OneNote Rewind: Stuff you may have missed in July

I have a blog about Office (http://kranjac.wordpress.com) and you can find OneNote posts between other things I write about. Complete transfer of posts from my old site is not complete yet but site is functional.

Hello! I work with students on improving their research skills (including notetaking) and I am interested in finding out more about how students can use OneNote in this context. Students often ask how they can gain greater control over the massive number of notes that they take in a variety of different contexts. I don't have OneNote myself, so I would be very interested in hearing how others have used it to assist in their scholarly research. In particular, I am wondering if OneNote allows students some way of transferring the annotations that they make to PDFs to notebooks, so that they can compile and access their annotations to scholarly articles without having to go back to the PDF itself. Thanks!

This isn't so much a tip or trick, but rather a suggestion for the next version of OneNote.  I recently got a tablet PC for an all-around workhorse at school.  It is especially handy to be able to take notes in class on it and convert my ink later to text to keep neat notes for posterity.

However, as a student of mathematics I find OneNote lacking.  The insert equation tool is a mess to use for a mathematician.  Frequently mathematics is written as a combination of text and equations, not purely as either.  This means switching back and forth often between tools, as the ink equation box refuses to accept any text at all.  For writing mathematical proofs this is especially tedious because there is frequent switching between math and text, despite the fact that certain words are well known in the mathematical vernacular to appear extremely frequently in proof writing.  For example, we'll often use the words "let", "for", "for every", "s.t. (or "such that")", "w.r.t. (with respect to)" and so on.

Probably the most annoying feature of the ink equation box is the fact that it is coded to recognize what it thinks are "well formed" equations.  It will frequently instruct the writer to "Please write well formed math expressions."  This is such a rigid restriction that one will also be given a "Please try a different correction." message, which is particularly infuriating to get when a mathematician is telling the software what he wants and the software refuses to accept the correction.  For example, when writing a proof it is common to write out the left hand side of an equation the first time, and then drop that part for subsequent transformations until a result is achieved.  Thus, the left hand side of following equations will be empty and the equals signs will be aligned with the first.

For example (a snippet of this proof: www.proofwiki.org/.../Pythagoras& ):

c^2 = 4 (ab/2) + (a-b)^2

     = 2ab + a^2 - 2ab + b^2

     = a^2 + b^2

This will often be done with chains of implications as well (i.e. the left side will again be empty, and a chain of aligned arrows will be used, meaning that the line which came before implies the line which comes next).

Why should this matter to anyone but professional mathematicians that OneNote refuses to allow entry of an equation where there's nothing on the left hand side?  For one, professors of mathematics are professional mathematicians and can frequently be seen using this convention on the board during lectures, meaning that it will appear like this in students' lecture notes if they're faithful to what they've seen on the board.  Achieving this currently means playing games with OneNote's two tools for ink as well as constantly correcting its font to get the desired effect if the conversion tools are used for ink, or just leaving the notes in ink and not bothering to convert them.  OneNote really should accept what it is given by the user as a correction and not impose conventions upon the user.

My suggestion: put two different lasso tools in the "Insert Ink Equation" box.  One lasso can be used to tell the software that the selected portion is actually text and to treat it accordingly (spelling check, etc.).  This should be biased in favor of specific words and phrases which are very common to mathematical writing, but otherwise not impose itself on the user should they choose to use words it doesn't know.  Students of math, physics, chemistry, economics, and others will commonly use words in equations to represent certain quantities.  The other lasso would then be used to correct the software when it doesn't understand the written equation, exactly as it works now, except that it should accept the correction given to it without question, with the understanding that the user knows what is correct.

I have the same issue with the "Please try a different correction." message.

This is really annoying. Perhaps there should be a checkbox/button to turn this feature on and off.