Give Our Abilities Time

To reiterate from yesterday, my goal is simply to stick with my company's required word processing platform, Word 2003, but extract meeting notes out of OneNote 2007 in a format that people can use, edit, etc. The primary problem is that bullet point formatting of multiple-line bullets that looks great in OneNote is all messed up in Word 2003.

Let me show you an example. Here's what the standard bullets look like in OneNote 2007:

And, pasted into Word 2007 (or Sent To Word, or Published to Word) they look very similar:

The only real difference (besides more generous margins) is that the bullets aren't as WingDing-y. That's maybe a good thing for professional documents.

Now, take a look at what you get when you try to paste, send, or publish this same data into Word 2003:

It's total crap.

I tried the new Publish to PDF option, but PDFs cannot be pasted from in any reasonable way. This is one of the many reasons why PDFs suck. The PDF looks fine (except that the table is too narrow) and has text in it, but if you paste that text into Word, it is like one giant run-on sentence. Doesn't matter if you choose Copy as Text or Copy with Formatting.

So, I'm not an idiot, I created a bunch of styles to relatively easily clean things up, but I really wish it would paste in USING the styles so I didn't have to highlight every bullet point and apply my style. I recognize that Microsoft probably hasn't yet paid much attention to people who don't upgrade the whole suite, so maybe they greyed out the Send to Word option knowing that, as a Word 2003 user, it would only lead to grief?

--sbreck

technorati: OneNote 2007, Microsoft Word