Import Windows Journal entries to OneNote
This free powertoy should be incredibly useful for anyone who purchased a Tablet PC but then later added Microsoft’s OneNote. Windows Journal comes with every Tablet PC to give you a basic note-taking application, but it’s fairly bare-bones. You can ink and convert your writing to text with Journal, but if you really want to step it up, you’ll want to explore OneNote. Ahhh… but therein lies the problem: what can you do with all of those older notes from Windows Journal once you add OneNote to your software stable?Up until last month, not much. Dan Escapa points out an importing tool developed by Lin Wang that solves the issue. Lin’s free Journal to OneNote Importer saves all that inking effort with an external application to pull in your notes. Sweet!
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I find that the inking feels a little better in Journal than OneNote on my UMPC passive/resistive display, and am pleased have one more option for entering notes into OneNote, though most of the time I’m mixing text and handwriting. A big thanks to the writer of this little utility!
@bluespapa: I find my inking experience to be MUCH better in Journal than OneNote, and that’s on my Tablet PC with active digitizer. Seems like it should be the same interface but in different apps, but it is not. Granted, I prefer the chisel tip option, which I can’t find in OneNote, but I think the stroke smoothing in Journal makes the difference.
I find Windows Journal much better than Onenote. Over the last few years I have done quite a lot of transcribing of old documents held in archives. Not being a competent typist, I sought other ways. A tablet PC is an OK tool, but far from perfect.
In Journal I can write page after page (in a typical session I might copy 30 pages of solid text), and defer the conversion to text and Word until I get home. In Onenote the equivalent process is messy. All those text boxes, or one huge text box. An additional inconvenience of Onenote is that you lose your handwritten original in the conversion (always dangerous), so you have to do the conversion on a duplicate file. It’s not a big deal, but one further inconvenience among many others.
agreed, Allan_Jones, re: the loss of handwritten input when converting. Other Msoft apps that include handwriting-to-text allow a “copy as text” option while leaving the original notes alone. To me, this is one of those “what were they thinking??” kind of omissions in OneNote.
Journal can be a beautiful thing in its simplicity. And this little powertoy…if it works as advertised…will be a welcome addition to my digital bandalier.
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I just started trying OneNote 2007 instead of Journal, working on a non-tablet XP PC just so I can try to keep all the different emails and attachments and notes on them better organized, and I’m liking it so far. My biggest problem is that it won’t sync everything to my Advantage without me greatly changing the way I have things organized right now. Journal wouldn’t do that natively either, but I feel like I could be much more productive on the road if it did, and if it would let me choose where to store the notebooks on my device, I’d definitely have room for it.
I’ll be interested to see if it’s possible to run OneNote reliably on the Vista MID being shown at CES, it would be an awesome business device if so but I predict eye-straining frustration instead.