OneNote making my text invisible!

Anonymous
2017-03-08T20:19:19+00:00

I imagine this is some sort of bug...

OneNote in Office 365 on Windows 10 

I use OneNote for a lot of notes, including one section that is password protected. All of a sudden a few days ago, it has this very annoying glitch where the text I type is invisible.

It basically allows me to type / click check boxes, etc., but it is all invisible. As in, it creates space for the words but there is nothing there. I mostly have been using the password protected section, so I notice it there. If I close OneNote and open it back up, the previously invisible words then show up. Sometimes it lets me type regularly again, or sometimes it just makes any new text I type invisible also. 

If I press backspace, for example, the cursor moves backwards but the deleted words are still visible (until I close the program, for example).

If I switch to a non-password protected section the words are usually invisible while typing also- but if I keep typing gibberish then after a few seconds, this seems to reset and do the same thing as closing / reopening the program.

Any ideas? This is quite annoying!

Thanks!

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneNote | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2017-03-10T02:24:31+00:00

Hello,

This issue is also occurring for me. I will type text and the cursor will move as if it is typing but the text does not appear. A short-term solution I have found is that switching to another section and then switching back to the "trouble" section then displays the text when typing.

I have tried both Quick and Full Repair.

The version is Office 365 Home Edition OneNote 2016 desktop app on Windows 10.

Help appreciated!

Thanks,

Jeff

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  1. Anonymous
    2017-04-10T03:23:29+00:00

    I too have been having the same problem sporadically for a few weeks. I find that scrolling the page I'm on makes changes visible. Happens on 2 different machines, both Win 10 with latest updates, and O365 desktop version of OneNote.

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-04-02T11:14:03+00:00

    I am having the same issue too, started over the last 3/4 weeks.  OneNote desktop on multiple machines, multiple different notebooks.  All my workbooks are stored on OneDrive.

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-03-28T05:59:33+00:00

    Hi Brian,

    I did a new installation of OneNote, but the problem is still present. It is not very easy to catch the problem as it comes and goes. I worked two days without any problem and then all of a sudden it happend again. Right now it seem to occur more often on pages where more than one user writes to (The OneNote books are on an internal network path, no OneDrive or similar) . There are some users, who also use this books with an older version of OneNote (from Office 2013).

    Regards.

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  4. Anonymous
    2017-03-26T21:00:24+00:00

    Brian,

    I am having this problem, as reported above, using OneNote with Microsoft Office 365 Buisiness, v1702, Build 7870.2024 -- which does not support the installation option you suggested this morning.  The only options are Uninstall and Change.  So I clicked Change and it gave me a choice between Quick Repair and Online Repair.  Since Online Repair seemed to be the more comprehensive option, I chose it.  It took a long time, but when it completed I rebooted my machine and ran OneNote.  The problem with invisible text resumed with the first character I typed into my default "to do" note.

    So neither upgrading to the latest version of OneNote, nor doing a full Online Repair of the app, corrected the problem.

    Please note that I am a heavy user and not having ANY other problems with my machine or any software including all of Office.  The only thing that has changed is that I upgraded my machine from Win 7 to Win 10 just before I started having this problem.  I'm running the absolute latest version of Win 10 Pro on a Dell Xeon CPU 3.39GHz, 128GB RAM, 64-bit.  I've had this machine for years and never had any issues.  None of the other Office apps exhibits this invisible text problem (Outlook, Excel, Word are the ones I use most often.)

    Randy

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