OneNote "Search Notebooks" field covers the title and won't move

Hi DanielUR, 

 

Welcome to Microsoft Community. We glad to assist you here. 

 

I understand that you are facing with the issue that OneNote "Search Notebooks" field covers the title and you cannot move it anywhere else. To inspecting your issue, could you please provide me your screenshots of One Note's Display setting. Go to One Note > File > Options > Display. Please make sure no personal information is visible on the screenshot. 

 

While waiting for further assistance, you can try these workarounds: 

• Try change to Vertical Tab layout and change back to Horizonal Tab. To change view layout, Go to View > Tabs Layout > Vertical Tabs/Horizonal Tabs

 

• Try change your display scaling. In some situation, UI elements misalign due to scaling issues.  Go to Start > Settings > Display > Scale

 

 

• Check for One Note update. In One Note, go to File > Account > Update Options > Update Now.

• Try uninstalling and re-install One Note. To do this, go to Start > Control Panel > Under Programs tab, Click Uninstall a program > Find One Note and uninstall.

 

I hope this will help. Thank you for your patience and understanding. 

 

If you have other questions, feel free to ask. I will try my best to help you

Sincerely,

Nam-D - MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

NOTHING in this reply is helpful or correct, and to top it off, whoever replied with this does not even have the latest version of OneNote that has this problem.

This is a prime example of someone who has no clue what the issue they are replying to is actually about. and then just copy/pasting garbage responses to mark a ticket as "handled" so it will be ignored.

this comment should be deleted and the the issue re-opened.

I agree with this comment; the Microsoft support response is no help.

I am a long-time OneNote user and this is the first annoyance I can recall.

Yes I agree. I also spent an hour looking for a tab or setting where i could manage it. Ughhh wasted time. I use OneNote daily and I never search my Notebooks. I do use all of the page at times. Useless change.

Hello, this is an intentional change we made to free up space in the Navigation:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft\_365blog/more-room-for-your-notes-in-onenote/4411729

I apologize for the side effect this has caused. Please use Help --> Feedback and send us feedback. As replied in the post above, we are listening to feedback and evaluating how to improve the design.

Is your page or keyboard using a right-to-left language such as Arabic or Hebrew? Typically in English the page title should be on the left, with the search box on the right out of the way. We're trying to understand the scenarios causing the most inconvienience.

For people like myself using RTL languages, the issue is more obvious because the search bar overlaps with the title. This has a direct impact on the app's usability, especially for those who rely on OneNote for daily work. I understand that Microsoft aimed to free up space in the navigation, but the current implementation creates unnecessary frustration for RTL users. It would be helpful to provide an option to reposition or dock the search bar elsewhere in the menu bar.

Yes it is in English, but even with the search being on the right side of the notes field, it is still in the way of the left half of the screen, meaning if I have a long title, it still cuts off part of it. Especially when you actually click on the box to do a search and the list of results pops out even further to the left.

It is VERY unfair to force a change onto one group of people to help them and then cause an issue for another group of people who the app used to work for and now it doesn't.

Which one is worse, An app that just never worked for you so you probably didn't use it, or having an app that used to work for you that you have been using for almost a decade and now due to a forced change it stopped working?

The WRONG solution is to screw over one group of people to try and help a different group of people, especially in an app that already lets you move some things from one side to the other. That's not solving a problem, that's just moving the same problem from one group of people to another.

The CORRECT solution, and what should have been done AND what needs to be done to fix the mistake, is if some people want a feature on the left, and some people want it on the right, then put an option in to let them pick where they want it. Or if it is an issue with only certain languages, then ONLY enable the new search option for people who select those languages and leave it alone for everyone else.