Here’s the scenario… You are quickly clearing your email inbox before going home. You open a rather lengthy message and start to read through it. A vague idea forms in your head about what your response will be, but you’ve been reading it for 5 minutes now and haven’t gotten through the entire chain yet. It’s time to go home. You move the message to your @FollowUp folder but you don’t want to lose your train of thought. Here’s where this little trick comes in.
Click the “Note…” button on the message toolbar and just start typing, then close the dialog box. Move the message to your follow-up folder, and then come back later with your “note to self” intact. Okay, I know you probably don’t have this button, but I’ll show you how to create it.
This trick utilizes the colored message flags in Outlook. As you can see below, when you click the “Note…” button it brings up a dialog box. You can start typing any message you want (up to 100 characters). When finished, just click OK or hit [Return]. Your note is automatically saved with the message. Messages with notes can quickly be found because they have flags set, and your personal note is displayed on the dark bar in the header of the message (as shown below).
You can also schedule a reminder if you like by setting a date & time in the “Due by” field after typing your note. Another nice feature is that your notes are private. When you reply or forward the message, the note stays attached to the original message but does not travel with your outgoing message.
Here are the detailed instructions for setting up the button. Note that all of this is >> READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY >>
As I promised earlier in my post on “Bending OneNote and Outlook to Fit my GTD System“, here are the setup details for OneNote 2007 along with some screen shots. For each of the screen shots, you can click on the image to open it full-size.
The options panel is accessed from the “Tools” menu in OneNote. The options are divided up into several Categories. I’ll walk through the changes that are important for my setup, and you may find other areas that you will want to tweak as well. Experimentation is usually better than the help menu when it comes to figuring out what some of these settings do.
On the Display tab, I prefer to have the page tabs and navigation tabs appear on the left. I also like the note containers visible since it makes it easier to see when you’ve accidentally split a note, or when you’re trying to grab text to copy or move it.
On the Save tab, the main thing you want to change is the location of the Unfiled notes section. Get rid of the separate section and have it point directly at your “@DOING” section. This will also give you another quick way to jump to your @DOING section by clicking on the Unfiled notes button.
On the Outlook Integration tab, change all of these to >> READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY >>
UPDATE: Since releasing version 3.0.0.842 in September 2008, Evernote for Windows now supports import, indexing, and preview of PDF files. The Mac version supported this several months prior. The work-around below is no longer needed (but still fun to try if you want to experiment with and learn more about Ghostscript).
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As I mentioned in my EverNote vs. OneNote post, one of the key weaknesses of EverNote is its inability to handle PDF files. To get around that, I created a script to send the content of PDF files to EverNote as JPEG images. This is in the form of an Outlook VBA macro. I used it to quickly capture hand-written notes scanned into my office copier/scanner. The notes would arrive via email in an attached PDF file.
To use the script, you must set up an Outlook rule to trigger based on the mail address of your copier/scanner. The script then saves the attachment to a folder of your choice (edit path below), then calls Ghostscript to generate a JPEG file for each page. Note that since I already had PDF995 installed, I just used the Ghostscript executables that come bundled with that tool. You can install the PDF995 tool and edit the path in the VBA script below to point to those executables… or you can probably find or compile a standalone version. By the way, PDF995 is an excellent free tool and does a fantastic job distilling content into PDF files.
The last pre-requisite is setting up the >> READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY >>>
I just posted an update to my Daily Record of Events (DROE) Tool, please check out the Downloads page. Version 0.3 adds some additional shortcuts for fast Outlook task and message creation, as well as easy creation of PigPog tasks. (Note that the Outlook shortcuts have only been tested on Outlook 2003). Version 0.3 also fixes an ugly bug that blocked the time/date stamp from working in Windows Vista.
Here are the details from the latest README file:
This is a configurable tool built using AutoHotkey. It gives you a handy shortcut to quickly open OneNote, jump to the top of your Daily Record of Events (DROE) page, insert a time stamp, and begin capturing thoughts before they slip out of your head. The tool replaces the standard Sidenote shortcut (Win-N) with the new function. You can still open OneNote in full/normal mode using Win-Shift-N. Note that the tool is a compiled executable, so you do not need AutoHotkey installed to use it.
In addition to the OneNote shortcuts, the DROE Tool also provides some handy Outlook shortcuts. You can now use CTRL-SHIFT-M and CTRL-SHIFT-K from anywhere to create a new Outlook Email Message or Task. These shortcuts already exist in Outlook, but this script will save you the trouble of having to switch applications and find Outlook before using the shortcut. You also have the option of having new tasks be created as “PigPog” tasks, as well as displaying the Outlook Categories dialog box every time so that you don’t forget to set a category. Note that these have only been tested in Outlook 2003, so all bets are off for Outlook 2007.
But wait, there’s more! With the DROE Tool you’ll also get:
- The ability to paste without formatting (clipboard formatting stripper),
- the ability to use the Mac-like shortcut (Alt-W) to close a window,
- additional shortcuts for bullets and manual time stamps,
- this set of Ginsu knives! (ok, not really)
Each of the features can be individually enabled or disabled through the INI file.
I hope you find it useful! I have many more updates & features planned, so stay tuned.
-Carl
I posted a minor update to the DROE Tool, now at version 0.2 (Beta). There are three changes in this release:
- The download now includes a detailed README file with installation/upgrade instructions, screen shots, and troubleshooting tips.
- The check to make sure that the OneNote DROE page successfully opened is now case insensitive, so it’s a bit more forgiving.
- Toggling the tray icon now also displays the version information for the tool.
You can download the latest version on the Downloads page. Thanks especially to Tripp Castell for helping to troubleshoot the previous version.
-Carl
