Rotate PDF's in OneNote

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.

not a real solution. You should find one as the original OneNote printout is an actual XPS file.

Workaround: copy image from OneNote to Paint. Rotate then copy back.

Omar,

I really like the Onetastic functionality you have created, but most of it really needs to be put in OneNote & supported.  Not only should it be valued more, but many companies do not have permission to install non-MS Add-ins (yes, like mine).  I cannot disagree entirely with them as each request needs to be checked for security and stability reasons and if it is a trusted publisher such as MS there is less concern.

From what you have said it sounds like OneNote is not being funded sufficiently for improvements as it should.  I say this because although some good functionality has been added since 2003, not much has changed, even in the areas that REALLY need to.  If it is being funded as much as it is currently being marketed we would see some huge changes.  This is being done better for the universal app, but unfortunately not for the desktop version (which in my opinion is more useable, stable, and powerful for real note taking).

Thanks for developing the Onetastic workaround, but I really hope MS integrates it into their software along with some other crucial improvements.

Hello, what I did to solve this problem was to convert the pdf file to a powerpoint and then insert the powerpoint as a file printout. This helped solve my problem! Hope this helps! :D

I realize that this is old, but the functionality hasn't been changed. I found a pretty easy solution.

1. Paste the printout of the PDF into your OneNote document. The printout basically creates an image within the document.
2. Select the printout image, and Cut it.
3. Paste it into an image editor. I used IrfanView, which is free.
4. Rotate the image.
5. Crop it if needed.
6. Copy and paste it back into OneNote.

This is a long standing bug in the "Send to OneNote" printer driver and it's about time that Microsoft solves it. Sure, there are numerous workarounds one can use to overcome the problem, but the bottom line is the orientation of the document needs to be automatically detected by the OneNote printer driver.

To illustrate why this has to be solved by Microsoft, consider the following scenario: a MS Word document contains to sections, the first section is in portrait orientation and the second in landscape. If you print this document to PDF using the "Microsoft Print to PDF" printer driver the result is a PDF where all pages are in the correct orientation. 

To print a PDF to OneDrive is no different from printing an MS Word doc to PDF. As such, it is puzzling that Microsoft are able to do this correctly in their PDF driver, but not the print to OneNote driver. You'd think that if this got to the correct folks within Microsoft they could fix it in a heartbeat!