Information on OneNote Misplaced Sections

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I saw someone ask about Misplaced Sections on the OneNote newsgroup so I thought I would blog about this.

  1. Misplaced Sections are created whenever OneNote could not sync some changes from the local cache to the master copy of the file. This might happen if you make some changes offline, then delete the master .one file and then come online; OneNote will move that section to the misplaced sections. You might also see this if you make changes to some notebook and while offline you try and close the notebook. OneNote will prompt you if you are sure you want to do this and if you choose to do so OneNote will create a Misplaced Sections virtual notebook and store the changed sections in there.
    The main point here is that OneNote will not delete changes to your content, we want to be very conservative with your content and lose it.
  2. Misplaced sections are only in the cache. These misplaced sections are not in the file system, you can only get to them from the cache and by running OneNote.
  3. They work like other sections so you can move them to other locations or deleted them; but they are read-only while they are in the Misplaced Sections notebook. If you have lots of misplaced sections and you want to quickly clear them out you can navigate to one of the sections and then choose File-->Delete all Misplaced Sections.
  4. If you reopen the notebook in question OneNote will attempt to patch up problems and move the misplaced sections out of that virtual notebook and move them to the master copy of the file. It works magically in certain cases, I was really impressed when I saw this working well.

If you have more questions please let me know and I will add to this.  Ideally you should never see misplaced sections : )