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More ways to store and share your OneNote notes
 
Applies to
Microsoft Office OneNote™ 2003
Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003

What's the best way to share your notes with others—or with multiple computers, so that you can keep one notebook for yourself across more than one computer? If you have Microsoft Office 2003, you can take advantage of more features for greater flexibility. You can also use Microsoft Windows® SharePoint™ Services 2.0 and the Microsoft Windows® offline files feature. This article walks through some example scenarios and best practices for making your notes public and portable.

Send notes as e-mail

Kevin Wright is a junior at Maple University. He became familiar with Microsoft Office during summer jobs as an administrative assistant at a real estate office in his neighborhood, and he uses Microsoft Word for his assignments. He's always been a meticulous note-taker, and he uses OneNote in all of his classes.

Kevin belongs to a study group in which several of his fellow students also use OneNote. Each week, the students in the study group take turns fleshing out and adding research notes to the week's lecture notes, and then they use e-mail to send the notes to the other members of the study group.

Members of the study group who do not have OneNote receive the notes as a message with a .one file attachment. These recipients usually delete the .one file and refer solely to the e-mail message for their notes. Study group members who have OneNote open the .one attachment and then move it from the Notes E-mailed to Me folder to their Political Science folder, positioning it as a page in the Lecture Notes section.

ShowSend notes as an e-mail message

Note  This feature is available only if you have Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 installed on your computer.

  1. Go to the page you want to send.
  2. If you want to send additional pages, select the page tabs of those pages.

    ShowHow?

    1. Click tab of the active page.

      Note  If the page tab you select is part of a page group, the individual page is selected. To select the whole group, click the page tab again.

    2. Select more pages by holding down the SHIFT or CTRL key while you click other page tabs. Use SHIFT to select a consecutive block of page tabs, and use CTRL to select the tabs individually.
  3. On the Standard toolbar, click E-mail Button image.
  4. Type information in the message header boxes (such as To and Cc).
  5. If you want to add a separate message, type it in the Introduction box.
  6. Click Send a Copy.

OneNote includes a predefined signature at the end of e-mail messages that you send from within OneNote. You can turn off or customize this signature in the E-mail category of the Options dialog box (Tools menu). To customize the signature, replace the existing text with your own.

ShowMake a .one e-mail attachment part of your notebook

Whenever you open a OneNote file that is sent as an e-mail attachment, a copy of the file is stored in the Notes E-mailed to Me folder. You can edit the file, but changes are not saved in the original attachment. If you reopen the original attachment, another copy of the file is created in the Notes E-mailed to Me folder.

  1. In the e-mail message, double-click the attachment.

    The attachment opens in the Notes E-mailed to Me folder in OneNote.

  2. To store the notes you receive in another folder, select the page tabs of the pages you want to move.

    ShowHow?

    1. Click a page tab to go to a page, and then click the page tab again to select the page.

      Note  If the page tab you select is part of a page group, the individual page is selected. To select the whole group, click the page tab again.

    2. Select more pages by holding down the SHIFT or CTRL key while you click other page tabs. Use SHIFT to select a consecutive block of page tabs, and use CTRL to select the tabs individually.
  3. With one or more pages selected, right-click, point to Move Page To, and then click Another Section.
  4. In the Move or Copy Pages dialog box, click the section where you want to move the page.

    Note  The section must be open to appear in the list. If you need to create a section or folder, click Create New Section or Create New Folder.

Publish notes as a Web page

Katie McAskill-White is a professor of English at Maple University, but she is spending the current academic year teaching abroad. To keep colleagues and students back home up to date with her travels and experiences, Katie uses OneNote to post a Web diary on her own MSN® Web site.

For the Web diary, she uses a single page that she adds to whenever she wants, using that day's date as a heading. She always overwrites the page that is already on the MSN site with the updated one.

ShowPublish notes to a Web site

  1. Go to the page you want to publish.
  2. If you want to publish additional pages, select the page tabs of those pages.

    ShowHow?

    1. Click tab of the active page.

      Note  If the page tab you select is part of a page group, the individual page is selected. To select the whole group, click the page tab again.

    2. Select more pages by holding down the SHIFT or CTRL key while you click other page tabs. Use SHIFT to select a consecutive block of page tabs, and use CTRL to select the tabs individually.
  3. On the File menu, click Publish Pages.
  4. In the Publish dialog box, browse to the location where you want to publish your notes.

    For example, if you have a group on MSN, locate it in My Network Places, and then click the Documents folder.

  5. In the File name box, type a name.
  6. In the Save as type list, click Single File Web Page.
  7. Click Publish.

Save notes in a document library

Yvonne Schleger is a researching scientist at Contoso Pharmaceuticals, where she is developing medication that reduces the incidence of tissue rejection in recipients of organ transplants. She works with a team of researchers who publish their findings in a OneNote notebook that they share in a document library on a Microsoft Windows® SharePoint™ Services 2.0 Web site on their corporate network.

