More news on Onenote 12

The guys at MS are doing a great job building anticipation for the new version of Office 12 in general and Onenote 12 in particular. Owen Braun just posted more news on the linking behavior in the new version. Probably one of the most requested features for Onenote is the ability to link between pages, sections and notebooks. While you can do this in the current version, it’s not at all pretty. I use Onenote extensively for my Getting Things Done methodology. I use one folder for notebooks and have links between summary pages and the various projects. But the links look like this:

<file://C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\My Notebook\GTD\Projects\Grant Proposal.one>

You can click on this, and it works but it’s ugly and you have to click through a warning box first. “In OneNote 12, when you right-click on a page tab, there's a new menu command called "Copy Hyperlink to this Page…”

I can’t wait for this new version!

Native PDF support in Office 12

News on Office “12”, the successor to Office 2003, has been slowly being announced over the last couple of weeks. Today it was announced that Office 12 will support publishing to PDF files natively. Office 12 is headed for public beta this fall and for release sometime in the middle of next year (theoretically).

Our mission, like many organizations, distribute a lot of information via PDF because it's ubiquitous--everyone has Adobe Reader. The only problem is that you in order to create rich content (with URLs, etc) you have to use a fairly expensive product from Adobe.

Chris Pratley posted this yesterday. He manages all or parts of various Office products including Publisher, Word and my favorite, OneNote. He writes:

PDF output is another request we get fairly often for OneNote on the newsgroups and other community forums. Our customers want to easily share their notes with other people who may not own OneNote yet. PDF provides a 100% WYSIWYG representation of their notes including ink annotations and the 2-D layout that OneNote has (since it is static like paper, unlike a Word doc or HTML), and Adobe has done a good job of getting a reader for PDF on lots of platforms out there.

While a number of PDF “printer drivers” already exist for Windows apps, native support will be richer and cleaner. For more information take a look at Brian Jone's blog
His actual post isn't that helpful in understanding the real world value of this. But check out the comment by Craig Ringer for the different this will make for many users.

Memory Stick Micro M2, yet another memory format

If you have the same love-hate relationship that I do with Sony, you’ll be thrilled to hear about yet another flash memory format coming to a proprietary device near you.  Sony is in/famous for only supporting the memory stick format…which only Sony uses.  Now we may have another format that won’t work in anything else.  Don’t get me wrong, I have a 1GB memory stick in my Sony CLIE TH55 and it does what it’s supposed to.  But we already pay a premium for using normal memory sticks.  What are we going to pay for this joker?

 

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http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000537061231/ 

Oh god yes, finally, what consumers have been demanding for nigh on years now — another friggin’ memory friggin’ format. Sony and SanDisk were showing off the new Memory Stick Micro M2, measuring 15 x 12.5 x 1.2mm (about 1/4 the size of the Memory Stick Duo), designed to compete with MiniSD cards as well as to be increasingly easier to lose. Yes! Apparently the format has a theoretical maximum of a whopping 32GB of storage capacity which, if true, might make us momentarily pause from our normal “but whyyyyyy another goldarn format already?” routine and take notice — but somehow we have a feeling these won’t just be popping out during the first days of product rollout, which should be sometime in the first half of 2006. No word on which sizes will be rolling out, neither, so we safely return you to your regularly scheduled bitchfest.

[Via I4U]

Related...

MS Office Tips

Most of us spend a huge amount of time in Microsoft Office.  Check out these links for some great tips for these office products.  Do you want to know how to change a default attachment directory or Outlook, or have it minimize to the system tray rather than to the task bar?  Check these out.

 

Hat tip to Mark Orchant.

 

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  http://channels.lockergnome.com/windows/archives/20050929_download_all_the_office_tips_from_lockergnome.phtml

”After many, many requests from readers, I have finally gotten around to compiling all the Microsoft Office related tips I have written over the past two years.

• Excel Tips
• Outlook Tips
• PowerPoint Tips

For those of you who are waiting on the Windows XP related tips, it is definitely in the works and I hope to have them done for you by the end of the month.”

Related...

Download of the Day: Skype 1.4

In case you missed this, there is a new version of Skype out there, the nearly ubiquitous internet telephony program.  Skype is saving our missions thousands of dollars in phone bills.  A call to Macedonia from Kosovo, for instance, costs about a dollar a minute.  No more.  I can even Skype my bosses cell phone for far less than that.  In fact, Skype has forced our whole mission to begin to more aggressively underwrite the cost of internet for our personnel because of the downstream savings.  Good stuff.

 

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http://www.lifehacker.com/software/downloads/download-of-the-day-skype-14-128097.php

Internet telephony application Skype version 1.4 is out of beta and ready for download, with new features that make it easier to make internet phonecalls easily on the cheap.

The new version includes support for call-forwarding from one Skype account to another for free and from Skype to up to three landlines or mobile phone numbers for as little as 2 cents a minute. Version 1.4 plays nice with Microsoft Outlook with an easy contact import and the ability to make one-click calls to numbers and names from Internet Explorer and Outlook. Skype 1.4 is a free download, Windows only.

Skype for Windows 1.4

Related...

Tablet PC coming soon

I’ve been an IBM Thinkpad laptop user for a number of years.  A model 760 (?) was my first real laptop.  All the ones I had before that were hand-me-downs from nice people in the church I served in at the time.  But that laptop made me a committed Thinkpad customer.
I’ve also been tracking the Tablet PC phenomena for almost a year.  TPC’s were first released several years ago but have finally begun to win over a growing audience.  TPCs give you the ability to “ink” directly on the screen with a special pen.  That ink can be searched, converted to text, converted to shapes, etc., by Windows.
Anyway, when Lenovo (who recently bought the personal computer division from IBM) released a Thinkpad in a tablet form factor, I decided to take the plunge.  My Thinkpad T23 was three and a half years old at that point and in need of upgrade.  Fortunately for me I ordered one early because unexplained delays pushed the ship date back by almost two months.  Not a good first product ship for Lenovo.  It was probably only a month after I ordered my Thinkpad X41 that my Thinkpad died.  It was a slow, painful, gradual death, one from which I recovered all my data before something critical on the motherboard inexorably burned away.
I took it to the IBM service center in Skopje, Macedonia (yes, there is a reason I’m sold on Thinkpads) and they said a new mobo would be $1300.  Since I can buy a used T23 on ebay for about $250, and since my new X41 was in route (sort of) I decided to pass.
My new TPC will make it’s way back to Kosovo in about a week when my wife comes back from the US from some doctors appointments.  While she’s been gone I’ve been using HER T23 to copy all my installation CD’s to an external hard drive to make sure I have everything I need to recommence operations on the new PC.