note Archives » Musings of an IT Implementor

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:

You may also be interested in:

Easy SAP Note Opening

In a previous post about one of the great time-saving features of my free Power Notes Searcher browser extension for Chromium based browsers, I showed how to auto-save a SAP note to PDF with the note title and version as the PDF file name.

In this post, I’m going to show you another great set of features related to opening SAP notes.

The Power Note Searcher has a massive 6 methods to open a SAP note, depending on how the note number(s) is/are input. Let’s go through each of them. I think you’re going to like this.

1. Enter a Note Number in the Popup

The first method is the simplest. You just enter the note number directly into the extension popup by clicking the extension icon in the browser toolbar, enter the note number and ticking “Open note number(s)“:

Notice that we specifically have text that says “number(s)”. This is because in the input box you can enter upto 10 note numbers separated by spaces, and Power Notes Searcher will open all 10 in new tabs:

A great tip, is that you can just paste text into this note number input box, and the extension will parse upto 10 note numbers directly out of the text. Any text, copied from anywhere!

2. Open Notes by Typing in the Omnibox

In Google Chrome, the Omnibox is the search text input, the URL display, the command entry box. It’s the all-in-one text entry area where a web page URL is usually displayed.

The Power Notes Searcher lets you open multiple note numbers from this omnibox using the keyword “note” followed by a space or tab.

Enter “note”:

Enter a tab or a space and the Power Notes Searcher extension is activated and ready to receive the space separated list of upto 10 note numbers:

3. Double Clicking Highlighted Note Numbers

When you have the Power Notes Searcher “Highlight Note Numbers” option turned on, then note numbers (or what are perceived as note numbers) on the SAP note pages and also in the note search results pages, are highlighted in Yellow (unread), and Green (read and in the history list):

Even though these are not hyperlinks, the Power Notes Searcher allows you to double click on them to open them in a new tab. How cool is that!

4. Highlighting Numbers and Opening

Another method to open multiple notes, is to highlight any note numbers on any page (any web page on the internet), then with the numbers highlighted, right click to open the Power Notes Searcher context menu, and select “Open note:”:

A great tip on this feature, you can just highlight the whole text including the note number and the extension will parse upto 10 note numbers.

You will also notice the “Parse note numbers to clipboard” menu item. This allows you to highlight any text on any web page and extract upto 10 note numbers directly out of the text and places them into the clipboard:

5. Open Notes from History

You will notice the SAP notes that you have opened, are recorded in the Power Notes Searcher history list, sorted in descending accessed date/time order:

Clicking the note number will open the link. Clicking the PDF icon will open the PDF version of the note.

Hint: There are a number of other hidden features on the popup, which I will run through on another post.

6. Open Notes from History Export

The final method of opening SAP notes in the Power Notes Searcher, is from the history export.

With the popup open, click the “Export…” link in the bottom left:

The export page opens. The export page has been designed so that you can highlight the whole list and copy to clipboard for pasting directly into Excel:

This concludes our journey around some of the features of the Power Notes Searcher. There are a few more features (as if that lot wasn’t enough) which I will run through on another blog post.

As a parting reminder, if you find the tool useful, please leave a review on the Google Extensions page and share the usefulness with your SAP colleagues.

As a reminder, here’s the link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/power-notes-searcher/djddlngbcgphkahmilapbfppblobpkfm

Enjoy!

Always Save a Copy of a SAP Note

You know what happens, you find a SAP note, make a note of it and then continue through your day.
Next day, you go back to that SAP note and instead you get:

Nooooooo!

You should always save a copy of a SAP note. You can do this by downloading the PDF version of the note if you think the note is relevant to what you’re working on.
Downloading the PDF version of the SAP note means you will get a PDF file with the name of the file being just the note number.
That’s not really helpful if you download a lot of SAP notes in a day.

Instead, what you really need is a tool that allows you to automatically apply the SAP note title to the name of the downloaded PDF.

Well, it just so happens that my free Chromium extension for Google Chrome and the new Chromium based Edge browser, can do exactly that!

With the extension installed in your browser, simply right click a SAP note page and select “Power Notes Searcher -> Auto-save note as PDF”:

It is downloaded and named accordingly, even including the version of the SAP note in the file name:

It couldn’t be easier.
This is just one of many features in my free Chromium extension for Google Chrome and the new Chromium based Edge browser.

New – SAP Notes Dependency Browser

Speed up SAP note implementation analysis using this new feature.

It’s difficult analysing a myriad of SAP notes for implementation.
You always end up deep in multiple SAP note dependency levels, and going through each note to check the relevance to your SAP system is very laborious.

I originally created a cookie trail feature of my free Chrome extension for working with SAP notes, but now SAP have gone one better and released the SAP Notes Dependency Browser.

Originally released to Pilot customers in Wave 4 (May 2018)
It was subsequently released to all customers in Wave 6 (August 2018)

You start by entering your SAP note and once on the SAP note details page, if the SAP note contains any correction instructions, scrolling down to “Prerequisites”, you will find the button to launch the dependency browser on the right-hand side of the page.

Filtering by your own SAP systems applies a filter to the notes tree, showing only the notes of relevance to your system.
You can then validate the final list inside your own SAP system in SNOTE to double check.

Power Notes Searcher Updated to v2.0

I’ve finally managed to update the Power Notes Searcher to v2.0, which now supports the new SAP ONE support portal.
This is my free Google Chrome Extension to make life easier if you have to wade through a lot of SAP notes on a regular basis. This is my tried and trusted tool for 3 years now and it was time to provide an update.

Whilst the main features of Power Notes Searcher remain the same, a few notable features are:

– Highlighted note numbers can now be double clicked to open the note, even if it’s not an actual HTML link.
– Increased the history size to 150 notes.
– Smaller code base due to the use of the Google code compiler for JavaScript.
– Note content searches now highlight the note numbers without needing to initiate the search through the Power Notes Searcher popup.
– Collapsable settings area, simplifies the screen layout and increases viewing area for the history table.

I’ve also installed some basics into the code to provide for a future “tag” feature to allow notes to be tagged and organised in the history table.