OneNote and Outlook Task Synchronization
I had a few questions come up related to how the task synchronization works between OneNote 2007 and Outlook. This is actually one of the best features that was added in OneNote 2007, as I noted in my post on “EverNote vs. OneNote“. The task synchronization feature, however, is still pretty new and can be easily broken. If you want to know how to synch without getting sunk, read on… (Ok, bad pun, sorry for that.)
The screenshot below shows a typical project in OneNote (from my OneNote Project Template). You can see that some tasks have a dark red flag, and some have a faded red flag. The faded red flag either means that the due date is farther out, or that OneNote hasn’t found the task in Outlook yet to determine the due date. Sometimes it just takes OneNote a minute or two to search Outlook and those pale flags turn back into dark red. Other times (such as when a task is moved to another folder or deleted in Outlook), OneNote never finds the task.
So how is OneNote finding those tasks in Outlook? Although I’m not an expert on the inner workings of OneNote, I did some snooping into the OneNote-to-Outlook interface. I say “snooping” since “reverse-engineering” would be a bit too strong for the 20 minutes I looked at this. Anyway, here is what I found… Basically, OneNote is adding two custom fields to your tasks: OneNoteTaskID and OneNoteURL. If you open the Field Chooser in your Outlook Tasks folder, you can see these fields listed under “User-defined fields in folder”. If you add these fields to your view you can get a peek at the contents. This is shown in the screenshots below.
OneNote also sticks a file into the created task as an attachment. This is a binary file with a “.one” extension. If you double-click on the file it takes you back to the line in OneNote from which the task was created. This is really just for your convenience, not something that is used as part of the automatic synchronization.
Generally speaking, the more tasks you have, the longer it takes OneNote to search. That explains why sometimes when you open up a project in OneNote, there is that delay before the flags go to full red. Until the task is found, the “Open Task in Outlook” menu option will be grayed out. The interesting thing is that you can still pick “Delete Outlook Task” from the context menu in OneNote. If the task is not found, this simply removes the flag in OneNote. You may still have a task floating out there in Outlook. This is one key weakness of the current task synchronization feature in OneNote 2007. For those of us that use multiple task folders in Outlook and like to move tasks around, the links get broken pretty quickly. In my previous post on “Bending OneNote and Outlook to Fit my GTD System“, I talked about using this feature to get next actions from the project page into the Outlook task list. Because of this weakness, I basically don’t worry too much what the status shows in OneNote. As soon as it’s moved to Outlook it gets tracked through to completion there. I may manually update the task status on the project page during my weekly review, but that’s just for reference since the real task is now in Outlook.
Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 : OneNote, Outlook : 9 Comments
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9 Responses to “OneNote and Outlook Task Synchronization”
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:38 pm
This is almost perfect. Here’s a question -
You take notes from a meeting your the Program Mgr of. You end with 4 people having 12 action items plus 2 for you. There are three projects they cross how would you track all 6 using Onenote and Outlook? I need separation for each “project” for weekly reviews. as well as a laundry list of all open items and there owners.
This article is the closest to cracking the code on this I’ve seen!
January 9th, 2008 at 12:16 am
Kurt - Sorry for the slow response, just getting back to this after the holidays. One approach would be:
–> Take the notes on your DROE page; use the date stamp and bullets features from the DROE tool to help
–> Preface each action with the appropriate project [TAG]
–> Email the notes to all attendees so that they see their tasks
–> Create tasks for all 14 actions in Outlook by clicking the task flag in OneNote. The Project [TAG] sticks in the subject line.
–> Assign (manually) the context of “@WaitingFor” for the 12 delegated tasks, and “@Office” or whatever is appropriate for your 2 tasks. By the way, you could choose to only create “Waiting For” tasks for the key actions that require your personal follow-up.
–> Optional, but you could also paste the DROE notes into the notes section of your project page.
I hope that helps. I have another little system in Outlook that parallels what I’m doing in OneNote. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to write about that soon so you can see how I’m managing contexts, projects, and status for Outlook tasks.
-Carl
March 13th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Hi Carl,
I’m still waiting to hear on your system in Outlook. How you manage contexts, projects, and status etc.
Thanks.
March 19th, 2008 at 7:24 am
Hi Cool… Yes, I’m quite delinquent in posting that. I have a lot of the diagrams done, but have not had a chance to write it up. I still plan to post it.
May 27th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Hi Carl
Your system is really fantastic. But I got a question, how to manually assign a CONTEXT to OUTLOOK 2007?
May 27th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
@Charlie:
In Outlook 2003/2007 configure your categories to be the contexts.
So you would have a category called @Calls, @Computer, @WaitingFor, etc
May 28th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Thanks Ron!
Charlie - Additionally you can use the ALT-G shortcut when you have a task open to quickly assign the categories Ron mentioned. If you are using the DROE Tool, you can have it pop up that window automatically by setting “QuickCAT_Enable = 1″ in the INI file.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Thanks Carl and Ron!!
Really helpful! And btw, could you please share the outlook VBA marco that sending the email as attachment to onenote? or is there another way to do the same task?
cheers.
May 30th, 2008 at 6:49 am
Charlie, which macro are you talking about? The functionality described in the above post is built into OneNote. The other thing I mentioned was the DROE tool available on this link. Is there something else?