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
    2015-10-07T18:15:50+00:00

    Hi ErkanSurface

    Have you tried disabling handwriting recognition? The option is under File->Options->Advanced. So far it seems to avoid the ink disappearing bug. If you still continue to see it even after that, let me know. It will help us in our investigation.

    Thanks

    Mavis

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-10-06T19:21:36+00:00

    Hey Microsoft. Can you hear me?

    If yes, please send a couple of your software engineers to classes (outside Microsoft premises) and let them take notes using OneNote 2016. You will recognize the problem and I am sure you will be able to solve it. And please advise people to install a specific update after those engineers spend a couple of weeks continuing to take notes with updated software and having no issues.

    OneNote 2016 also crashes more often than earlier versions.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-10-02T13:49:28+00:00

    Running OneNote 2016 on Win 10, after the update yesterday, I noticed no ink loss after disabling handwriting recognition.

    After turning handwriting recognition back on, the problem of disappearing ink returned.

    After again disabling handwriting recognition, the problem no longer recurs.

    I hope that helps you to find out where the problem lies. I am just glad that I can take notes now, since I do not rely on the automatic handwriting recognition.

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  4. 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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  5. 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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