OneNote outline -> MS Word

[mkosma]

I am enjoying using OneNote for creating outlines. It's very natural and
matches the way I think, reminiscent of ECCO Pro which got me through law
school. I also like the structure for organizing notes, although I'm still
just scratching the surface in that area.

My question relates to how best to take my notes - say, an outline of
research on a problem - and turn them into a nicely formatted printable
document. All I really want to do, typically, is something like apply basic
formatting consistently across the outline. For example, format all Level 1
items in Bold, and make sure there is a 12pt space before all Level 1 and
Level 2 items. However, it seems that OneNote cannot do this other than
one-line-at-a-time.

So, I figure, the thing to do is to export into MS Word. I've figured out
that there are a few ways to do that. However, the problem I'm having is
that what arrives in Word is not easy to format. If you create an outline in
Word, it automatically applies styles Heading 1, Heading 2, etc. With
everything I've tried, OneNote docs come into word with the right outline
levels, but without any styles.

Is there any way to get OneNote to export (or word to import) outlines using
styles? Or perhaps, to apply styles automatically once the doc is in Word?
Perhaps a word macro is what's called for here, rather than something on the
OneNote side.

I'd appreciate any ideas, or a VB snipped, and I'd also be willing to try
tackling this if nobody has already done so.

 

[Patrick Schmid]

OneNote doesn't understand the concept of a Word style.
Have you tried copy & paste?

Patrick Schmid

 

[mkosma]

Unfortunately, cut and paste yields virtually the same result as the export
to word function - everything remains in Normal style and there's no
formatting applied to the outline.

 

[Patrick Schmid]

well, OneNote can't create what it doesn't know (Word Styles)
The question then becomes how you can fast apply the same style to the same
indentation level in Word. Unfortunately, I don't know the answer, but you
probably can get one in the Word group.

Patrick

 

[Grant Robertson]

Is there any way to get OneNote to export (or word to import) outlines using
styles? Or perhaps, to apply styles automatically once the doc is in Word?
Perhaps a word macro is what's called for here, rather than something on the
OneNote side.

What you are going to need to do is export the OneNote outline to Word
then use Word's style features to apply the styles you want to each
heading level. You can create a template to store your pre-configured
styles then copy those styles to your new Word document using the
Organizer dialog. { Tools / Templates and Add-Ins... ; [Organizer...] ;
<Styles> }. Or you could just modify the styles that are stored in your
Normal.dot word template.

In situations like this it is always better to use the tools of the
receiving application to do the modifications rather than depend on the
sending application to modify the output specifically for any given
recipient application. You want the sending application to keep things as
simple as possible so as many different receiving applications can handle
the data as possible. (Of course, having said this I have now probably
guaranteed that Microsoft will find a way to insure that the output of
NonNote can only be used in Word by doing exactly the opposite of what I
just said.)

In fact, almost every program that creates files in Word format just
inserts the style names in the document rather than all the
characteristics of the style. This allows you to determine the way the
style is actually formatted.

What would be great is if OneNote had a place to set a default template
to use when exporting OneNote pages to Word. Even better would be a way
to choose the template you wanted to use each time you exported your
OneNote pages to word with an option to just always use a specific
default or ask you every time.