OneNote SimpleImporter with OneNote 2007

I wanted to take a minute today and write about a change that will happen with the OneNote 2003 SimpleImporter in OneNote 2007. First of all we will be fully supporting the same API in the next release of OneNote so we will accept the OneNote 2003 XML as well as the OneNote 2007 XML. This also means that existing powertoys will work with OneNote 2007. These are all great things for our customers and if you are seeing any problems with this please let us know ASAP and log a bug on the OneNote Connect site.

So what is the change you ask? As you might have noticed we changed the design of a OneNote page. We no longer have a page header and instead the page title is directly on the page in OneNote. This caused a small problem with the SimpleImporter from OneNote 2003 because by default it thought the best place to start the first outline was at 36, 36. This puts the outline right in the middle of the date & time on the page title in OneNote 2007. Instead we will be modifying the page offset in OneNote 2007 by a little bit (actually 72 now).

This means that whenever you send something to OneNote using the SimpleImporter we will push the content down far enough so that it doesn't collide with the page title that is now on the page. We didn't have a default value but if any of you read Andrew May's blog posts you saw that it said 36, 36 and Donovan's DataImport used that value as well. I know people complained because it was hard to determine what to do correctly (find which version of OneNote was installed and then have two different code paths) and they said that OneNote should handle this correctly. I agreed with this feedback and made the change (with Dev & Test's help!).

There might be some of you developers who are out there and are upset because they wanted exact positioning but you have to realize that you can still do this you just need to detect the right version of OneNote installed and then calculate the right offset that you want. We focused on the base case where most people were inserting content into OneNote and they didn't want it to collide with the title area. This was the most common scenario so we wanted to ensure that our shared customers wouldn't be upset from this.

You won't see this in Beta2 but it will appear in later release of OneNote 2007 and the final version. If you have comments please let me know, but the key take away is that your powertoys for OneNote 2003 will continue to work in OneNote 2007 and you don't need to do anything special (unless you changed the default offset which is pretty uncommon). Thanks!