OneNote: why does this message keep coming up: There are no sections open in this notebook or section group

Anonymous
2017-05-31T20:12:42+00:00

Hello,

I have OneNote 2010 downloaded from a CD onto an upgraded Windows 10 pro -- from Windows 8.1 pro -- and it's been working okay, but for the past two weeks I've been seeing a message that states, "There are no sections open in this notebook or section group," regarding all three of my Notebooks, which in fact contain many sections, and have for years. The first time I saw the message I became scared because I thought it meant that my OneNote Notebooks' sections were all missing, with all my work and research gone, but then -- lo and behold -- the sections reappeared, usually after I synced -- sometimes, however, the syncing didn't work right away, and so I would repeatedly try it and anything else that came to mind.

This "disappearance" has happened over and over, but, again, only for the past two weeks. I don't know what's going on, and I'm a bit concerned that one day my Notebook sections might never reappear again.

I might add that I've also been seeing a message repeatedly pop up up asking if I want to upgrade my OneNote 2010, but I always decline; I don't know if this has anything to do with the "disappearance" problem.

Has anyone else experienced this?

Thanks

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneNote | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2017-06-07T22:00:39+00:00

**Update 6/9 6PM PDT:**According to the OneDrive team they've fixed this issue. Please let me know if it recurs.

OneNote Engineer here: We're aware of this problem and working to get it resolved ASAP. Thanks for letting us know!

6/9: We've narrowed it down to a problem with receiving an updated authentication token from OneDrive. This results in OneNote believing you don't have permission to the sections and removing them from display.

Update 6/8: As mentioned above, if you open the notebook in Edge and restart all processes, OneNote 2010 appears to properly get the auth token and sync properly.

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  1. Anonymous
    2017-06-02T00:30:36+00:00

    I am having the same issue and just synced, closed and opened to get them back only for this to happen 5 minutes later.  I am using the desktop version which is supposed to keep this stored locally and sync updates.  Why is everything disappearing.  I have something important to do and I don't have time for this.

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-06-01T23:15:30+00:00

    Hello Microsoft, how can you have such buggy "commercial" software which we use for our businesses and important projects?  My notes disappear a few times a day now with the error message, "There are no sections open in this notebook" Disappearing notes and the error message started a few days ago.  It's a brand new bug as nothing has changed on usage on my end for years.  My last workaround took 10 min to restore the notes in my notebook.  

    Your quality control of OneNote is wanting.  I'm very close to jumping ship to another vendor's platform because this bugginess never should happen from a company like Microsoft.  Please help and give us an update.

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-06-01T22:03:43+00:00

    Same here; I get the error sometimes 3 or 4 times in a day, started a week or so ago.  I use it on the road with no internet most of the time but still, 'poof' everything disappears and a blank notebook is facing me.  It only happens to one of my notebooks, the one I use all the time but they are all cloud files.

    My solution has been to close the empty notebook, go to File  Open  and select the notebook from the list of recent files.  Works, but then again it disappears again in a few hours... maybe it disappears when I catch some internet during my travels.  I'm assuming that's the case because I have to be online to reload it, and even my recent data is there so it must have uploaded... unless it's pulling up a local copy... which I cannot seem to find on the hard drive.

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  4. Anonymous
    2017-06-01T18:46:37+00:00

    Confirmed. This workaround indeed works!  Thank you for posting this and hopefully it will help others with this same problem.

    Hopefully Microsoft will fix this issue soon.  It's a shame that there isn't an official way to report bugs/issues.

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