We have links to files (embedded hyperlinks/file icons) on many of our
OnenOte pages. If we make changes to these files, either by clicking on the
embedded link, or opening the file spearately using it;'s host programme, we
get many odd results.
This is all a result of OneNote 2007's penchant for working entirely out
of the cache even though it looks as if it is working directly on your
main files. Every section in a OneNote notebook as well as all the files
that have been icon-linked onto the page are actually copied into one or
more gigantic files called a cache in a special folder on your computer.
When you edit anything in ON it is actually working on this cache file.
The changes are then copied back out to your original files. Often this
happens instantly so it seems you are actually working on the originals
but you are not.
When you edit a document that has been icon-linked into ON 07 by double-
clicking on it's icon weird stuff happens in the background. OneNote
actually recreates the icon-linked file from the cache and places a copy
of it in your Temp folder. It then opens your external program and feeds
it that file from the temp folder. When you save that file it is just
saving it to the temp folder. Only when you exit the program does OneNote
get the signal that you are done and insert that file back into the
cache. (I think it is suppose to do a kind of continuous update but I
haven't seen it actually work this way.) After it has inserted it into
the cache it immediately recreates yet another copy of that file from the
data in the cache and places that copy into the original folder. This,
again, makes it look as if ON is working directly on the file in your
notebook folder but it is not.
All this weirdness is so you can do all of this even if the notebooks are
actually stored on a server somewhere and you aren't connected to that
server. I have complained about the weirdness but have learned to accept
it. There is a known bug where it ends up creating far too many copies of
the file in the actual ..._onefiles folder but this will be fixed in the
"Technical Refresh".
The weirdness can cause several problems. If you exit OneNote before
actually exiting the other program then OneNote will not know you have
finished and will not be able to do the last of the weirdness and get the
final version back into the cache. There is another known bug where
OneNote thinks the program is still open and thinks you will loose your
edits. This is why it pops up the error message every time you edit a
file this way. It also starts hogging all the CPU time and bogs down your
computer. The only way to stop that is to then exit and restart ON.
If you attempt to edit the file directly out of your OneNote notebook
folder things get hosed up as well. I speculate that OneNote probably
actually does watch that folder so it will know if some other instance of
OneNote on some other computer has modified that file. But I have not had
good luck with directly editing the file.
Yet another weirdness comes about when you first create the icon-link.
OneNote actually copies the file from it's original location to a special
folder named after the section where you placed the link. This folder is
called "section-name_onefiles". (Remember, this is then ALSO copied into
the cache file.) If you hover over the link you will see a popup where
OneNote tells you where the original file WAS LOCATED AT THE TIME YOU
CREATED THE LINK. If you double-click on the link it opens the copy
(which seems like it is being opened out of the _onefiles folder but is
really that temp file recreated from the cache). Since keeping this
original file is just confusing and redundant I usually delete that file
and only work on the file which is stored within OneNote.
This is so much of a problem that MS recommends that we just not use this
feature at least till the "Technical Refresh" comes out.
Since this is all so darned nebulous I only put files into OneNote that I
am only keeping around for reference like notes for school and such. Real
documents, like letters or actual school papers, I keep in a separate
folder structure and only use the hyperlink feature. This is the one you
get when you drag a file onto a ON page and choose "Insert a link to the
original file." When you click on this particular type of link you are
actually editing the original file from its original location.
