One of the most overlooked tools of Office is OneNote. If you’re not using it, well, I’ve got questions for you, but I suppose if you’ve already made a large investment in something like EverNote, then I suppose it’s somewhat forgiven.
Microsoft introduced OneNote Clipper back in March of 2004 through their Office Blogs. It allowed the ability to “clip” a page from the web and push it to a OneNote notebook hosted up in Microsoft’s cloud. Pretty handy for students and professionals to capture information to organize and use at a later point.
Well, Microsoft released version 2 of the OneNote Clipper last week and I have to say that even as a Mac OS X user, it’s plain simple to use.
Depending on the browser that you use, you’ll see a different button for installation purposes over at https://www.onenote.com/Clipper/OneNote.
Each of the different browsers handles the installation slightly different. For example, within Chrome, the installation is completed as a Chrome extension where the user is prompted to install OneNote Clipper similar to other Chrome Extensions:
Once installed within Chrome it shows up similar to other extensions with a warm greeting to show you where it is within the extension bar:
After it’s installed, the UI of the Clipper in action is similar to what is seen in other browsers:
Alternatively, the installation for Safari on Mac OS X is slightly different.
Instead of characterizing Safari as a browser with a specific extension, OneNote Clipper gets treated as a bookmarklet.
Note that if you click on the Button to “Clip to OneNote” instead of dragging into the Bookmark bar of Safari, you’re greated with a cute message:
Don’t click, just drag 🙂
So you’ve dragged the “Clip to OneNote” up into the Safari Bookmark bar and then you’re confronted with the profound question… “Why haven’t I removed ESPN and Disney from the OOTB Bookmarks?”
Note that the OneNote Clipper in Safari is merely JavaScript in a Bookmarklet that provides operates a function called ‘oneNoteCaptureRootScript’. Pretty nifty in that the UI is identical to that of what is exposed within Chrome.
The actual functionality of the Clipper is pretty slick with the ability to capture a page, a region of a page or the text of a page as though it’s in an RSS Reader’s Article view. And while it captures these as pages that are images, Microsoft added an OCR capability within OneNote to dig through the images to find text (whoa).
Furthermore, the article view provides a nice capture of text as can be seen below, grabbing the core elements of the page without the CSS and such…
But there are some instances where the page doesn’t turn up any article elements, alerting the user to try a different mode:
All in all, a pretty slick implementation to assist in capturing relevant information to use at a later time. Well done Microsoft – even helping us Mac users out 🙂
The Tech Blog of Dan Usher 