Twitter user @mhtopper asked me if it was possible to print just the 1st page of a document with OneNote. That question could be interpreted two ways: Printing the first page of a document to OneNote or Printing the first page of a OneNote page. Both are possible. Both are easy, once you know the trick.

Print only the first page to OneNote

Printing only the first page of a document (or anything else) to OneNote is done just as you would with any other printer.

From the document, click print. In the print dialog box, change the print selection to a range of pages. Change the page range from 1 to 1-1. This will force only the first page to print.

For example, if you were printing a page of a website from IE, you would set up the dialog as shown here:

Print dialog for one page print to OneNote

That works for any kind of printing that uses the regular print dialog. But what if you are trying to print from Office 2010? The print dialog doesn’t come up. Instead, you get the print options in the backstage area. In this case, you would make the same kind of change, but it takes two steps. As shown here, you need to change the page range setting from “Print all pages” to “Print custom range”. When that option is chosen, you will get the option to set the page range. Again, set it to 1-1 and just the first page will print.

Print one page to OneNote from O2010

Print only the first page of a note page

That’s half the story. The other half is how to print just one page of your notes.  I am guessing you already figured out the answer, but I am going to give it to you anyway.

Because even OneNote 2010 still uses the old style Print dialog box, printing just the first page of a section means using the Print dialog (from File–> Print) and setting the range to be 1-1. Just as with any other program, this will send the first page of your notes to your printer.

What if the page to print isn’t the first page in the section?

Use Print Preview! Set the Print Range to be “Current section”, then page through to find out which page you wish printed. Once you know the page to print, click the Print button and select the range to print.

Want an image of a note page?

Got a set of notes that you need as an image? Use “Send to OneNote” as your printer from within OneNote.  You will get an image of the page that you can use elsewhere.

Do I do this? Yes – when I need to turn a set of notes into something I want to send to another person, but don’t want the other person to be able to change the content. I find it a bit easier than creating a PDF of the content.

What other printing tips would you like me to share? Post them in the comments and I will put them together!

]]> http://vitaminch.com/blogs/2010/06/17/print-a-page-with-onenote/feed/ 2 http://vitaminch.com/blogs/2010/05/21/powerpoint-tip-use-placeholders/ http://vitaminch.com/blogs/2010/05/21/powerpoint-tip-use-placeholders/#comments Fri, 21 May 2010 20:11:48 +0000 CallKathy http://vitaminch.com/blogs/?p=183 Continue reading »]]> Tweet

Do you use placeholders in your PowerPoint files? Or, do you start with a blank slide and add text boxes to hold your content?

Many people are never trained why they are there or why they should use the text holders. Some of this comes from the earlier days of PowerPoint when there was a limit on how many placeholders could be on a slide. Now that you can create your own placeholders (and have been able to for awhile), using placeholders is a habit you should get into. Not using the placeholders to hold your text leads to problems when you want to change the look and feel of a presentation down the line. (There are other kinds of placeholders as well. We’ll talk about them another day.)

What’s a placeholder?

When you first bring up PowerPoint, you are shown a blank slide with two boxes. These boxes have dotted outlines. These boxes are placeholders. Using them allows you to easily format your content the way you want it to look. Type your text into these boxes and they automatically pick up the formatting you have used in your slide masters, layouts, and presentation themes.

Text placeholders contain slide titles, presentation titles and sub-titles, and slide text. Because we used to be limited on what kinds of placeholders were available, some PowerPoint trainers used to recommend you not use them. Now that PowerPoint allows as many placeholders as you want to put on a layout, you should always use them.

What’s the advantage of a placeholder?

Placeholders allow you to worry about content separate from design. By putting your content into a placeholder, it shows up in your outline. You can see at a glance what content is on what slide. You can edit it, refine it, and sculpt it as you want to until it is both succinct and clear.

Because placeholders automatically pick up the font, sizing, color, and other formatting from the slide designs, changing the look and feel of the placeholders on all your slides is a matter of changing the look in one place. When you use text boxes instead, you have to hand format each text box every time you change the look of your presentation.

But I already did the text boxes! Now what?

There are few ways that I know of to take the content of text boxes and get it moved to the placeholders. The hard way is to cut the text from each box and paste it into a placeholder. This is a tedious process that can drive you crazy. But there is a better way. I’ve documented it over on the Office 2010 blog for Symbaloo. Check it out.

While you are at it, check out the web mixes we’ve been creating on Office 2010. There are some really great links there. I know I haven’t found them all. Let me know which ones I have missed!

(Disclosure time: Symbaloo is a client of The Social Media Party, my employer. That’s why I am blogging there. It’s a new way to access web content. Try it, you will like it. Nice and graphical and easy to navigate. I am the community leader for the Office 2010 community over there. Hey, it’s getting me back into my community roots: OneNote and PowerPoint is where I started, after all.)

Just a quick post to say how much I love Techsmith’s Snagit – especially when it saves me from other software problems.

I just had yet another Facebook (FB) crash. I type too fast for FB to keep up in comments and notes. When this happens, the screen dims and I know that the error message isn’t far behind.

Tonight, it happened while I was putting in a comment on a friend’s note containing travel hints. (Which, by the way, I will be adding as a guest post when this post is done.)

Instead of panicking, I thought “Snagit”! My first attempt was a text grab, but the text was too faded. The second attempt was an image grab – that worked. When my browser re-opened, I just set the two windows side by side and re-typed the text. The image I grabbed was:

If I had been thinking, I would have dropped it into OneNote to grab the actual text. It just takes a few moments to drop the image into OneNote, copy the text from the image, paste it on the note page, edit it, and copy paste it to the note after the browser comes back. OneNote did a halfway decent job of recognizing the text, as you can see here:

Has SnagIt saved the day for you? How? Let me know!

(In the interest of full disclosure: TechSmith takes good care of those who help them beta test and discuss thier products. In my case, that good care includes a few great tchotchkes through the year and a paid account on Screencast.com. I regularly tell Betsy Weber that I would write about and talk about the products even without the extras and that they rock. If you think so, you should tell them too!)