Not too long ago I started using OneNote for organizing documents, thoughts, presentations, plans, and notes. I know it’s been out for more than a little while, and I’ve not been using it for long, but I’ve been rather impressed so far…

So I got to thinking – is there an app for my smartphone that would let me use OneNote on my phone? Sure enough, a quick Google search later and I discovered Microsoft already thought of that. So I dug out my USB cable for my phone and found the installation instructions. They’re rather straight forward –

  1. From OneNote, Click the tools menu
  2. Select Options
  3. Select OneNote Mobile
  4. Click “Install OneNote Mobile…”

In theory, as long as you have a device supporting ActiveSync 4.5, it should work fine. Except mine didn’t. ActiveSync gave me an error:

“Error Copying File

Cannot copy the file. Make sure the mobile device is connected, that the mobile device has space available and is not write protected, and that all setup programs on the device have been completed.”

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I checked the device space – 12mb free (the app is about 600k), checked any other setup programs – nothing.  Rebooted the phone.  Rebooted my computer.  After every step, the programs listing within ActiveSync have the program listed, but not selected. Every time I rechecked it for installation and synched, I got the same error, and no application.

For Office 2007 users with OneNote, the mobile program gets installed by way of a .cab file. A quick search of “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\” for *.cab yielded:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\1033\OneNoteMobile.CAB

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So, quick and easy fix: copy this cab file to the mobile phone (I put it on my storage card), use File Explorer to select it, and run the installer (the .cab file). It installed pdq, and presto – I have OneNote Mobile.

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