Is there any way to connect MS Access with MS One Note

Question

I am developing a solution using Microsoft Access and Microsoft One Note. (Microsoft tools only)

I am using Microsoft One Note as an OCR Tool to extract information (basically text) and I would like to store that information to MS Access database and view it in Access using Access Forms.

I did a lot of research online to understand the questions below:

1. Which is a better Microsoft OCR tool? Microsoft Document Imaging or Microsoft One Note
2. Is there any way to connect MS Access with MS One Note in 2010 and 2013?

Given below is my research: If the OneNote files are stored on a file server or SharePoint page, then you could create file:// URL links within Access to point to each individual *.ONE file.

There is an import API (details here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/onenote/default.aspx ) that was included with OneNote SP1. You or your developers would have to write code to extract data from the Access DB and insert it into a page in OneNote. No interoperability exists by default between OneNote and Access.

This does not provide much information so I would like to get some help from this forum.

Answer 1

The answer to 2) is yes, but you'll have to write a custom tool to join them together.

OneNote has a COM API that can be used to interact with notebook content, so you (or your developer) can use C# or VB to pull out the OCR data using the GetPageContent() method and then parsing the resulting XML. At that point it would then be relatively trivial to write this information to an Access (or any other relational) database.

Of course as with any software development project the devil is in the details. Do you need a custom UI, what other features are required, etc.

It might interest you to see the OCR data. If so download OMSpy and run it on a machine with OneNote installed. Navigate to a page with an image in and press 'Get Content'.

I did this on a screen shot of this page:

...and here's the resulting output:

<one:Outline selected="all" author="Darren Beale" authorInitials="DB" lastModifiedBy="Darren Beale" lastModifiedByInitials="DB" lastModifiedTime="2014-02-03T22:01:32.000Z" objectID="{B9706545-5999-4130-8B3C-4CAC5B4C413E}{29}{B0}">
    <one:Position x="36.0" y="86.4000015258789" z="0" />
    <one:Size width="759.0" height="622.9920043945312" />
    <one:OEChildren selected="partial">
      <one:OE creationTime="2014-02-03T22:01:30.000Z" lastModifiedTime="2014-02-03T22:01:32.000Z" objectID="{B9706545-5999-4130-8B3C-4CAC5B4C413E}{50}{B0}" selected="all" alignment="left">
        <one:Image format="png" selected="all">
          <one:Size width="759.0" height="549.75" isSetByUser="true" />
          <one:CallbackID callbackID="{B9706545-5999-4130-8B3C-4CAC5B4C413E}{49}{B0}" />
          <one:OCRData lang="en-GB">
            <one:OCRText><![CDATA[LJ stackoverf Low
Unanswered
Is there any way to connect MS Access with MS One Note
a I am developing a solution using Microsoft Access and Microsoft One Note. (Microsoft tools only)
I am using Microsoft One Note as an OCR Tool to extract information (basically text) and I would like to
store that information to MS Access database and view it in Access using Access Forms.
I did a lot of research online to understand the questions below:
iagged

As you can see the Outline contains an image which in turn contains an element <one:OCRText> with the CDATA being the extracted information.

Good luck.