Showing the full name of an attachment in OneNote

  • A week or so ago in a previous entry I uploaded an image here. You can see where I used my pen to annotate the photo, and if you look at it again, you may see the odd comment about "the truncated file name."  Let me explain that comment.

  • Well, I got an email last week from a lawyer who uses OneNote to track documents related to his clients. He has a specific naming convention on his hard drive for tracking the documents (some Word, some PDF, etc…) in which the name has a long, common base and is differentiated only by the last few letters of the file name, which is usually a date. I imagine this is an example:

  • JohnGuin_EscrowDocuments_RealEstateRealProperty_May5_2008.doc

  • When he pastes the document into OneNote, the file name gets truncated to this:

  • He wanted to know of a way to preserve the full name to show in the UI of OneNote. The workaround we use is to drag and drop the file onto the page a second time and choose to insert a link to the original file:

  • <file://C:\Users\johngui\Desktop\JohnGuin_EscrowDocuments_RealEstateRealProperty_May5_2008.doc>

  • Then you can either leave the link as it is, or "clean it up" by removing the path name.

  • (Oh, and this entry has another subtle testing purpose behind it. I use the beta version of Live Writer to upload my blog entries, and I have never tried to upload an attachment other than images with an entry. I expect LiveWriter will upload my zero byte Word doc when I try this, but I feel compelled to try and verify if that is what happens.)

  • Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

  • John

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  • PS: the Word document I wanted to attach did not upload, so I converted it to the truncated name image above.