By Ron Grattopp 
….OK, so I’m a die-hard OneNote user – it’s probably more important to my daily productivity than any other app – and from way back I’ve used the Win+S shortcut to get screen clips from web pages and other screen shots that I use in documents (including this blog). In fact, the Win+S screen clip into OneNote integration was always the show stopper Office demo that I could count on to get an audience reaction and folks always wanted to know “how’d you do that?”; plus I’d say it’s the productivity tip I use the most on a daily basis. Hopefully it’s a pretty well-known productivity tip now. So, a few weeks back I got a new Surface Pro and have just updated it with the Windows 8.1 Preview bits in preparation for my next round of LAR partner training. And that’s where the subject of this post comes in.
I’m doing a new blog series on Windows 8.1 features and as I was getting that ready, I wanted to get a screenshot of the new Search UI. No problem, I thought, just Win-Q to bring up the Search charm and then do the obligatory Win+S to grab the screenshot. So I do Win+S and nothing happens. Well, it turns out one of the changes in Windows 8.1 that I had not heard about is that it’s taken over the Win+S key combo to launch search –- sure Win+Q or just typing on the Start screen still brings it up as well, but now Win+S adds another option, but at the expense of OneNote screen clipping. Well, I then leveraged Lync (with SharePoint integration) to search for OneNote expertise and lo and behold found a couple of internal aliases that looked promising. I found out that indeed, Win+S had been taken over by Windows 8.1 search but they also pointed me to their blog which reveals a handy workaround, check it out at: Windows 8.1 Preview and a workaround for your favorite Win+S shortcut key. As they point out in the blog, the new OneNote shortcut key will be Windows+Shift+S, but this won't be available until later in the year as an update. Also, as you will find out in their blog post the workaround, no surprise here, is a registry hack that essentially adds a ScreenClippingShortcutKey value (which their example sets for Win+A, but you could research and use a different value if you’d like). I already like the new Win+A since it’s the very next key to S, simple (2-key combo), and same distance or less from the Windows key, and otherwise normally unused, and of course, I can keep this combo even after the update to Windows 8.1 officially changes the OneNote clipping shortcut to the 3-key version. If you’re a OneNote aficionado like me, and already on Win8.1, then you’ve probably already ran across this change, but like me perhaps you didn’t think to check out the OneNote team blog and avail yourself of this great workaround.
So now you know, and cheers, as always,
Ron
btw, if the title confused you, since the Win-S shortcut still works fine for OneNote in Windows 8, I was anticipating that everyone using Windows 8 will be updating to Windows 8.1 (and sooner vs later), so this is intended as a heads-up. As I mentioned in the article, for those already on Win8.1 and using OneNote, I’m sure they’ve already run across it but hopefully it might help some of them as well.