Tip o’ the Week #98 – OneNote calendar front-end

Here’s a doozy of a little application that provides a great front-end to OneNote 2010, from Omer Atay of the OneNote development team.

In short, it’s a separate app which shows a calendar view of all the OneNote pages you’ve written, arranged by date. If you have several notebooks open (maybe a Work one, a Home one that’s synchronised with SkyDrive etc), and like to have lots of sections and subpages, it’s an ideal way of referencing what you’ve been doing, chronologically.

Omer initially released the app inside Microsoft, but I’m pleased to see he’s making it available externally, for free, too.

To use, visit the application page from Omer’s own web site. It’s available as a stand-alone app from here, the idea being that you’d save the executable file to your PC somewhere and just pin it to your start menu to run. Alternatively, enter %programdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs into the search box on the Start Menu, and create a shortcut to the OneCalendar executable in there, so it’s not pinned but can be easily found again – either by name, or just by typing “OneCal” into the Start Menu to find the program again.

OneCal. ah, those of a certain age can reminisce about 1980s TV adverts, too.
(check out the YouTube collection of classic ads from 1983. they sure don’t make ’em like they used to.!)

Another was of getting hold of OneCalendar would be to install Omer’s Onetastic addin to OneNote – it allows you to pin an individual OneNote page to your desktop, cleans up multi-page printouts (where you print from another application into OneNote) and also launches OneCalendar from within OneNote. See more here.