Making your own page template groups for OneNote 2007

On www.onppt.com, I have an article about creating and storing your own stationery for OneNote 2003. Most of the article holds true for OneNote 2007, but I thought you all might want a quick update on what has changed for 2007.

First off, what used to be stationery in 2003 are now templates in 2007. This change was made to make OneNote more consistent with the rest of Office. No big deal there.

Next, there are now two kinds of templates. You can create a notebook template or a section of page templates. I’ll write up more on the notebook templates in a future post, but for now, let’s look at just the page templates.

Page templates are still by default stored together in a personal area for your OneNote set up. Before, that area was called “My Stationery”. Now, it is called “My Templates”.

To create a new entry in this group, you create the page you create the page you want to be the template, then:

1. Bring up the Templates task pane via Format–> Templates or by selecting the task pane from the task pane list if it is already open.
2. Click the “Save current page as a template” link at the bottom of the task pane
3. Give the template a name using the dialog that comes up.
4. Click Save to save the template.

You now have a template showing under the My Templates group. That’s fine, but I like to keep things a little more organized than that. So… Let’s take it a step further.

If you want this template to be in its own group, you have to jump through a small hoop outside of OneNote. In OneNote, make sure that the original copy of the section you used to create the section only contains the pages you want to be templates. Using Windows Explorer, navigate to the notebook where this section resides. Copy the section. You are now ready to go “exploring”.

Navigate to the folder: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates\1033\ONENOTE\12\Stationery

This folder contains the template groups for OneNote pages. Paste your new section there.

Go back to OneNote and refresh the template task pane. (The only ways I know to do this are to navigate away from it and back, either by selecting a different task pane and coming back or by closing the task pane and opening it again.) Your new template group should show up, with the pages listed in it.

If you want to add other pages to this template group, open the section as a regular section and add the new pages. Close the section when you are done so that you don’t mess up your master template. Next time you bring up the template task pane, the changes will show.

[tags]OneNote, templates, Office 2007[/tags]