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Best places to discuss OneNote and best practices etc? #1130
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Let me start:
https://www.youtube.com/@AndyPark365
https://www.youtube.com/@MikeTholfsen
Automating / Developing / Scripting Aside: In our development community (Delphi) someone has created a repo that is basically a list of Delphi components / tools and resources. I am happy to set this up for ON, then people can just make change requests OR I could work out how to set up a knowledgebase. |
I need to re-organise my shared notebooks and asked about moving sections and pages https://www.reddit.com/r/OneNote/comments/177m85g/safety_moving_pages_and_sections_between/ No answers. Anyone fancy chiming in there? Ultimately I need to move notebooks from personal to "Work" accounts. I need to reorganise pages into different notebooks, reorganise pages into different sections, archive a load of pages, but not lose them forever. All this in notbooks that must have 10's if not 100's of K links between pages and paragraphs! |
Can't say I have any answers. But I do have questions. Since I haven't been able to repro this although have experienced the issue in the past, I'm wondering how you move pages. Are they across Onedrive notebooks? Local notebooks? A combination? And in what direction? Do links break when you move pages between sections vs notebooks (more or less or equally?) Does it matter if you move the linking page or linked page, or both? I'll have to dig it up, but I thought OneNote docs mention that pageIDs are mutable, although it doesn't say when they change. I suspect links get broken on shared pages more (or exclusively?) with shared pages but haven't confirmed. With all of that, I can create some test pages and easily move them about in any direction, across any section or notebook, local or cloud, without any issues whatsoever. So if we can narrow down a repeatable example, then we can open a support ticket with Microsoft. I haven't looked, there may already be a similar case opened. |
Hey, really sorry @stevencohn for not replying I remember reading and doubting myself. I will test and get back to you. I have avoided mass moving and re-organising, so will have to have an experiment. |
My test was (from memory) from a onedrive.live.com -> *.sharepoint.com. Just an update on this. I moved (Right click on page in page list) and used ON's Move / Copy. Selected a new location in a different notebook. Clicked "move". I definitely clicked on move, but now there is a page in the new and the old location and they both have the same page ID! If I take the OneNote link and cut everything out other than the page link.... click start | Run and paste it in, it finds the old one! If I delete the old one and do the same, it finds the deleted page! If I go to another machine logged in as the same user (MS, non domain), and without going to any specific pages in ON, tell it to sync all. Then goto a page that has both the old and the new link, click the new link, it takes me to the moved page. If I click the old link, it takes me to the same page, i.e. on that machine it seems to find the new location for the page ID. I know this all sounds very confusing and it really confuses me. Other comments:
More confusion. I need to dig out notes on Object ID's / Page ID's and how ON deals with these and the precedence it gives to other data (section / notebook) information in the links. I am assuming internally it has a "try" and a "try harder" to navigate to a page based on a link, then finally a "We couldn't open that location" message. |
I just made a post on Reddit, about this very issue. You can find that post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/OneNote/comments/19at4j7/warning_do_not_create_links_to_specific/ . Basically, the links break any time you move a page from one section to another, but not when you move a whole section from one section group or notebook to another. They break because OneNote assigns all the paragraphs new GUID "object-id" values, and because it doesn't update any links to the new "base-path" of the page. Lots more info on Reddit. |
@GrantRobertson Excellent post. I responded to it on Reddit. For completeness, here's a copy of my response: I certainly appreciate your frustration, have seen it myself, and heard of it from plenty of other people. Background, I'm the developer of the OneMore add-in, so while I'm not a Microsoft employee and have no connections to the OneNote product team, I have a little insight into the inner workings of OneNote. Yes, I 100% agree that this is a defect regarding the design vs. expectation of linking and Microsoft should resolve it. Somehow.
