Making OneNote Printer-Friendly
byOne of my major gripes about OneNote is that the pages will get longer, but they won’t tell you where the page will cut off if you have to print it to paper. For random scribbles and day-to-day operations, this is fine, but if you’re getting ready for that open note test, being able to easily print without equations/diagrams getting cut in half is important.
Here are two easy ways to make your life easier for those moments when you’re forced to surrender control to paper printouts.
The first thing to make sure you do is to print to OneNote the same way you would want those pages printed on a printer. You can always zoom in to make things bigger. If you won’t ever need a hardcopy with your notes, don’t worry about this, but OneNote will try to group pages to fit all of one image in a page (keyword: try). If you have two PowerPoint slides to an image already, you won’t have to work with OneNote to make it print two images per page (because OneNote will likely just print one slide per page).
The OneNote PowerToy Printout Manager can help arrange your files printed/imported into OneNote in a fashion that will print best, just remember to make your layout mods before inking your printouts.
The second key to making sure your notes will print perfectly onto paper with all the proper formatting is to use a page layout that has the same dimensions as the page you will be printing to. Using this technique will likely mean you’ll become friends with the sub-page button since you won’t want to make these pre-formatted pages longer or wider (it ruins the point), but we’re going for solid page definition.
To make this step as easy as possible, we’re going to walk through how to make it the default layout when you create a new page:
File–>Page Setup…
There should be a page set-up bar that opens. Create a new blank (or use whatever page it’s on if that’s OK with you) to apply the new layout to. I’ll be printing to letter-sized paper, so my template will be letter-sized. For kicks, I also made the line style a grid and the background color tan.
After selecting your desired new layout, your page should look something like this, with a defined border if you zoom out, letting you know where the edge of that standard-size paper is.
Now to make this the default layout for new pages (this is exactly what it will look like when you create a new page, text, ink, pictures and all). Click Format–>Templates…
You should see the option to save the current page as a template.
Give the new template a descriptive name and, if you’re in the section you want to use this template in, check the “Set as default template for new pages in the current section.” Click Save.
You can also just save it and go back later to set the default template for a section.
Now, every page you create in that section should have defined edges which make it easy to stay inside the lines. Just use sub-pages to join multi-pages topics together (search works well like this, also, since it will let you know exactly which page it’s on).
If you’re looking for an easy way to put that sub-page button in a better location (a drop-down menu just to add a sub-page? whatever), customize your toolbar as follows:
Tools–>Customize…
Click on the Insert category and find “New Subpage.” Click and drag this into where ever you want it to be in your toolbar.
You can place it anywhere, but note that you have to re-place the button if you want it in full-screen view as well (change the view to full-screen and repeat this process)
Enjoy, and study hard!
Other posts that may interest you:
You know Tracy. I use Journal to do my homework and I will use onenote as an organizer. Usually I will do all my notes and homeworks in Journal and research in Onenote. I remembered you used to do the same thing too.
By the way, I want to have chisel in my Onenote and I never see a mod that can help me so. This is ONE major turnoff from me doing my works on Onenote…..
October 4th, 2007 at 11:21 pmBy the way, this is another excellent post from studenttabletpc. I think your team knows more about onenote than the people who created it!
October 4th, 2007 at 11:26 pm[...] Tracy Hooten of The Student Tablet PC has posted a great tutorial on how to get good printing results from OneNote. She covers all the bases from laying out pages, to defining templates, to using the new OneNote Powertoy Print Manager. If you need to get your digital notes onto paper this is a great resource to hang on to. Perhaps you should print it into OneNote as a handy reference. [...]
October 5th, 2007 at 5:46 am[...] Tracy Hooten of The Student Tablet PC has posted a great tutorial on how to get good printing results from OneNote. She covers all the bases from laying out pages, to defining templates, to using the new OneNote Powertoy Print Manager. If you need to get your digital notes onto paper this is a great resource to hang on to. Perhaps you should print it into OneNote as a handy reference. [...]
October 5th, 2007 at 5:48 amWow! Thanks, Tracy!
Your step-by-step makes it easy to see what works. The idea of the template makes it easy to always have printable notes. Otherwise, it looks like you have to be proactive (Set it up BEFORE you ink) if you want it to print well. A lot of the time, printing for me is an afterthought.
S.
October 5th, 2007 at 6:05 amThanks, y’all! Glad you liked it ^_^.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:15 amGreat post. Thank you!
I cannot seem to get powerpoint slides to look as nice in onenote. If you have the time, I would really appreciate learning how you print/import your slides into onenote. Thanks.
October 5th, 2007 at 10:40 pmTracy rules ! !
October 7th, 2007 at 2:21 pm[...] Tracy Hooten of The Student Tablet PC has posted a great tutorial on how to get good printing results from OneNote. She covers all the bases from laying out pages, to defining templates, to using the new OneNote Powertoy Print Manager. If you need to get your digital notes onto paper this is a great resource to hang on to. Perhaps you should print it into OneNote as a handy reference. [...]
October 8th, 2007 at 12:01 amTiming is amazing. A few days prior to this post a teacher asked how to make her class notes more printer friendly. Tracy and StudentTabletPC to the rescue.
October 10th, 2007 at 6:24 amI am trying to get the Sub-Page icon in the full screen toolbar. I can’t seem to access the toolbar customization menu. Any ideas or how I go about doing it? Thanks
October 16th, 2007 at 5:00 pmEven after doing this I still have problems with printing in OneNote. I set my page size to Letter in OneNote, which is the same paper size that I print to. However, even though everything fits nicely onto one page on screen, when I print, it will sometimes say I need more than one page. I can fix this by checking “Scale content to paper width” but then it shrinks everything leaving lots of empty space. I don’t understand why a letter page on the screen isn’t 1-1 with a letter page printed out. Very disappointed.
October 17th, 2007 at 1:46 amNick, this is due to tabs set while writing. Try the following: Point at the first empty possibility after the last fultstop, klidrag down as far as possible. You will notice several marked blue spaces; hit delete. If this does not hit the deal, search for typing spaces you accidentally left, remove them too. All this should resolve your problem.
October 18th, 2007 at 3:15 pmhi I dont know if my question is related to this blog but anywyas here it is:
I usually print my PDF lecture notes onto microsoft one note but recently I have started to get this message saying:
OneNote can not find a page on which to isnert your printout. Navigate to a page in your nooteook and then try again.
I have uninstalled and reinstalled microsoft 2007 to try and fix this problem but no luck. IF anyone can help that would be great!
March 15th, 2008 at 9:14 amAlso, might be good if you want the lines or the graph paper to print to screenshot it, then insert as a background image, and set that as your template since they don’t print otherwise.
May 18th, 2008 at 6:59 amHi, interesting post! I work as a part-time employee at a store that dealing in multi function printers. We receive many orders for multi function printers especially the ones with the fax machine compatibility.
June 9th, 2009 at 11:17 pm