Changing the OneNote Screen Clipping and New Side Note keyboard shortcuts

I think this is the longest title for a post yet. Have you wanted to change the keyboard shortcut for screen clippings? For new side notes? For a new screen clipping? This is the question that was asked in our internal DL:

I wanted to get a screen capture of something while I was mouse clicking on something but I could not click the mouse and be able to stretch the fingers on my other hand to reach both the Windows + S key.  Can I assign a different letter than S which is closer to the Windows key?

Now @ first glance you might think that S and the Windows key are close together, but if you have Toshiba laptop they decided to put the Windows key on the top right of the keyboard (which totally pissed me off for the first month of use). So actually in OneNote you can change this via the registry, here are the steps. Note: you can only do this with OneNote 2007.

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By default OneNote uses "s" for screen clipping and "n" for new side note. You can change that by changing the following reg keys under this path:

 HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\OneNote\Options\Other

There are two DWORD values ScreenClippingShortcutKey & NewNoteShortcutKey. The default values are:

Now this might not make sense but those are hex values for the keyboard keys, here is an entire mapping:

Say for example you wanted the screen clipping command to be Win+P instead of Win+S, just create a new DWORD called ScreenClippingShortcutKey and give it the value of 0x50. Now just log off/log on and you should be all set!

I hope this helps you all if you questions please let me know. Also if someone wants to make a nice GUI app that does this that would be awesome too J Maybe I should but just not enough time.

• Anonymous
  November 22, 2006
  Hi, My laptop is a T40 series Thinkpad - no Windows key in sight.  Is there some way we could set the shortcut key to rely on something other than my non-existent Windows key? Thanks, Matt

• Anonymous
  November 27, 2006
  Matt - Thank you for the comment, that is a good suggestion but at this time we don't have anything like that.  Also when you look at new laptops today pretty much all of them have the Windows key, even IBM/Lenovo now has it on their Thinkpads.  In the meantime please use the tray icon to click on it and you will be all set.  Take care

• Anonymous
  June 04, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 05, 2007
  What is the way to do this?  I guess I will have to search for this since I never knew you could do that.  Cool trick Jody!

• Anonymous
  October 12, 2008
  Is there a place describing how to change other things in One Note, like the basic font?

• Anonymous
  October 28, 2008
  On my instance of OneNote (Office 2007), I don't event see the entry for Screen clipping on the registry, so I created one! Million dollar stupid question: how do I make sure that the setting is accessible from OneNote? Is there another place in OneNote, where I can point to the keyboard shortcut setting?

• Anonymous
  December 16, 2008
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• Anonymous
  December 27, 2008
  Great trick. I was searching for a way to change the shortcut key for Screen clipping as I wanted my slickrun launcher to be on Win+S combination. This helped a lot. THanks

• Anonymous
  December 27, 2008
  I was also wondering why microsoft did not put that feature as a configurable option??

• Anonymous
  May 05, 2009
  Hi, OneNote is behaving really wierdly - it is going into screen clip mode whenever the S key is pressed. No Windoes key - just S - typed anywhere like a word doc or a password to a website! Had to disable oneNote to stop it happening. Other shortcuts seem to need the windows key - just this one playing up. Any ideas anyone? Thanks, Ray

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2009
  I have an issue.  I've been using OneNote a lot, but recently I haven't been able to screen clip anything.  It just stopped working randomly, and I don't understand why.  When I press the Windows + "s" combination, it does nothing.  Have you ever come across this situation before?  The last time I was able to do it was April 19.  It hasn't worked since then.

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2009
  I might have figured it out.  I didn't have the icon on my taskbar, and ever since I put it down there it's been working.

• Anonymous
  January 29, 2012
  this is fine if onenote is working properly, but when I press windows logo + S nothing happens anyway. on the microsoft pages it says you must have the onenote icon in the taskbar, but it doesn't tell you how to get it there!

• Anonymous
  October 30, 2013
  Tried on a Windows 8.1 + Office 2013 installation: Win+Shift+S works just the way Win+S did for screen clippings

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2013
  Great way to get around this!  Thank you Madhur!

• Anonymous
  January 16, 2014
  I am running OneNote 2007 on Windows 8.1. I couldn't find the above keys in the reg-database, so I just created it myself in the location described above. Then restart OneNote and it works. I only did it with Screen clipping. Otherwise nice article - really helpful.

• Anonymous
  January 24, 2014
  Could you tell me how to 'HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice12.0OneNoteOptionsOther' I try to find it but it is really not work? Best kind regards,.

• Anonymous
  April 18, 2014
  OneNote 15 removed those two keys :/ any updates?

• Anonymous
  May 04, 2014
  Wow.  Also using 8.1 with 1N 2007. (Why would you put ANYTHING important in a Cloud?) Thinking behind the fridge in the wall, buried deep in the backyard, or even the old standby -under the mattress. Makes about as much sense as using something called partition- magic.  I thought Disk partitions were science, not magic.  So when it disappears, don't be surprised. Happy Victim of 8.1, but now Win + A does the trick!!!!!!!

• Anonymous
  June 07, 2014
  Hi I have window 8.1 and OneNote 2010 (V14) 32-bit. I add the value "ScreenClippingShortcutKey" in here 'HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice14.0OneNoteOptionsOther' as DWORD and set it to 41 Hex but still doesn't work. the new note shortcut works fine with the window + n yet the value "NewNoteShortcutKey" does not exit in the registry. any suggestion please...

• Anonymous
  August 04, 2015
  Hi! I have windows 10 and now when I try to use the onenote screen clipping shortcut, it doesn't work because Win + S is now a command to open the start menu and search bar. Help!  I really need to be able to configure one of them so they are different. How do I change the screen clip command for OneNote 2010 or otherwise the open start menu/search command for Windows 10?

• Anonymous
  November 16, 2015
  Does not work in Windows 10, which seems to disable the use of any shortcut key for screen clipping. Worked great in Windows 8.1. Windows 10 startup seems to disable it.

• Anonymous
  February 23, 2016
  Thank you so much, I was stuck with Windows 10 and One Note 2010. As windows 10 is having windows + S as served for cortana search this wasn't working. SO I have applied your fix and this works like a charm. Thank you.