How many of you need to get the textual content out of something you have taken a picture of or scanned? I have a solution: Print to OneNote.

The basics:
You may not have noticed it, but when you installed OneNote 2007, you got a new printer: Send to OneNote 2007. If you need to add anything to your notes, you use File Print and select this printer. Short delay (how long depends on how big an item you are printing) and then the item appears in your notes.

What can you print to OneNote? Well, I haven’t found anything I can’t print to OneNote 2007 this way. Big documents take a long time, but they do get there.

Where? Oh - by default, the new notes will end up on a page in the Unfiled Notes section. You can change that by going to Tools–> Options and checking out the Send to OneNote options:

As you can see here, I have changed my printouts to go to the current page. This way, when I send something, I know right where it is going. Another common practice is to create a section just for your printouts and then file them from that section to where you want the note to go.

If you select “New Page in the current section” instead of “On the current page,” you get one extra benefit: Because a new page is created, the printout is automatically marked with the date and time you created the printout.

Why do it?
Once you do the print to OneNote, you get an image of what you printed on your note page. IF the item was in color, it stays in color. This means that you see just what you needed to. That is only the beginning.

Once you print something to OneNote, it automatically becomes searchable. If the item is long or large, there may be a short delay before the content is searchable, but it will be indexed. In addition, once you print to OneNote, you can right click the object and “Copy the text” from the current page of the printout or the entire printout. What a great way to create copies of stuff, huh?

I pay most of my bills online. When I get the confirmation page, I print it to OneNote. Then, I can search for any instance of the bill name and see exactly when I paid the bill each month.

An Extra:
Any picture or image that you add to your notes via Insert Picture, cut/copy/paste, or scan directly to OneNote will also become searchable and can be copied. Put that together with the print to OneNote and you have a powerful addition to your basic note taking abilities.

Tags: onenote, printing