Because a page, being stored in a section .one file, is bound to that section, it can move freely within that section while maintaining its ID and the IDs of its containers and objects. But when a page is moved to another section, you're ostensibly tearing down the old page and creating a brand new page, which causes OneNote to generate a new ID for the page and all of the objects on that page. Fabricating a new page ID makes sense since page IDs include the ID of their parent section. But why are the container and object IDs also replaced? Well, OneNote has an Interop API that lets you navigate to any object across all of your notebooks by specifying that object's ID, implying they all need to be unique! (I presume that's a wrapper of an internal routine that does the same thing.) But again, why do they need to be replaced? Well, if you copy a page to another section, obviously, you'd need all new IDs so that navigate routine doesn't get confused. I also presume (may be wrong) that OneNote has a single shared routine to copy/move a page to another section and that routine just blindly replaces all IDs when copying content into that section. This is my best understanding. I can appreciate Microsoft's dilemma when they try to abide their "always backwards compatible" mantra. But I can also appreciate why this needs to be fixed because it doesn't satisfy the end-users' needs. |
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Rewiring broken links may be possible but also may be quite tricky. If you see that a page contains a broken link, perhaps you could tell it to look for the target page in the same section or notebook. The link is similar in structure to a Web hyperlink: it has an internal address and a text component for display but that text component can be customized. So, to match, the text must match exactly one page in scope. I suppose it could present you with a selection box of all the pages that have the same title. If the title can't be found then you're hunting it down yourself anyway. It looks like Microsoft replaced their support site where you could submit tickets and is now relying on public forums. In other words, we're all SOL |
SOL? |
OK, I'm going to start lobbying ON influenca's - who do you think are likely to have some leverage and do you know any of the names of the ON dev team (I have a little experience doing this with other smaller dev companies). |
AI - So in my other dev life (UkDeveloperGroup), we are learning about AI and "Embedding" our data repositories into local or SAAS models. Is anyone here on that journey / looking at leveraging their ON data for this. I want to be more nuanced than just getting Copilot to ransack my data (I haven't paid for Copilot as part of my Office 365 subscription). So looking for any input / ideas / collaboration. I see this as a possible extension of OM, where it is doing crawling and offering up content to chunkers and embedders (can you tell I learnt 2 new terms in the last couple of days). |
@GrantRobertson That is interesting. I haven't done any sort of thorough testing myself but in my experience, ON is pretty darn good at keeping links intact even as pages, sections and even full notebooks move, get renamed, restructured, etc. I just did a quick test of your scenario from your Reddit post - creating a link to paragraph, paste it on a page, then move the page containing the paragraph that was linked to into another section, and the link I pasted still works. I saw you had linked to an MS thread in your Reddit post where a (former?) Developer/Manager from the MS ON Team (who also happens to be the author of another ON plugin I believe, called Onetastic) mentions that paragraph links are fragile. However, that was from 2012, I think a lot has changed since then. I know your post is much more recent though and I did see you mentioned you were on the latest insider build and still experiencing the issue - I am on M365 Apps for Enterprise, v2402 semi-annual channel (build 17328.20670) myself. But actually even going back as far as ON 2016 (which is around the time I start using ON heavily), I've done a lot of restructuring, moving and renaming of my notebooks/sections/pages and had always been pretty impressed at how well the links stayed intact. Sure, I did manage to break some here and there but I would say probably 80% or more of my links still worked after making significant changes to the notebook structure. When I say "significant changes", I mean things along the lines of:
