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I keep getting an error message whenever I use onenote that says "your system has run out of application memory". It pops up after a couple minutes and has been going on for about a week now. Prior to this it had never happened. this is extremely frustrating because i need to use onenote for medical school. has anybody else had this issue and how do i fix it? i dont know if it has something to do with the new apple update? Plzzzzz help!!
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OneNote engineer here
It's hard to give you an exact date because of the staggered way in which we rollout Office Updates, but I can tell you that an improvement had been checked in.. and its a matter of releasing the update that should reach customer before end of year.
To all of you fellow OneNote Mac Annoying Memory Overflow Sufferers (OMAMOS)...
So far, no luck with updates from Microsoft. Nothing works. The memory leak is still insane.
I have been exploring various things and wanted to post here to keep folks from wasting time.
First, following the "remove" instructions from Microsoft (https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/remove-onenote-from-your-mac-a14a5c9c-681c-4c7a-9d6e-3605b0b30e9c#:~:text=From%20the%20Finder%2C%20Click%20the,icon%20isn%27t%20docked.) and reinstalling, it did not fix the problem, but it did generate a set of "misplaced sections" (please see below) that were apparently out of sync between my different computers. Painfully (hours) combing through them, I was able to find the many differences [mostly missing content] and manually merge the two, eventually deleting the "misplaced sections." Still no luck, but a clue.
What this really seems like is that some sections "get too big" (the error message from sync attempts says to move ALL content to new sections - indeed moving only some of it does not help). When I do that, the error message about "section too big" goes away, but the memory leak persists, at this moment, after all of this work, still coming in at 8.9GB of RAM, perhaps spiking higher (not yet tested for long periods of time).
My take-away is that if sections genuinely get "too big" there needs to be a tool to alert you IN THE MOMENT you make a section too big, or proactively warn of impending "too bigness" to prevent what seems to have happened, which is inadvertently adding too much content. This could all be wrong, but we seem to be getting NO useful help from Microsoft so we are on our own for now.
Again, this does not seem to happen on my Windows 11 or Windows 10 machine. It really seems that in my case one of my several computers has gotten out of sync on OneNote and the problem is on that one. The others do not have the memory leak, but OneNote on them cannot "see" the non-sync'd materials which seem to be in "Microsoft purgatory."
Please, please, OneNote Engineers... take a deep dive into this. Many are suffering. What does it take to get a real fix here?
Thanks,
Greg
Gregory Kovacs, MD, PhD
Professor, Stanford University
I gave up on onenote and started using obsidian instead and omg it is better. There's even a way to import from onenote.
https://help.obsidian.md/import/onenote (just google "obsidian import onenote" if you are not comfortable clicking the link)
My advice is leave onenote behind. It's obviously not a priority to microsoft.
Also having the same problem, also a medical student. 😅 Must be something about the med student life... It's been driving me crazy for a couple weeks now. Tried the recommended fix and it did not help. I deleted OneNote from my computer and am only accessing it through the browser now. It's a lot slower, but at least I am able to upload and sync slide decks.
Try deleting the macbook app and reinstalling it again. This solution seems to be working for me. Was so frustrated just now when I was having a tutorial and the onenote app was not working at all!