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I'm an attorney, and I created a great litigation and trial-management system using only OneNote. We put it to use in a large "mass action" case with over fifty plaintiffs and tens of thousands of exhibits. The system allowed us to completely outmaneuver the plaintiffs at trial, and we were able to line up exhibits, deposition citations, and both direct and cross examination questions from a single program. We all credit a great deal of our defense verdict to the system.
The key feature that let us build the various pages for trial quickly was the ability to drag and drop exhibit pdfs into the onenote pages as links to files. Due to the sheer volume of exhibits, as well as the ease of using tables, links were far more effective than inserting the files directly, and certainly more effective than inserting printouts.
With OneNote 2013, this mission-critical feature appears to be missing. I can only insert the file, or insert a printout. I don't want to do either- I want to insert a link. I know that I can insert links using the manual "insert link" function, but that is slower and more error prone than the simplicity of the previous versions. Am I missing a key option to trigger? Or is this a missing feature from OneNote 2013? If the latter, I suspect we will stick with 2010....
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Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
One of the simple powerful features of Microsoft Windows and related programs has almost ALWAYS been the ability to drag and drop files. It's just beyond belief that you don't have the option to insert a link to a file by dragging and dropping it.
I still don't get why this is still an issue.
If I drag a file in that's in my OneDrive for Business folder, or on a sharepoint server, OneNote should create a real URL link to the file (not to the local copy on my PC, or worse to a duplicate); so that I can access it from wherever I can get to the OneNote file.
That's brilliant! This is now my method of choice. Thank you!
I use OneNote 2010at work and 2013 at home and it is frustrating that the linking to files in 2013 has been made more difficult.
The way I do it in 2013 is the following:
Click on the file in it's original location.
Drag and drop it onto the OneNote page and select "Attach File".
(This creates an unlinked copy in OneNote)
Right Click on the copy in OneNote and select "Copy Link to Original"
Right Click on the OneNote page and select "Paste"
This creates a link to the original file.
The copy can then be deleted.
As other contibutors have stated, there are other methods but I find this the quickest and easiest.
Provided the other users have access to the folder that the original is stored in, the link should work for them too.
If you are seeing the message "An unexpected error has occured" then either the user in question has no access to the folder or there is something wrong with the path in the link.
You can check the path by Right Clicking the link and selecting "Edit Link"
I use a shared notebook at work. While both of these methods work for links that are created by each user, individual users cannot access links created by others. Some methods used to create a link to the original file cause an error message to pop up stating, "An unexpected error has occurred." Any method used that actually allows a file to be opened is only opening a copy of the file, not the original file on the network drive. This causes issues with file updates for users that do not have access to the notebook. Are there any workarounds that allow for a clickable link to the original file for all users of the notebook?