Rotate PDF's in OneNote

Thanks for the insight into how OneNote works.

It is sad that an individual can do something that MS refuses to do.  I am a programmer, so I do understand the trade off between requirements, time and money. Your "excuse" for MS only goes so far. Sure, they can argue there was not enough time to add the feature for the 2013 release, but in the 6 months (more since it was locked down) since it was released, MS has had time to code, test and roll out the feature as part of a Windows Update.

******

Can you clarify your suggestion

"One suggestion I can give is, instead of using Insert > File Printout, open the file first and then use Print command in the application (e.g. Adobe) and choose your orientation there. This will do the same insertion, but with the correct orientation."

Do you mean, in the PDF reader Print to OneNote with the orientation selected?

Try using "Run As Administrator" to start the installer. That should give it the required rights.

Win 8 - Right click on desktop shortcut, select “run As Admin” from dropdown. On Win8 Start Screen, right click on the “tile” and select “Run As Admin” from the task bar that pops up on bottom of screen Run a Program as Administrator in Win7

**http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/11841-run-administrator.html?ltr=R******

Win 7 Run As Admin tips

What you need to do is "runas admin":

•         Go to the start menu and find the program icon you want to start

·      <Shift> <Right Click> on it

·      Select “Run as …”

If that doesn’t work try this:

•         In the start menu , right click on the shortcut for any Office app, select “RunAs Admin”

•         If runas does not appear, right click and drag the shortcut to the desktop

·      create a shortcut on the desktop.

·      Right click on the desktop shortcut,

·       runas admin should be there.

Activate the application/office:

·    2007 Office button  or 2010/2013 File tab

·      Help

·      Click on “Activate the Application”

·      Follow prompts to enter product key

·      Close the app

·      Restart app normally

Win 7 - 5 ways to Run As Admin - link

***http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/11841-run-administrator.html*******

FYI: for this situation, you can consider Vista and Win7 to be essentially interchangeable with only minor differences between the user interface in the 2 versions.

In Win7, even when you are logged in as administrator, UAC no longer gives you “Full” administrator rights. To get all of the access you now also have “run as administrator”

It appears there is an error where your userid is not being allowed to update the activation information in the registry.

The general process is :

·     Close all of the office apps

·     Start one of the Office apps using any one of the following “run as admin” techniques

·     Activate office

·     Close the app

·     Start it normally, confirm the message has “gone away”

·     If the message is gone, reboot the computer

·     Start the office app again to confirm that the message really is gone for good (was saved in the registry)

Hi Omer,

I have LOTS of University class notes that I need to put in OneNote in layout format. They all get inserted in Portrait format when I use File Printout. I tried your suggestions, but the result were unsuccessful.

Printing to OneNote does not always work. It works when I print to OneNote from a small PDF of 1 or 3 pages, but it does not work when I do it with big PDF of 26 and 64 pages. When I click 'Print' the progress bar loads to 100%, but OneNote fails to open. The only other difference with the bigger PDF is that they are PDF of PowerPoint, but that should not matter since the file format are all PDF. The biggest PDF is only 2.20MB.

Therefore I download your OneTastic on Omeratay. When I click on the application 'OnetasticInstaller' I get the following message "Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permission to access the item.". Then I click OK, and get the following error "Window cannot complete the installation. The destination file could not be created.".

I own a brand new Surface Pro, I am the only user on that PC, and I have downloaded other program without permission issues.

I also used Adobe Acrobat XI Pro to rotate the PDF and save them in layout format. That did not work.

Do you have any suggestion for what to do, or other options to get my PDF rotated in OneNote?

Thanks,

Francis

Hello Omer,

First, thank you for your refreshingly candid reply.  I certainly understand the trade-offs associated with prioritizing (sorry, that's not unique to the engineering field), and appreciate your add-on.  I also have extensive experience and understanding of users' experiences with technology, which unfortunately some engineers don't always acknowledge, or frankly care about.   Each time a user gets stymied by a feature that doesn't work the way it seems like it should, it makes acceptance and use of that product a greater challenge.  As I am training 300 employees to use OneNote (only 1 or 2 had ever used it before), to use in the classroom with 3,000 students, simple things like file printouts being inserted sideways, and not being able to rotate them, make them lose confidence and excitement for the product.

I appreicate the work-arounds you suggested, but if something doesn't work the way it should, why not just remove it until it does?

Thanks,

Eric

Hi ejlev, I am the developer of Onetastic addin and also a developer in the Microsoft OneNote team.

To explain the situation a bit, when you insert a PDF file into OneNote, you are actually printing it, that is why it is called "File Printout". OneNote does not know anything about the PDF file format (or other files that you are inserting through File Printout command). The way it ends up in OneNote is that OneNote invokes a "print" command on the file which launches the application that is registered for the file format (in this case Adobe Reader) which then prints it to OneNote. The registered application decides which orientation the page should be printed. The result of the printing is a bunch of images in OneNote which we call "printouts".

OneNote has a rotate feature for images, but not for printouts. Printouts work differently then images so the image rotate feature doesn't work on printouts. OneNote has to do something different to handle the case of printouts, which it isn't doing. Why is this feature missing? Well, it was missing in 2010, and I don't know why because I wasn't part of the OneNote team back then. We tried to bring this to 2013 but the issue was a bit complicated and we didn't have enough time to solve it completely and properly. Therefore it was left out. You see when you spend time on one feature, you can't spend that time on another. So you have to prioritize your work and spend your time on the most important things. You may call this as "the MS engineers just get too tired to include this very basic, totally necessary feature", but engineering is a trade off. I wish we had all the necessary features for our customers, but at the same time we have to stop somewhere to be able to ship the software. 

After we ended up not doing this for 2013, I decided to write an add-in for this and give it away freely. This was actually how I started working on Onetastic.

One suggestion I can give is, instead of using Insert > File Printout, open the file first and then use Print command in the application (e.g. Adobe) and choose your orientation there. This will do the same insertion, but with the correct orientation.

Let me know if you have further questions. I know that what I tried to explain won't help with your frustration of not having this built-in. Hopefully you like Onetastic.