Taking Screenshots and Extracting Text from Images

OneNote has become integral in my day-to-day work. Whether I am doing internal work, work for clients, or, writing a blog. Two of the main features I make use of are OneNote’s screenshot capability, as well as the capability for OneNote to extract text from images.

I regularly show people these things, since they seem to be features people are unaware of, so, I thought I would put together a quick blog post about it.

I was today, going through sites at a customer site, to review them for specific features and functionality. In doing so, I needed a list of those sites, as well as a way to create a checklist of them, so I could keep track of my progress – OneNote provides that solution.

For this example –I will just use the Jornata website.

I first expanded the menu for Products, and took a screenshot of just the products listed. To do this, all you need to do is press Windows Key + S – One Note needs to be open, or, running from the system tray.

And, OneNote will automatically copy this to a previously defined section of my notes (I generally choose Unfiled Notes under my Personal notebook), as well as copy it to my clipboard.

Once it is in OneNote, all toy need to do is right-click on the image, and choose Copy text from Picture

And it will do just that. I can then paste that into a new note in OneNote, and create them as ToDo items, using the appropriate tags. You might need to clean up the text a bit, but, for the most part, it saves a lot of typing of information readily available to you.

Cool, huh? How do you use OneNote? Any features which save your bacon, or make your life easier and more productive each day? Please share!