What to do when OneNote won’t sync

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ONENOTE By Mary Branscombe The Windows desktop OneNote app has tools to help you understand and troubleshoot sync issues, but don’t rush into anything
[See the full post at: What to do when OneNote won’t sync]

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Juice, Norio, George Costigan, Fred

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Thanks for the article. Very informative.

But wow! Having to write (and put into practice) this much detail for what I thought was supposed to be a (from Microsoft) “… fast and simple editor has been a staple of Windows for years. Use it to view, edit, and search through plain text documents instantly.”

The reason reason I am still uncomfortable with Notepad (even though I use it), is that I can never seem to convince myself it will have the data I need when I need it. There always seems to be a problem locating files.

I’ll keep trying, but your article and my experience don’t seem to bode well for my use case.

Wherever you go ... there you are!

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The article is about Microsoft OneNote, not Windows Notepad.

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Oops … I meant OneNote … I don’t have any problems with Notepad!

I don’t see how I can edit the post?

Wherever you go ... there you are!

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So apparently I can’t edit the post after 15-minutes … Repost correct version.

Thanks for the article. Very informative.

But wow! Having to write (and put into practice) this much detail for what I thought was supposed to be a (from Microsoft) “… fast and simple editor has been a staple of Windows for years. Use it to view, edit, and search through plain text documents instantly.”

The reason reason I am still uncomfortable with OneNote (even though I use it), is that I can never seem to convince myself it will have the data I need when I need it. There always seems to be a problem locating files.

I’ll keep trying, but your article and my experience don’t seem to bode well for my use case.

Wherever you go ... there you are!

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Aussie wrote:

But wow! Having to write (and put into practice) this much detail for what I thought was supposed to be a (from Microsoft) “… fast and simple editor has been a staple of Windows for years. Use it to view, edit, and search through plain text documents instantly.”

That’s Microsoft’s description of Notepad, not OneNote:

Description

This fast and simple editor has been a staple of Windows for years. Use it to view, edit, and search through plain text documents instantly.

Windows Notepad

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Ha … I can’t seem to get this right … I am still talking about my problems with OneNote … but I’ve pushed this off tangent long enough.

Admin … feel free to delete my posts to avoid further distraction.

Wherever you go ... there you are!

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I guess it’s ironic that after clipping the article to read later and trying to store it in OneNote, I got a sync error when I was prompted to view it online.

I deleted the page on the desktop version, re-copied and pasted it again in the desktop version, and the sync error went away.

Thanks for the article.

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Thanks Mary, for the informative OneNote articles and your interesting connections to the incubation phase of OneNote.  (My own fascination with organizing info, thoughts, and documents in a searchable database began with James Lewis’ Tornado Notes in the DOS days, which became InfoSelect, that I happily used for years.) Maybe I should be posting this sync question to the OneNote forum, but if you don’t  mind I’ll start off here.

My goal is to merge 2 separate “forks” of

• OneNote 2010 data (Win7 laptop), and
• OneNote iOS data

into Microsoft 365/OneNote on a Win 11 laptop.

…Originally both OneNote 2010 and iOS versions synced fine with OneDrive, but after changing my Microsoft Account password a few years back the desktop version failed to sync.  I thought I’d correct this soon after it occurred, but didn’t jump at the tech suggestion of creating a completely different user account to re-establish desktop sync.  Weeks turned to months and then to years, and now here I am, having added important data to both “forks” over the years.

…I realize 2010 OneNote data has to be format-converted to be compatible with OneNote today, but my attempts at package file saving haven’t worked: I got an error message of “OneNote must be online to complete this operation,” but I’m unable to bring OneNote 2010 online due to the password issue.

…I hope to be able to manually organize the data from the 2 forks if I can get ever the sync process to work, so in theory shouldn’t orphan data from 2 different sources added to the same OneDrive/OneNote page both gracefully show up on that page?

…I also have many links in OneNote 2010 to documents on my Win7 laptop.  I suppose the best way to keep those links working is to copy all of my C:\(User name)\Documents to the same spot on my Win11 laptop, but the User name has changed.  Am I just stuck with having to manually re-link those documents every time I need to click a link?

Thanks for any suggestions.

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sorry I didn’t see this before. Can you actually open the OneNote 2010 data that you already have on your Win 7 laptop? If so, make sure that you are signed in with the Microsoft account you want to use and then use the Share command to move that notebook into OneDrive.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/how-to-move-my-local-notebooks-to-onedrive-or-sharepoint-7343c424-cdee-4bbf-9245-312549e81fc0?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us

OneNote 2016 can also convert a OneNote 2010 notebook (and if you look through my various OneNote articles here, there is a link to the conversion tool on the OneNote for web service)

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/convert-a-notebook-to-a-different-format-52e2f763-e138-4f6b-8de2-48362b6fe76a

If you run into problems converting the notebook you can make a new notebook (creating it in OneDrive), which will automatically have the most recent format, and move the pages into it (assuming you were able to open it locally).

The OneNote notebook from iOS is already on OneDrive so you can just open it in OneNote on your Windows 11 system and then move the pages into the other notebook (or the new notebook you just made).

You can change your user profile name in Windows in the user accounts control panel, to make the file links work (or you could use the OneTastic addon to do search and replace on the links to update the user profile name).

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Juice wrote:

I realize 2010 OneNote data has to be format-converted to be compatible with OneNote today, but my attempts at package file saving haven’t worked

My apologies for posting multi-prong 2010 sync problems here.

Microsoft Answers has a slew of posts regarding OneNote 2010 sync issues with OneDrive and porting data into 2016 to try to re-enable syncing.  Apparently the issues are widespread so I need to sort through those to see if I can ferret out a workable solution.

Looking forward to any future OneNote articles.

 

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