SAP Note Highlighting

You’ve probably been in this situation before.
You have a SAP note open in your web browser, which itself has many SAP notes mentioned in it. Sometimes the same SAP notes are mentioned more than once inside the note you have open.
How can you easily see which notes you have already accessed?

In this post I show how the use of a free browser plugin can help significantly in the daily grind of SAP note browsing.

This is the follow-on post to these previous posts, as part of series showing the plugin’s features:

Installing the Plugin (Extension) in Your Browser

You will need my free Google Chrome (and Microsoft Edge) plugin installed (Power Notes Searcher for SAP) in your browser.

If you have note done so already, install the plugin (extension) from the Chrome Web Store (use the link above), then click the “Add to Chrome” (or Edge) button:

Once installed, if you don’t see the plugin icon on the Chrome menu bar (top-right), then you may need to “pin” it (it depends on your version of Chrome):

Now the plugin is installed you may be wondering about security:

The plugin can access content on pages located at: https://*.sap.com, https://*.sap-ag.de and https://*.sap-ag.com.
It can create context menus (right click menus) on the above pages/sites.
It can create new tabs and update existing tab locations.
It stores your SAP note search history locally in your browser.
It allows you to copy note details to the clipboard, but it doesn’t read from the clipboard.
It can manipulate the HTTP headers during a PDF download in order to adjust the filename (a really nice feature).
It does not record your data for any use other than for use with the tool.
It does not send any of your data to anywhere else other than local storage in your browser.
You will still need to log into the above sites using your usual secure method (the plugin does not interfere with that secure process).

Highlight Note Numbers in Chrome & Edge

First we need to ensure that the plugin option to highlight note numbers is turned on.
Open the plugin (extension) by clicking the plugin icon in your browser (note you may need to “pin” it to the bar from the “manage extensions” section of the browser settings), then select the “Options…” link:

Make sure that “Highlight note numbers” it ticked:

Now you are ready to use the feature.
As an example, here is a SAP note:

At the top of the page is the note header with the note number highlighted in green.
It is in green because I’m currently reading that note. The plugin has highlighted it green.
At the bottom are 3 more SAP notes highlighted in yellow.
They are yellow because I have not accessed those notes yet.

TIP: Another feature of the plugin is that all highlighted note numbers can be double-clicked to open, whether they are actual links or not.

If I double-click one of the yellow notes to open it (note 2055470 from the screenshot), then go back to the original note and refresh the page, you will see that the yellow highlighted note I opened at the bottom, has now turned green:

It is green because I have just accessed that note.
If I hover the mouse pointer over the note number, the Power Notes Searcher for SAP plugin tells me when I accessed it:

You can see that if you have a large list of SAP notes on a page, it would be extremely easy to work through them, refresh the source page and see which ones you have not yet accessed.

Where Are These Notes Stored?

The note history is stored in the browser and can be accessed by opening the main Power Notes Searcher for SAP plugin popup in the top right of the browser window:

You can see in the above screenshot that your accessed notes history is stored in chronological order of access date/time.

If you click the “Export…” link at the bottom of the popup window, you will get the full history list which can be copied and pasted into Word or Excel.

If you click the “Clear History…” link, well, then you erase the entire history list and all note highlights will revert back to yellow until you access them again.

Turning off Highlighting of Note Numbers

If you wish to turn off this really great feature, you can simply disable the setting in the plugin options area:

Any Other Features?

There are a whole host of features in the plugin.
There is even the ability to create a cookie trail that shows which notes you accessed from which other notes (for those times when you get to a great note but forget how you got there).

FInd out more about other great features in my other posts here: