[...] Loose your Unfiled Notes section in OneNote 2007? Kathy Jacobs has a tip on how to get those Unfiled Notes back on her blog. Other value from the tip? Given OneNote 2007’s structure that includes NoteBooks, Sections, and Pages, did you know that you can create a section outside of a Notebook? I didn’t. Check out Kathy’s tip here. [...]

[...] Loose your Unfiled Notes section in OneNote 2007? Kathy Jacobs has a tip on how to get those Unfiled Notes back on her blog. Other value from the tip? Given OneNote 2007’s structure that includes NoteBooks, Sections, and Pages, did you know that you can create a section outside of a Notebook? I didn’t. Check out Kathy’s tip here. [...]

[...] Lose your Unfiled Notes section in OneNote 2007? Kathy Jacobs has a tip on how to get those Unfiled Notes back on her blog. Other value from the tip? Given OneNote 2007’s structure that includes NoteBooks, Sections, and Pages, did you know that you can create a section outside of a Notebook? I didn’t. Check out Kathy’s tip here. [...]

Kathy,

I’m having a devil of a time getting my Unfiled Notes section of OneNote 2007 to work. I used to be able to right click on an Outlook E-mail and then select OneNote and move the file into OneNote 2007. It would go into the “Unfiled Notes” section thus allowing me to move the message into any notebook I wanted. It no longer works. When I click on “Unfiled Notes” I get this message: “OneNOte cannot find the destination section. Make sure that the section was not deleted, is not password protected, andisnotmarked read-only. To specificy a different destination section in OneNote, click Options on the Tools menus, and the click Outlook Integration.”

Well none of this works. I have listend to your movie several times and when I click save in tranferring the section to re-create “Unfiled Notes” the info goes into a section called “Open Section - Unfiled Notes”

Any help you can give me is greatly appreciated. I’m just trying to restore “Unfiled Notes” so it works again.

Thank you and all the best,

Mick Altmyer - Mick@WebsterGroup.us

Mark,
It sounds like you have an unfiled notes section, but that you have closed it. When you get the option ot open the section, what buttons are active on the window? If there is an Open button, then click that and try to save your email item again.
If that doesn’t work, I may need to see just what you are doing to solve the problem. If you use JIng, record a quick video and post it here. That will help me see just what you are seeing.

Kathy

I was receiving the same error message, and when I clicked on the unfiled notes section I received a message stating that the section was read-only. I was able to fix this by : 1) close OneNote; (2) browse to the unfilednotes.one file; (3) Deleted the file; (4) Open OneNote. Voila, no more problems!

Bob,
One word of warning about the process you describe for making the unfiled notes readable again. If there is anything in the file that you want to keep, copy the file and give it a new name before you delete it.

Hi Kathy, I’m experiencing a bizarre problem (to say the least) with my Unfiled Notes section (OneNote 2007) - I’ve trawled Google and the Newsgroups extensively and can’t find anyone experiencing anything remotely similar.

Basically my Unfiled Notes section will work fine for a couple of days/weeks at a time. Then, for no rhyme or reason whatsoever that I can think of, I’ll boot up my computer one day and it will be completely gone (e.g. the ‘This section is empty’ message).

But it doesn’t stop there - the now empty ‘Unfiled Notes’ section then gets moved to the ‘Misplaced Sections’ tab and recreated literally every few seconds - e.g. after ~5min I’ll have 10+ ‘Unfiled Notes’ sections under ‘Misplaced Sections’. This happens whether I try creating a page or not. I know I’m not going crazy because the colour of the notebook changes every few seconds.

It seems to be some kind of syncing/caching issue as far as I can tell. If I follow the steps in your video, then type a few characters and hit the sync button, it triggers the same issue - it doesn’t throw an error in the ‘Errors’ tab of the sync dialog either, the item simply disappears from the ‘Sync Progress’ tab.

I’ve played around with every setting I can think of and I’m at a complete loss as to what might be causing it. Any help you can give me while I still have some hair left would be greatly appreciated!

Also worth mentioning:
* Even with OneNote and the tray icon both closed, if you create a file called ‘Unfiled Notes.one’ in the notebook directory it is instantly deleted.
* If you rename a different file to ‘Unfiled Notes.one’, it just reverts back to the previous filename - to get it back you have to do an extremely dodgy workaround:
* Create a new section named something different, and set that as your Unfiled Notes section in options
* Copy the entire file & directory of your notebook folder to a different location (or slightly differently named)
* In this folder, rename the file representing your new unfiled notes section to ‘Unfiled Notes.one’
* In OneNote, set the location of your Unfiled Notes to the new folder structure’s ‘Unfiled Notes.one’ file, and update the location of your backups & default notebook folder

Dave,
I would strongly recommend that you do three things:
First, do a detect and repair on your Office installation. There may be more going on here than you think.
Next, go to Tools–> Options, Save and click the Optimize Now button. That may help (I don’t know that it will, but it might.)
FInally, go to the Microsoft Connect site and use that to enter a bug report on what you are seeing. Provide the information you have provided here, along with whether your notebooks are local or on a removable or remote device. I believe you may have found something the OneNote team at Microsoft needs to know about.

Thanks Kathy,

I haven’t tried a detect and repair yet - I was hesitant to do this as I don’t know exactly what will be changed across the other office applications, and I couldn’t see a way to selectively repair OneNote. I did however run Office Diagnostics which didn’t detect any issues.

Since making these posts yesterday, I’ve actually got a hunch as to what the problem might be - I need to test it when I have a chance. If I’m right, as you suggest it’d be a pretty huge flaw that the OneNote team would want to know about.

I believe that a poorly designed optimisation process may be responsible. I came across a very similar issue here: http://www.tabletquestions.com/microsoft-onenote/38679-shared-notebook-deletes-sections-its-own.html#post188486

OneNote seems to have some conflicting mechanisms (making a few big assumptions here):
* A poorly designed ‘pseudo-locking’/protection mechanism to prevent conflicts during optimisation
* Non-standard handling of Unfiled Notes - OneNote spawns a new file in the specified location if it can’t find it, rather than removing it like it would in other notebooks.

This is the most likely scenario that I could come up with - I’ve made a few educated guesses/assumptions though:
* OneNote begins optimising notebooks immediately after it is closed - both the .one and .onetemp files are locked at this point.
* User initiates a shut-down while the optimisation process is running.
* Writing to the .onetemp file is completed, and the file is unlocked so that it can be renamed.
* The locked .one file is deleted.
* Windows detects that there are no more locked files and shuts down before the .onetemp file is renamed.
* Next time you boot up and OneNote tries to sync Unfiled Notes, it can’t find the .one file so it spawns a new one.
* The protection mechanism kicks in and moves the newly created file to ‘Misplaced Sections’ to prevent conflicts, because it is expecting the .onetemp file to be renamed but doesn’t seem to realise that the optimisation process isn’t actually running/has failed.
* This causes OneNote to spawn another Unfiled Notes.one file, which triggers the protection mechanism again, and so on and so on.

As I said, this is a hunch that needs testing - if you are willing to use your Unfiled Notes section as a guinea pig it’d be great for you to try and replicate the issue as well… the bug report would carry more weight if others are also affected.