Disappearing Ink problem in OneNote 2016 + Surface Pro 3

Anonymous
2015-09-23T06:58:32+00:00

Hi,

I just upgraded to Office 2016 via the Office 365 subscription. Working on a Surface Pro 3 and Windows 10. I am mostly using OneNote 2016 to take handwritten notes using the Surface Pen.

The disappearing ink issue, (that was a problem in the OneNote 2013 edition, until it was fixed), seems to be back: parts of written stuff disappear. I was writing in OneNote 2016, and out of nowhere, parts of what I had written earlier disappeared. Though the issue is not as severe as it was earlier, when the disappearing was very frequent.

This needs to be fixed ASAP, it renders OneNote not very useful for note-taking!

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneNote | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-10-02T02:35:42+00:00

    Update time, I've been using my surface for homework now for about 3 hours now, and since I turned off the enable handwriting recognition I haven't noticed any ink disappearing. This might fix it for the time being.

    Slightly unrelated, but I've also only really noticed the issue when I was at school, connected to their wifi. I don't think that would have anything to do with the issue, considering everyone else who is having this issue isn't connected to the same wifi, but I'm thinking out loud at this point.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-10-02T00:29:07+00:00

    The correlation that I've noticed so far is that the ink disappears when a sync is completed in the background. I caught wind of this by watching the 'View sync status' window inside OneNote. When writing, the ink is cached on the page as it should and the sync status will show as 'waiting for update'. However, when the next the sync interval occurs, the ink will be partially lost during that event and the status is now reported 'up to date'. Obviously, correlation does not imply causation, but I figured I would share this since it could be a starting place for investigation. 

    This is a OneNote 2016 specific issue and not really related to Windows 10 as I am experiencing the same issue on my Surface Pro 3 running Windows 8.1. Hopefully this is fixed soon, I can't have a semester of notes disappearing like this.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-10-01T23:00:41+00:00

    Mavis,

    I have done the update, but I still experienced this issue earlier today. I haven't tried with the hand writing recognition disabled yet, but I have disabled it and will be seeing if the issue persists.

    I will note that it seemed to be happening when syncing with one drive, and once I disabled the wifi and it couldn't auto sync, it seemed to help the issue.

    If the handwriting recognition doesn't help I will update.

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-10-01T20:36:02+00:00

    I also have this problem in my Lenovo Thinkpad X230 Tablet (Wacom, not N-Trig) (Windows 10 Pro x64) and OneNote 2016 x64. I downgraded to OneNote 2013 x64 due to this as well as PDF prinouts sync issue in 2016 version.

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  5. Anonymous
    2015-10-01T12:15:36+00:00

    After the update this morning and disabling handwriting recognition, I haven't lost any inking in OneNote 2016 running on Windows 10.

    Interestingly, OneNote still will occasionally "flash off" for a fraction of a second, and then the content of the screen reappears. It would be after such a "flash" that much of the inking would disappear previously. The "flashes" still occur, and these are random, separate from the automatic saving to OneDrive.

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