If, like me, you’re a fan of the “For Dummies” line of books, you might want to check them out online. The dummies.com website has a lot of tips from their books available for reading online. If you’re not sure if a particular Dummies book has what you want, you can check it out in advance before plunking down your money. That’s especially helpful if you’re buying your books online, as opposed to visiting your local brick-and-mortar bookstore and looking at the book first-hand.
//Steve//
Something I've found useful when capturing a bunch of web-based data to OneNote is to use a dual-monitor ("extended desktop") configuration. My notebook does a nice job of supporting this setup. I put OneNote on the 2nd monitor, and use the main monitor to view web pages in Internet Explorer 8.
Why do I mention this? Because sometimes it takes a moment or two for a web page to be copied to OneNote, and I can't really proceed to the next page until it's done. Being able to see both applications helps me keep track of what's happening.
Also, I've found that it works MUCH faster, and preserves the formatting better, to select the text on the web page that I want to copy to OneNote rather than just capturing the entire page. Doing the latter causes the data to be put up in a series of tables, and the formatting gets skewed pretty badly sometimes. Not always, but sometimes. The process takes about a third of the time if I select just what I want to capture, rather than doing the whole page. To do this, select the section of data you wish to capture, then right-click on the selected information and choose “Send to OneNote” at the bottom of the menu.
Finally, if the web page you're capturing has a "print" option -- one that changes the data layout to a printer-compatible format, rather than just invoking the IE "print" command -- it's much easier to capture the information. A good example of a website that works well in this regard is the “For Dummies” site. Take, for example, the following page:
It looks like this:
If you click the “Print” item here:
you get a format that’s much more conducive to capturing to OneNote:
With this format, even capturing the whole page works very quickly.
I’d love to hear from other OneNote users who have interesting tips to share. Drop me a note in email to steve.silverwood@gmail.com with your ideas and I’ll be happy to post them here.
//Steve//
Just read this on The Onion:
New College Graduates To Be Cryogenically Frozen Until Job Market Improves
Reminds me of some pundits talking back during the big “Y2K” crisis that we all should consider taking the few remaining COBOL programmers and cryogenically preserving them for the time of the “Y10K” crisis so that there would be someone on tap to fix COBOL applications when that problem comes up…. 
That’s the title of the email I just received. Here is a copy of the content:
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We all need to do our own part by abiding in God and living according to His standards – not the corrupt standards of this world or the eroded standards of our once-great country! Then we need to register our important votes in the November elections for candidates that are like-minded and committed to the kind of change that will get our nation back on track.
Please join us in prayer for our country and seek God’s face and His wisdom and guidance in these difficult days.
Gotta love it!
OK, I’ve finally gone and done it. I’ve made the switch permanently (as much as anything is “permanent” 
) from Internet Explorer 8 to the Google Chrome web browser.
The one thing holding me back was the lack of support (either built-in or provided by a third-party add-in) for sending the contents of a web page to Microsoft OneNote. I pretty much live in two applications: Outlook and OneNote. Anything I think I’m going to refer to in the future gets stuck in a OneNote page. OneNote indexes everything, enabling me to do a keyword search on the entire OneNote database for anything I’ve stored there. Technical information, personal projects – heck, even stuff for my ham radio, shortwave and stamp collecting hobbies! – can be easily searched for and retrieved on a moment’s notice.
One thing I do frequently is send information from a web page to OneNote, but I couldn’t do that in Google Chrome until a gentleman by the name of Eugene Rosenfeld came up with a two-step process that gets the job done. In an article here, Mr. Rosenfeld shows that by using the “IE Tab” add-on to read the current page using Internet Explorer’s rendering engine, right-clicking within the page can send the contents of that page to OneNote. It’s a hack, but it’s a very, very good hack!
Since Google Chrome operates – in my personal experience – about 10 times faster than Internet Explorer 8, this saves a lot of time!
See the following locations on the Web for more information about the products mentioned in this article:
Disclaimer: As I’ve emphasized in many a blog posting in the past, I am not an employee of either Microsoft or Google. (I wouldn’t mind working for either, but that’s another story. ) I have no financial or any other connection with either company, nor do I receive any compensation – financial or otherwise – from either for praising their products online.
This past Sunday something came up in conversation that I hadn’t thought about for some time. A friend at church recently had to change her email address because she changed Internet providers at home. I’ve taken my GMail and other accounts for granted over the years, but this reminded me of why I have those other accounts, and not just the one from my Internet Service Provider (ISP).
Here’s the thing: if you only have the email account from your ISP, and you change ISPs, you have to do all sorts of extra work…
…and so on. And you have to do this every single time you change ISPs. In my friend’s case, it was because she switched from Time-Warner Cable to Verizon’s FiOS fiber-optic service. But it could be for whatever reason: moving to a new location that isn’t served by your previous ISP, for example.
Now, if you have an email account that’s independent of your ISP – Google GMail, for example – then you’re spared the inconvenience of having to go through all that hassle. No matter who your ISP is, your GMail account remains the same. Have all of your online subscriptions, emails from your friends, online utilities, all of that stuff sent to your GMail account, and if or when you need to change ISPs you don’t have to do a thing.
It sounds completely obvious, but I’m betting there are a lot of people out there who go through this whole process, completely unaware of the advantage of using an ISP-independent email address, hence this post. Heck, I may even put the URL for this blog item on my business card…! 
//Steve//
