I love the “Send to OneNote” application that sits running in the taskbar once OneNote is opened.

1. With a simple click of the icon (or by using the Windows & N shortcut) you can
2. Start a screen clipping to capture any part of the screen
3. Send a printout of the entire document in the current application (only works for Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Internet Explorer) to OneNote or
4. Open a new “Quick note” – effectively a tiny square a paper that hovers over your current workspace and gets stored in your Quick Notes folder in OneNote

Each of these are really useful, especially when using your Tablet PC without the keyboard attached.

But I want more!  I image a world where the Send to OneNote application has two more options:

The first is the ability to capture the full screen with a click of the stylus (with no keyboard attached) – its just not easy to select the full screen with the screen clipping tool!  On a Surface Pro 3 you can do this with the keyboard disconnected using Windows & Volume Down – but it only works on the Surface (which I have, so it may seem kind of strange that I’m kind of complaining about this!).  For completeness, with the keyboard attached you can take a screenshot using the shortcut Fn & Space.

The second is something I’m referring to as Glass Mode (this is available already in some whiteboard software). This has the effect of a sheet of glass over the screen, enabling you to write anywhere, over the entire application that is currently in focus.  It would need a floating drawing toolbar so that different pens could be chosen, and a button to end glass mode – this would then result in the option to save the annotations, or discard them – Saving them would take a full screenshot and store it in your OneNote.

The use case for this full screen annotation over an application is for instruction on how to complete a task, how to use a piece of software, or in the case of a video (either playing or captured from a webcam live) annotating the either moving or still picture for discipline instructional purposes.  To make it even cooler, there would a slider for the annotation “stay time” – by default they would all just stay, but when annotating over a video you would be able to select that they disappear by magic after time x – 10 seconds, 15 seconds etc.

There is a work around at the moment, that involves capturing the full screen with FN & Space, or by selecting the whole screen when making a screen clipping, and then annotating over this within OneNote.  It’s not slick though, with wasted screen real estate, and certainly won’t cope with video.

So there you have it – Send to OneNote, as it is and as it could be 🙂