and Word is horrid – even the 2007 versions that are in beta. Hopfully this will improve over time, but as nice as it is to create a long post in OneNote, the work involved to clean up the HTML is lengthy and not easy. Several posts have ended up in Writely anyway so I could work on the HTML before posting the damn thing on my blogs.
I’ve had some great hints, tips and tricks from several people on the OneNote development team & forums, but for blogging, the product has a long way to go. The biggest problem with OneNote/Word is that Microsoft (it seems) just can’t get deal with the fact that other products and developers can handle presentation as good or better than they can. Fonts are the worst part of OneNote/Word posting – every damn paragraph definition, they have to embed the font being use in the product. Hint – every blog handles the default font for the blog. Oh well, the reality is that I’m moving back towards online tools that I can reach from almost anywhere – I think this will work best for me going forward.
Ok, thought I’d give a quick update on where I’m at using OneNote as a blogging tool, and I’ll try to keep it short.
ITS GREAT!
So I was able to follow Chris Pratley’s workaround (look at the bottom of the post) to get blogging through Word to work. And it does! Here are the steps I do have to go thru:
Ok, maybe I was a little quick to dismiss OneNote as a blogging tool. My issue is with the ability to post directly from OneNote something it does not do currently and not with the software itself.
As Chris Pratley noted in a post on his blog, you can use a workaround to post to a blog through Word 2007. Interesting…
Well, Im going to keep using OneNote as a post creation tool, mainly because its great for saving quick notes, ideas and stuff for each post. Once the post is created, Ill do something like copy to w.bloggar to post to my blog.
The combination of Word & OneNote 2007 has huge potential for bloggers, and I hope that the functionality is fleshed out a bit more. To that end, Im going to post a list of feature requests for Word & OneNote specifically for bloggers.
I’ve been looking for better tools to write, manage, and post to my blog lately – and I’m still looking. The freebie tools are interesting, but are not working that well for me. w.bloggar is about the best one for post creation, and it lets me save posts as files on my PC, so I could manage them in a set of folders prior to posting.
Writely is another tool I’ve been using to write & manage, but not to post. I had been posting directly from Writely, but it soon started to display this ugly skill of skewering my blog layout. The first time I thought it was something I did and it took me about 2 days to track it down, then I wised up.
So this past week I started trying to use Microsoft’s OneNote 2003/2007 as my blog post manager. While it does not have the ability to post directly to a blog, it seemed to be a great way to organize by folders, tabs, and pages all the research, pictures, links, and posts for my blog.
While OneNote is great at doing exactly the thing I was hoping for – organizing & managing the research and post creation – it failed at the most simply thing. Or at least Windows did – Copy & Paste.
When I copied the post text and pasted it into WordPress, the full HTML formatting followed the text. Now maybe I’m being stupid again (shh…), and there is a simple way in Windows/Office/OneNote to copy only the text – like when you paste in most Office apps, you can choose unformatted text as an option. If there is will someone point that out to this slow IT guy? 🙂
If I can get past the copy & paste issue, I’ll be using OneNote full time. I’m about ready to try and request the product at work, it is that helpful to the way I work. Being able to combine all forms of digital information into one page is huge – makes me want to get a Tablet PC ;).
😢
“We are not enemies but friends.”
Live your life.
Completely.
Without fear.
Live it with Love, compassion, empathy, tolerance and joy.
Treat every person with the kindness, respect and dignity they deserve by the very virtue of being a human being.
Out riding this rainy, wet spring. Got 1,000 miles on the clock with more to come this season. #IMRG #IndianMotorcycle
Watching early seasons of #GoldRush. Fun seeing @GoldrushRick in season 3! Hope his new season is off to a good start!
Oh yes I did! https://www.instagram.com/p/BsRDO9ogSO0/?utm_source=ig_twitter_share&igshid=1kha5yzhjq3ot
