OneNote >> DTPO/DTTG

DEVONthink Tips
1

Hello all,

Not really sure where to put this - but since I’m not suggesting anything per se, figured rather here!

I’ve been a fairly long-term user of MS OneNote. Before transitioning to the Mac at the office as well at the beginning of this year, OneNote and its tight integration with Outlook on the PC, offered me the cleanest/most efficient manner of spanning the divide btw my work related material, and the PC/Mac.

With OneNote, I could sync to my Mac using the latter’s native app, and have same available on my phone and tablet.

With my now moving everything over to Mac, the friction of this workflow has risen exponentially.

** There is zero integration between Outlook Mac and OneNote Mac at the moment. Whereas I can drag/drop an email from Outlook into ON - it doesn’t display the actual text of the email, and merely serves as a link back to the email in question.

Over on iOS, I cannot see the email at all, since it obviously cannot open the quickview there, without access to Outlook/Mail.app.

As a result, I need to import a PDF fileprint-out the mail in question, to be able to view the text on iOS and in ON Mac. This involves several steps of Printing/Exporting said email as a PDF to a particular location, and then - over in ON again, importing same as a PDF.

When compared to the tool-bar click & location select that the same process involved over on the PC, the difference is annoying.

My solution would be two-fold:

Use Outlook for meetings/related features that it offers over that of Mail.app, and then use the latter in those instances where I need to get the clients email into their “file”.
Those client-“files” are currently housed inside OneNote.

Therefore, stop using OneNote, and have everything done inside DTPO. I could then use Mail.app and its integration with DTPO, to throw those client-related emails into the relevant client-group inside DTPO.

When DTTG2 sees the light of day, I would presumably be able to sync only that Client-Group to my iPhone and iPP - since it’s purely the client-files that I need to access when away from the Mac.

Based on what I have been reading about DTTG2 - this looks like a very likely possibility.
I’m hoping it will be robust enough to allow for editing/additions to the DTTG2 client-files, and allow that to be synced back to DTPO.

So…

Replicate/re-create what is in my 6gb ON workbook, inside DTPO.
Upon DTTG2’s arrival - all is golden.

Since there isn’t going to be a magic-bullet that does anything like this automagically, it will force me to remove the cruft as well, and set things up right from the get-go. So there’s that…

The ON pages contain mixtures of the occasional screen-grab, of websites or website articles (clipped from the web), text that I have input into text-boxes, and then (mostly) related email correspondence - dating back 4/5 years in some instances…

My query:

I’m guessing that there might be many DTPO users who also have ON within their daily workflow-sphere - who with the imminent arrival of DTTG2 are considering moving everything into DTPO (similarly for Evernote)…

Would love to hear some thoughts from DTPO users who, like me, are going to have to make the transition in the next few months/year/arrival of DTTG2…

a.) Are you going-all in - as in, try to get everything that is in ON over to DTPO?
b.) Or are you going to run both in the transition phase >> ON for the historical data that is already in it, and then gradually build-up DTPO with ‘new’ material?

I’m leaning towards the latter - there would be ‘clients’ that I am working with now, that are currently ‘inside’ ON >> will probably move them across, and leave the rest where they are…

It promises to be a PITA, but will no doubt be worth it in the long-run… That said, going to be a process of note! :confused:

2

Due to the lateness of OneNote’s appearance on the Mac, I am guessing there are few ON Users. (Evernote’s a different story.)

Though I don’t have your particular situation, my working philosophy for a large project like this is to take what’s critical first, then continue as needed or in down-times (which we usually have very little of).

3

I use OneNote and Outlook extensively for a client who is totally non-Mac – both in the Windows realm. I collect emails and documents in notebooks. I sync certain OneNote notebooks to my OneDrive account, and access those thru OneNote on my Mac running in a Windows 10 VM under Parallels. Unfortunately, OneNote on the Mac and OneNote in Office 365 online do not have the same features that OneNote for Windows has. It’s just not worth using OneNote Mac because of that. But OneNote iPad is useful for accessing those synced NoteBooks.

The glue I use for file sharing is the OneDrive account, which is accessible in the Windows VM and on the Mac side, and I index folders in DEVONthink.

I suppose DTTG 2 would be useful for this – not for me, but maybe for your workflow – but I’d caution you to check it out when it’s released before making decisions about major workflow changes that might involve data migration.

I don’t see how Evernote would be helpful here at all.

4

Thanks for the above.

Had a closer look at OneDrive – didn’t realise it had a MAS app - but will need to play around with it a bit more. Seems currently to only have some sort of link to my ON workbooks, which when selected, opens the online version of ON for those corresponding workbooks and pages. [Spent a few seconds thinking I could simply clip those webpages into DTPO as PDFs, only to be (understandably) blocked by the password wall. If push comes to shove, could use KM et al to assist ‘automating’ a ‘ON-print-page-to-pdf-and-save-in-DTPO-inbox’ scenario.]

Regardless, will have to think a bit about how to set things up - and certainly good advice to wait for DTTG2 before doing anything too radical.

That said, a large part of my current frustration stems from the lack of features/integration between Outlook and ON - and wanting to improve that side of things. I jumped over to the Mac with the work stuff to leverage the productivity power of Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, Textexpander, Alfred, Default Folder X etc., and to be met with almost more friction (given it was essentially a Windows-based ‘workflow system’), has taken a bit of the wind out of the proverbial sails, so to speak.

Think I will go the manner advocated by Jim, slow and steady, and work out what works along the way – before committing to any major overhaul. Remains useful to get feedback on these things, so thanks again.