Misplaced Sections

Earlier this week I got a request to blog about a few concepts in OneNote that haven't been covered before so I thought I would write about them during my lunch break. First of all I was asked about Misplaced Sections; in an ideal world you should never see these. In fact there a large amount of app that you shouldn't see in ideal cases (conflict pages, misplaced sections, error dialogs, etc).

What are Misplaced Sections? As you know in OneNote 2007 you can sync you notebook to remote locations like a SharePoint site or a UNC/SMB file share and OneNote will sync the changes for you. In most cases we can make the changes to the master copy but imagine that your server went down or you weren't connected to the network. During this time OneNote cannot sync your notes to the master copy, instead OneNote is only working out of the cache. Now as a user if you chose to close the notebook during this time what would happen? If you have changes that haven't been sync'ed you would get a prompt telling you that if you close this notebook now then your changes cannot go into the master copy, but we will not lose your information instead we will put it in Misplaced Sections. This is what the dialog looks like:

If you click on Cancel then OneNote will not close the notebook, but if you click OK then OneNote will close the notebook. The sections with new changes will go into Misplaced Sections which appears on the bottom of your navigation bar, see here:

If you have items in Misplaced Sections you can:

1. Keep them around on that one computer and never delete them
2. Drag it into another notebook so it becomes part of your notes
3. Clean them up by choosing to delete individual sections that are in there or choose File-->Delete Misplaced Sections

Ideally you should never see this but in case you do then you know and knowing is half the battle.

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 07, 2006
  I do appreciate the teaching you are doing.
  
  Thanks.
  
  Anygood tutorials on backing up (sharing) over a network?  I've tried managing the notebook on multiple computers as well as to an FTP server, but nothing seems to work.  With 2003 I set my backup folder to be a shared folder on my desktop.  This seems to cause problems if the original goes bad and no backup is available (which has happened a lot for me).
  
  I've tried the help files, but nothing has worked (I consider myself technologically sound).  Do you know if anybody has built a tutorial for this, or, is there a wiki for OneNote?