Every day, Yvonne updates the Yvonne section of this notebook with the information she thinks will be useful to her colleagues. Because each researcher has his or her own section in the shared notebook, there is rarely a time when anyone is locked out of contributing to it. Occasionally, Yvonne adds comments to someone else's section; if her colleague is currently working in that section, Yvonne tries again some other time, or she uses commands in the Shared Workspace task pane to contact the colleague and share her comments in an e-mail message.

The research team members formerly set short intervals for file locking, so that sections would be available quickly for each other to modify. They found that performance on the Web site was poor, however, because each section file was downloaded again whenever the lock on it was released. Instead, the team has decided to set file locking for 30 minutes—an interval long enough to prevent section downloads during a note-taking session and yet short enough to make the files available when the researchers want to modify their sections from another workstation or from a laptop computer.

ShowStore a section in a document library

You can use the Save As command to save a copy of a section at a location other than My Notebook.

  1. On the File menu, click Save As, and in the Save As dialog box, navigate to the location where you want to save a copy of the section file.

    For example, to save a section in a document library, type the Web address of the Windows SharePoint Services site in the File name box, press ENTER, and then double-click the name of the document library in the list of library names.

  2. In the File name box, type a name for the section file, and then click Save.

ShowOpen a section stored in a document library, and use the Shared Workspace task pane

  1. On the File menu, click Open.
  2. In the My Notebook folder, double-click the shortcut to the section that is stored in the document library.
  3. Use the Shared Workspace task pane to communicate with other members of the site, work with the Tasks and Links lists on the site, or open other documents stored in the same document library as the active section file.

    For example, to quickly send an e-mail message to all members of the site, click Send e-mail to all members on the Members tab of the task pane.

ShowModify the time interval for locking sections

OneNote locks sections so that they cannot be edited from more than one computer at the same time. When you are working in a section, the section is read-only for anyone else. If you haven't been working in a section for a certain amount of time, the lock is released and the section becomes available for editing at another computer. You can configure this amount of time by clicking Options on the Tools menu and specifying options in the Open and Save category under Accessing files from multiple locations.

Run OneNote on multiple computers without using offline files

Annette Hill is promotional director at Coho Winery. She uses OneNote on desktop computers at work and at home. At home, she uses OneNote for personal notes, such as grocery items, projects to keep track of, and ideas for family vacations.

Occasionally while she is surfing the Web at home, she finds ideas for entertainment or activities that she wants to make note of for her work. She stores these notes in a special Event Planning section reserved for this purpose. This section is located on a network share that she can access from her work computer and from home, by a dial-up connection.

ShowStore a section at a shared location

You can use the Save As command to save a copy of a section at a location other than My Notebook. The new location becomes the destination for automatic saves of that section file copy.

  1. On the File menu, click Save As, and in the Save As dialog box, navigate to the location where you want to save.

    For example, to save a section on a shared folder on your network, type the share location in the File name box, and then press ENTER.

  2. In the File name box, type a name for the section file, and then click Save.

ShowReopen a section at a shared location

  1. On the File menu, click Open.
  2. In the My Notebook folder, double-click the shortcut to the section that is stored at the shared location.

Run OneNote on multiple computers by using Windows offline files

Avrind B. Rao is vice president of research and development at Contoso Pharmaceuticals. He has OneNote installed on the desktop computer where he does the bulk of his work, but because he often attends meetings away from the office, he also has OneNote installed on his laptop computer.

The IT department at Contoso has set up the offline files feature in Microsoft Windows® XP, so that employees can specify that a folder be stored on a corporate server that is backed up nightly. Avrind uses this feature so that when he reconnects his laptop computer to the corporate network, the notes he took while he was offline are automatically synchronized with the contents of his My Notebook folder on the network.

If he has made changes to a section on his desktop computer and he also modified that section on his laptop, he can choose to save both versions of the file during synchronization. Later, he can look at both copies and resolve the differences manually.

ShowMake the My Notebook folder on the network available offline

Note  The offline files feature in Microsoft Windows is available only if your organization has implemented it on your Windows network. For more information about offline files, contact your system administrator and Windows Help and Support Center.

  1. Click Start, and then click My Documents.
  2. In the My Documents dialog box, right-click the My Notebook folder, and then click Make available offline.
  3. Follow the instructions on the screen.

ShowSynchronize files

  1. When you reconnect your computer to the network, be sure to close files and folders that are open, and then click OK in the Windows message.
  2. If you made changes to more than one copy of a file, choose to keep either the version that's already on the network or the version that's on the computer you are reconnecting to the network — or, click Keep both versions to save them both on the network. Windows appends a version number, such as "v1," to the file name. Later, you can open both versions in OneNote and resolve conflicting modifications manually.

    ShowHow?

    1. In OneNote, click Open on the File menu to open both versions of the file, such as Meeting Notes and Meeting Notes v1.
    2. Observe both sections for recent changes. If necessary, move pages from one version of the section to the other.
    3. When the section you want to keep is up to date, delete the other version (right-click the section tab, and then click Delete).

    ShowTip

    If you want to compare the files side by side, do the following:
    1. Open both sections.
    2. On the Windows menu, click New Window.
    3. Resize the windows so that they are next to each other.
    4. In one window, click the section tab of one section; in the other window, click the section tab of the other section.
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