Store any web page in OneNote with one click using OneNote Clip

Another nice new feature introduced in OneNote which is useful while browsing on the desktop or tablet. OneNote Clip allows you to send screenshots of the entire web page to OneNote in one click.

Lot of browsing is needed

Researching or work specific exploration are two common business needs for browsing. On personal front, job search, recipes, academic activities require extensive browsing.

Procurement, Recruitment, Investment Analysis, Competitor Analysis and many other activities require visiting specific pages and remembering them for later reference.

How do you remember browsed pages?

If the page is interesting, you need to store it somehow for future use. Three possibilities.

1. Add to favorites or bookmarks. Problem is that notes about the link cannot be stored.
2. Use Linked Notes in OneNote to have notes which refer to the page.
3. Copy paste information into some other application like Word and also copy paste the link so that we can go back to the page at a later date
4. Copy and paste from the browser page into OneNote and the content as well as the link is automatically pasted
5. and now a new method called OneNote clipper is added

What does OneNote Clip Option do?

This works by adding a button to your Windows based browsers. Click on that button to capture the image of the current page shown in the browser to your default OneNote location.

The text contained in the image is searchable. Which is a great facility to have when you want to refer to some interesting page saved long back.

Step One: Install OneNote Clip

Browse to this site from the browser you use. You will see the installation instructions. Installation is very easy.

You display the favorites / bookmarks bar in the browser. The exact steps are shown on the web page. Drag the Clip to OneNote button to the bookmarks bar. It stays there.

It stays there as a button Clip to OneNote.

Sometimes you may get a warning about trusting the site. Click Yes.

Works with IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

Step Two : Use OneNote Clipper

When you are browsing any page which you want to archive for future use, just click on the Clip to OneNote button. You need to sign in to your Microsoft account (Hotmail, Outlook, Live, OneDrive) to use the OneNote clip option.

Now you confirm the save.

Saving progress is shown in a message. Long, complex pages may take significant time to save.

Here I am trying to clip the home page of this blog… http://efficiency365.wordpress.com

If you click on the OneNote button, it will open the equivalent page in OneNote. Unfortunately, this has no practical use because we are already on the live page. The only reason this is useful is to find out where it was saved in your OneNote. More on it below…

What is saved?

An image of the page is saved. This image is of the entire page is saved. This can be a long and big image for complex pages. For example, blog pages are usually very long.

Where is it stored?

It is stored as a new page in your default OneNote notebook – which is called Personal (web) in your OneDrive (earlier known as SkyDrive). This notebook is automatically created when you sign in to OneDrive (SkyDrive) for the first time.

This notebook has a section called Quick Notes. The clipped page will appear under this section.

At the bottom of the picture of the page, the original URL is automatically posted.

Pages can be very long. Therefore, many users may never look at the bottom of the page to notice that the original URL is available. Logically, the link should be either in the beginning or the page itself should be the link. I have already posted this as a suggestion to Microsoft.

You can search for text within this picture

Yes. That is true. What is the point in having a big image if you cannot find text in it? You might as well have pasted the browser link and typed notes manually or copy pasted some text content.

This one is better. You can search for the text in the page. I tried it on browsers but it did not work for me.

Connect to all devices

You may browse and capture important web pages on-the-go while traveling. When back in Office you may want to study these pages in greater detail on your PC. All this is easily possible by setting up synchronization of OneDrive Personal notebook with all the devices you have.

Connect this Personal notebook to your Desktop by choosing the button Open in OneNote

Once the notebook is synchronized, you can view and edit it from browser as well as your PC or laptops.

Similarly you can download OneNote on your mobile devices from here. Android, iOs, iPhone, Windows Phone are supported.

Which method to use when?

If you want to just remember the URL, use Favorites or copy paste the link into OneNote.

If you want to write your own comments about a web page and also want to remember the link, then used Linked Notes in OneNote (we will cover this in the next article).

If you want to copy paste part of the content from the web page, paste it into OneNote. It will automatically paste the link as well.

If you want the page itself for future reference, use OneNote Clipper.

Try this out and let me know your feedback.

OneNote is available for FREE on all devices

In case you did not know this. You can download it from here.