Weird problem with OneNote App on SP4

[convergent]

I have been happily using both OneNote App and OneNote 2016 together on my new SP4. Now all of a sudden, the OneNote App is clipping every page into a small scrollable box in the upper left corner of the page. There doesn't seem to be any way to scale the boxes so I have to scroll around in a box about 20% the size of the screen to see the page. Bringing up the same notebook in OneNote 2016 it looks normal. Anyone else seeing this and know of a way to fix it?

 

[convergent]

Well this has digressed and killed quite a bit of time. I restored OneNote App a couple of times and this problem went away. Then after adding a few notes, it started getting the error about not being able to sync. Spent quite a bit of time researching how to resolve this and seems a lot of people get in a non-syncable state and no easy way to get out of it. Hitting the button to show sync errors just said it had a problem and to try later. I tried several things and lastly went into Settings > Apps and was going to uninstall OneNote App to see if that would do it but found a Reset option. I hit that and I believe it deleted the local copy for OneNote App and have now restarted and doing a clean sync again. That solved it, but of course I lost the latest changes I made.

This leads me to the conclusion that OneNote 2016 and OneNote App each have their own local copy of the OneNote notebook. That seems kind of odd, but probably required for the two apps to work differently. Its very strange that Microsoft has two versions of the same app that do slightly different things; and require redundant cache files. Hopefully they unify that at some point.

Are there any things from a workflow standpoint that help avoid this syncing problem? I've been going back and forth between the two apps depending on if I'm doing pen work or keyboard work... having both open. Is this a problem?

 

[convergent]

Well that success was short lived. Now it went from getting a sync error, to not syncing and not giving an error. If I add something to OneNote App, it says it synced the note but I am unable to find it in the notebook in OneNote 2016. If I add something in OneNote 2016, it does end up in OneNote app. Any ideas on what's causing this? This note taking was one of the main reasons I got the SP4, and this is a big problem if it can't reliably keep my notes straight.

 

[convergent]

Sorry for my self exploration going here. Turns out when I setup the SP4, it created another OneNote notebook on my business Microsoft 365 account, so it is syncing to two different places. Will have to figure out how to get it to send new notes to the correct notebook.

 

[convergent]

I ended up moving all my notebook contents to the new one created when I connected the SP4 and then deleted the old one. But seems that OneNote App aggregates all the input going to all the Notebooks opened in its view. I routinely have two notebooks open... one in OneDrive for Business and the other at OneDrive (personal). With OneNote 2016 I can select which one I'm in.

How do I designate in OneNote App which notebook's QuickNotes folder than a new note will go when I click the eraser on the pen?

 

[SNLJ]

Settings > Options > Quick Notes

 

[convergent]

Settings > Options > Quick Notes

Thanks... I was aware of that. I don't want it to always go to the same place. my problem was it was in the Recent Notes view and didn't realize I could pick a notebook.