For example, for years I kept all my notebooks locally on my desktop - like many others, I didn't like the idea of my data being in the cloud, for various reasons. Notebooks I needed to share with people at work were on our SharePoint 2016 on-premise farm hosted in our datacenter. After some years of fighting the lack of flexibility of this setup, I finally gave in and started moving my notebooks to the cloud (OneDrive - either Personal or Business depending on use case). Just recently, the company I work for migrated from SharePoint 2016 on-premises to SharePoint Online as well, so all notebooks on all SharePoint sites have now moved/had their URLs changed as well. As a result, I have a whole lot of notebooks with links in them that now reference invalid URLs, as I have used the internal link functionality in ON heavily for quite a long time now. These invalid links range from on-prem SharePoint links that point to servers which no longer exist to UNC paths like \machine (or even local C:\ paths) to locations where no notebooks reside anymore. What I've found is OneNote generally is able to keep the link working (as I mentioned, about 80% of the time in my experience). I noticed it does seem to take longer when it has to resolve a link whose original destination no longer exists - so that may be some evidence towards what @jasonjac2 mentioned that it might have a process it goes through to try and resolve the link. The scenario that sticks out in my mind was when I start with a notebook that is referenced by links in other notebooks (most of my links point to pages, but some will point to paragraphs, and some to sections or section groups) and those links reference it via UNC path (e.g. \\machine\share). The destination notebook later moves to the cloud (OneDrive Personal or Business) but keeps the same name. Some time down the road I try one of those link in another notebook that points at a page or section in the one that moved, and voila - somehow it still works! In fact there have even been a couple times that the target notebook is not even currently open in OneNote. Nevertheless, OneNote finds it in my OneDrive, opens it for me, and navigates to the correct location within it! That part was pretty impressive. I've actually been so surprised by this that a few times I've gone back to check the link properties just to see if I had updated it to use the new URL, but nope - the old UNC path is still there (of course it has the object IDs and everything a ON link normally has in it as well, but the base path is a now-invalid UNC path yet it still works). If I had to guess I'd say maybe if the original notebook doesn't exist, it checks for any notebooks w/ a matching friendly name in your "known storage locations" (e.g. OneDrive that you are signed into) and then if it finds a matching notebook there, it looks within that notebook for a matching object ID - or something along those lines. However it does it though, it is pretty cool. |
Hello @dwillis77. I think it might have been best to address this issue in the original Reddit Thread, I feel bad enough that I have hijacked this GitHub thread (which is supposed to be about the best places to discuss OneNote use strategies, but in a GitHub project about a OneNote add-in.) for a discussion about this major bug in OneNote. So, If you don't mind, could you please repost this comment over on that Reddit post. When you do, please flag my new Reddit user name, u/ButNoSimpler. I decided to delete my old Reddit account, because I had been using my real name as my user name on Reddit for almost a decade, and I became concerned that trolls would start trolling me personally. Or, you can just reply to this particular comment. When you do, please notify me, here. Thank you for your consideration. I will respond to your comments there. |
Sure @GrantRobertson no problem, I reposted there with some updated results from another test I did tonight. Flagged you there as well. Sorry for continuing that conversation here. If you want me to delete my post here I can, just let me know. Link in case anyone else is interested (it's a 3-part post). |
@dwillis77 "Sorry for continuing that conversation here. If you want me to delete my post here I can, just let me know." That is up to @stevencohn or @jasonjac2. Quite often, there are etiquettes against deleting any posts or comments. I don't know if that applies here. |
It's all good. I leave it up to Jason if he wants to start a new "sanitized" thread. |
How can I help you?
So this isn't about OneMore per-se and I may have asked the question before, so apologies if I have.
I've checked my "OneNote" OneNote page and I haven't recorded forums / NG's etc, which I do for other products.
I think discussions fall into:
So I could have started this thread on answers.microsoft.com or reddit. I started this post because I we have been adding pages to our 4 person ON's for about 10 years now. We are adding more people to the group and I need to think about organising / archiving etc.
But I thought I would start with the question of groups / support / discussion / sources of info and curate them.
So can I have your opionions on that first. Then I'll post my question there (even if it is another post here).
THE FINE PRINT This is a hobby project that I started for myself. I'm happy to take requests and will promise to
consider each one carefully but offer no guarantees that I will ultimately agree to their
usefulness or have time to implement any of them. If OneNote offers a "close enough" work-around
then I will probably reject the request - you've been warned!
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