A new powertoy (nee test tool) used to find OneNote pages with embedded files
Every so often I'll get a question from someone who has a need to find pages that have embedded files in them. The reasons vary, but when you need that information, it is hard to get with OneNote 2007. The same question was facing me last week as we were testing notebooks on SharePoint, and I was thinking of creating a tool to identify those pages. I remembered someone posting the same question to the newsgroup many months ago, and figured if anyone else wanted this, I would give it away. Lo and behold, as I was in the process of adapting Nani's Table of Contents powertoy to my needs, I got an email forwarded to me from someone who wanted the same functionality. And finally, about a year and a half ago, Kathy Jacobs, a OneNote MVP, asked if we ever used our powertoys to test with, and this is a great example of a tool we use for testing turned into a powertoy. Talk about getting a lot of bang for the buck.
Before I describe how this works, I want to point out this is an internal tool which I hope you find useful. It has a bare bones UI, and I did not try to optimize much to make it optimized for speed. It's a tool that solves one specific problem and is aimed at people that need that particular bit of functionality.
To install it, click the download link below. Unzip the file and run setup.exe. Then when you start OneNote, you will notice a button named "FDO" in the toolbar, like this:
(You'll notice two other addins installed here. Can you identify them?)
When you press the FDO button, the addin will look through all the pages in the current section - whatever section you are viewing - and identify the pages with embedded files or images. Since this is a test tool designed for our testing purposes, I needed to know which pages had those two specific types of information on them. When it gets done checking, it creates a table on a new page at the beginning of the section with links to the pages with the files I looked for:
This is from my Unfiled Notes section. I have one page with 2 images on it (one is a screen clipping and the second is one I pasted there) and another page with one inserted file. Again, for testing purposes, I log a count of how many of each file type I have. The links in the left hand column will take you directly to the page.
If the table looks familiar, I re-purposed Nani's Table of Contents powertoy to create the table and the new page. It worked very well and provided a nice solution of how to display the results of the search. The code will also group the Image pages first in the table.
Some miscellaneous notes:
- FDO stands for "File Data Object." This probably only means anything to us, but I wanted to point it out to be complete.
- If you click the FDO button and it turns gray and gets disabled, check this out to ensure you have the .NET programmability support for OneNote installed.
- It's not fast, and if you have a large-ish section (30 pages or more), it may take a minute or more to finish.
- You can get the source code here.
Let me know what you think!
Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,
John
Published Monday, December 22, 2008 10:17 AM by JohnGuin
OneNote Testing : A new powertoy (nee test tool) used to find OneNote pages with embedded files
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