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Include OneNote in Start menu search results - WDS OneNote

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If you are using Vista you might have fallen in love with the new start menu which automatically includes Windows Desktop Search results when you search for something.  This enables you to search for programs, files and emails all from the same place.  The other day the OneNote PMs where in a meeting and someone said that they didn't see OneNote hits in the search menu results and I told them that this wasn't the case as I use it all of the time.  We I found the difference, I had changed a start menu search option which included the OneNote files and by default the option was set differently.  I wanted to share this with you all, here is how to set this up:

Include OneNote hits in Vista start menu search results:

  1. Right-click on the taskbar and choose properties:
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  2. Start Menu tab and then the “Customize..” button
  3. Scroll down to “Search files” and set it to “Search entire index”
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  4. Click Ok & Ok.
  5. Success!

For example I have an ING Direct account and I never remember my account number so I just type this into the search results and hit enter:

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Enjoy!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 05, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2007
    Do you use the Windows Desktop Search from the Start Menu in Vista? Wondering how to get OneNote data

  • Anonymous
    August 12, 2007
    It's getting hard to keep blogging about OneNote in detail now that I am no longer on the team, but I

  • Anonymous
    August 12, 2007
    It's getting hard to keep blogging about OneNote in detail now that I am no longer on the team, but

  • Anonymous
    August 12, 2007
    It's getting hard to keep blogging about OneNote in detail now that I am no longer on the team, but

  • Anonymous
    November 10, 2007
    Is there an equivalent to solve this issue with WDS 3.01 on XP?  I'm only getting Outlook showing up in my WDS search from the desktop (although WDS seems to be indexing OneNote fine as I can search for OneNote stuff from within OneNote.  Just not from the desktop search bar. I just posted a question to microsoft.public.onenote, to see if anyone has the answer... http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.onenote/browse_thread/thread/5c81cc03f52389bb/7be19a853ca74979#7be19a853ca74979 Andy.

  • Anonymous
    June 03, 2008
    Thanks for posting this, I wonder why "search entire index" isn't a default setting in vista? Cheers, Nick

  • Anonymous
    July 31, 2008
    Aha! That's it! I was wondering why searching from the Start menu didn't bring up obvious results when searching for, say, an mp3 file. I always had to select "Search everywhere" in order to get search to bring up these sorts of results. This little change makes all the difference in the world.

  • Anonymous
    June 14, 2010
    Well, I do not know if this is a closed issue. The start menu search on my Vista Home Premium is not finding all the pages in OneNote. It finds the pages that are under the tabs that OneNote came with. It seems to be blind to only those pages under the tabs created by me. I am the only user and also administrator on the computer. The "Search Files" in Customization under the Start Menu properties is set to "search this user's files". So what could be wrong? Thanks for any help.