Thursday, August 10, 2006

More on OneNote 2007 / Word 2003 coexistence

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:

bullets in OneNote 2007


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

bullets in Word 2007

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:

bullets in 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

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Comments:
Are you just doing a regular Paste into Word 2003, or are you doing a Paste Special? Might help, or at least give you different results.
 
I have tried each of the Paste Special options:

HTML yields the behavior I describe in my post

Unformatted Text or Unicode Text still is not tabbed properly (multi-line tabbed items wrap at the beginning of the line instead of in line with the tab), and also includes funny characters for the bullets which would have to be stripped out

The other two options paste in a picture which sort of negates the purpose of pasting into Word.

I do appreciate the suggestion and had hopes that it would provide a solution, but I think for now I will be manually styling it or playing with a numbering tool to get that to work (and if you are who I think you are then I think you know which numbering tool I am talking about).

Thanks,
--sbreck
 
I'm having the exact same problem w/OneNote and Word 2003. After getting my bullets to look just as I want them in OneNote, Word screws them all up. I want wingdingy! You've probably already noticed that this doesn't only apply to the shape bullets. Word will reformat some of the number bullets as well.
 
has anybody come up with a fix?
 
In re Publius: My thoughts exactly! Why can't Microsoft & Microsoft get together to overcome this irksome problem? Nothing more frustrating getting my outline just right in One Note and then watching as it falls to pieces in Word. What ever happened to importing docs into other MS formats?
I can vouch for all law students when I say: Ubiquitous Wingdingies for all.
 
Slightly of thread but I hope you don't mind - when I paste from OneNote into an app that can have a plain text ot HTML view (Novell's GroupWise in my case) it pastes as a block with handles on the corner and is not visible when in text mode. Paste Special is greyed out. In o5rder to be sure that my recipiants see it I have to paste it in to Notepad or similar and then paste out of that. Any ideas? Thanks
 
Where I mostly see this is when the OneNote page contained handwriting that was converted to text on a line-by-line basis, leaving those little tiny lines in 2pt font that OneNote seems to insert to match your writing to lines as unconverted. Try Selecting All (pressing Ctrl-A a sufficient number of times until the whole thing is highlighted) and then doing a Tools-->Convert Handwriting to Text to "convert" these stragglers.

If the passage you're pasting never had any handwriting in it, maybe adjust the font in OneNote so it is of a uniform size and color. I recognize that it is the year 2008 and you ought to be able to use different fonts and colors to make points clearer or separate things, but...

...

...oh, dear commenter, I just don't have the heart to joke about your use of GroupWise and what year that might indicate you're stuck in.

Despite my attempt at a cruel joke, please let me know if any of these suggestions help you.
 
Thanks sbreck for your putdown :-) but it is my employer who has thrusted GroupWise upon me. I'm afraid you comments were not useful as what happens is that the text pastes in great but when you click on it there are open square handles on each corner as if it were an image or other object (which is, I guess what it is according to GroupWise). Interestingly when I emailed one of these pastes to myself and looked at the source of the email the paste was actually a bmp image - XPgrpwise\48D0C73BCCBDOM1CCBPO110016C68341C7361\IMAGE.BMP and opening this in that folder proved it as it was the pasted text in a border as bmp!
 
You didn't say which version of GroupWise you were running, but perhaps upgrading to GroupWise 7 Support Pack 3 might help? This was in section 14.5:
When you copy and paste an image or table from another source into a GroupWise message, it is no longer stored as a bitmap. This results in smaller message sizes for GroupWise messages that contain such elements.

Maybe that just means it pastes as a JPG instead of a BMP...
 
Thanks. That was useful as I have found out that we (at work) are adding SP3 in a week or 2 so I will just hang on. Might well sort out this issue. Thanks again.
 
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