How to ‘print’ to OneNote on a 64-bit computer.
Onenote has a nifty ‘Send to OneNote’ option that is added to the printer list but it doesn’t work on a 64-bit version of Windows.
There are plenty of missing add-ins and features with 64-bit computing – this is just one of them.
Microsoft’s official solution isn’t a lot of help. It only works for Windows Vista and XP – even then it is messy.
The first solution is to run the Office setup Repair option. We tried this on several 64-bit machines to no avail. The second solution requires the setup of a generic print driver. Windows 7 64-bit isn’t mentioned at all.
To the rescue is David Rasmussen from the Microsoft OneNote team – he’s taken the time to produce an unofficial workaround. Print to OneNote is on the CodePlex site.
Print to OneNote works for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows but is mainly useful for 64-bit machines.
It’s not as elegant as the in-built support – the workaround involves ‘printing’ to an XPS file, saving it to a special folder then choosing a Notebook to save it to.
On the other hand, the add-in lets you choose the scaling of the printed page and the OneNote notebook.
Either way you ‘print’ to OneNote, an image is saved to the Notebook. OneNote has a nifty trick of automatically “OCR’ing” any image to extract text. This makes the image automatically searchable.
The other alternative is to select text from a document or web page and paste it into OneNote.
