A beta powertoy for OneNote 2007 to extract highlighted text from a page

  1. Based on a few requests I received last week, I decided to investigate a powertoy to get the highlighted text from a page. And to be specific, this powertoy gets ONLY the highlighted text and nothing else. The search functionality I wrote about last week did not work for everyone. For the few whose needs were not met by that workflow, the request was to get only a single word or sentence which had been highlighted. The search functionality generally gets the whole paragraph.

  2. So I had been itching to create another powertoy and this one looked pretty simple. It hasn't been as easy as I had hoped, but I do have a beta version ready. The setup files are at the end of this article.

  3. Here's how it works. Exit OneNote 2007 and run the setup.exe. When you start OneNote, you will get a button named "THE" on the standard toolbar. For what it is worth, the "THE" is an acronym for Text, Highlighted, Extractor (I was thinking of some navy stuff and got into the habit of backwards, thinking over the weekend). Ahem.

  4. Anyway, this is what it looks like:

  5. When you click the button, a new page named "Highlighted Text" is created in the current section. The highlighted text from the current page is copied to it. OneNote then opens the new page. That's about it.

  6. Some items which do not work right now and other notes:

  7. International support. My first build of this did not work with German text. This one may not either.

  8. The highlighted text is copied from top to bottom.

  9. There is not much error checking.

  10. Lastly, this only works for text that was highlighted with the highlight tool from the Standard toolbar:

    clip_image002

    (As opposed to using a pen on a tablet to draw highlighting).

    Anyway, if you want, download it and give it a shot. You can either post bugs you find here in the comments or send me email using the link at the top right. If you find an error that only happens with a particular page and you don't mind, send me the page as well.

    Good luck!

    Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

    John

the.zip