Notebook cleaner and privatizer powertoy
People that publish shared notebooks in some environments have a couple of requests which need to be addressed. First, suppose you are an administrator creating a section or some pages in a "New Employee Orientation" notebook which will be shared with all new employees at your company. OneNote keeps track of who modifies information on a page in shared notebooks (right click the "Outline Element" to see on the context menu who last modified it), but in this scenario, it is really irrelevant who typed the information. Wouldn't it be nice to remove that data from the notebook?
People also may want this as an additional level of privacy. I suggest spot checking the results if it is really critical that the personal information is removed.
Another problem is a bit more subtle. If you add a lot of information to a page, focus (technically, the "insertion point," or location of the cursor) is remembered and focus goes to that location when anyone navigates to that page. For our scenario, you would probably want the focus to be at the top of each page by default, but since you probably typed the information at the bottom of the page most recently, focus is left at the bottom. The tedious way to move focus to the top of the page is to manually open each page and click at the top.
Or, you can install the "Notebook Cleaner" powertoy from https://johnguin.members.winisp.net/Shared%20Documents/OneNote%20Notebook%20Cleaner.zip and let it do all this work for you. (Update: the link for downloading is below my signature at the end of this entry).
Gary Neitzke wrote this tool and here is his summary:
Purpose:
To remove author information and reset navigation points to make the notebook easily distributable.
Description:
This add-in will allow you to prepare a notebook for distribution. When started it will do several things:
1.) Reset all navigation points to the top most page of each section, and the top most section of each section group.
2.) Removes selection from content so the cursor will be in the title box
3.) Clears Author and LastModifiedBy items .
This tool also includes a pair of registry files to toggle cleaning the names on or off. If you only want to move focus to the top of each page in a notebook, double click the "DisableCleaning_Names.reg" file to leave the author names intact. To re-enable this functionality, click the "EnableCleaning_Names.reg" file. Cleaning the names is the default.
I can't really demonstrate this addin easily since I don't want to wipe out the "Last Changed By" data in my shared notebooks. The toolbar does not have an icon - it just uses "Clean Notebook" as a label.
And we're still fixing a few nagging bugs with the Journal Importer. It should be done in the next few days, so please bear with me.
Questions, comments, concerns and criticism always welcome,
John Guin