"Insert link to file"- where did this go?

Anonymous
2013-02-06T22:04:23+00:00

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....

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneNote | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2014-05-29T21:14:33+00:00

    Yes, or you could even just hit ctrl-k to open the same dialog, paste in a copied path to the file, and give it a name.  Linking to files still exists.  But this is not the problem.

    The problem is that Microsoft removed the ability to easily create one or several links to files by dragging the files from file explorer onto a page.  This was an option alongside inserting a printout of the file onto the page, or a copy of the file into the page.  It is much, much faster to simply drag a selection of, say, 17 files from explorer to create 17 links than it is to manually create links to the files each and every time.

    This isn't a matter of asking for some new, impossible and difficult feature.  This was a feature of all previous versions of Onenote before 2013.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-05-30T15:37:47+00:00

    Let me at first declare that I don't want to defend this design decision by MS ;-)

    But I think the reason behind is the resulting trouble from creating links to local files in a notebook which resides on Onedrive.

    These local links work only for the creating user. Not for any other user who shares this notebook.

    Bernd

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-07-03T12:08:45+00:00

    Hi Omer

    Is there any progress with this? I would really like to be able to click and drag folders and files to create shortcuts in my notes.

    Your workaround wouldn't be too bad with low volume but with high volume, removing the quotation marks really make it problematic and long winded.

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-07-08T20:55:33+00:00

    We seem to have waited 18 months with no reply from Microsoft regarding whether they are actually considering this? I'm disappointed with this lack of response. If it is not going to happen - for whatever reason that information would be helpful, actually any response from Microsoft would be welcome. As it is I'm hanging on using second rate work arounds - something I'm not used to doing with Microsoft products.

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  5. Anonymous
    2014-07-09T08:04:52+00:00

    Maybe they prefer that people go to Evernote...

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