Can't search All Notebooks. Broken!!

[Theo]

Something weird started happening with my OneNote today. I typed a word in
the search dialog near the upper right hand corner. The results that come
back are only for the section that is currently visible on my screen. I know
for a fact that the word I am searching for is in multiple places in my
Notebook but it refuses to search anything but the section showing on my
screen. I've tried toggling the different search areas but nothing changes.

How can I get this thing to search All Notebooks again? What broke? I rely
on this search function to search my notes and now I cannot which will make
this thing useless to me. Please help.

Thank you.

 

[Theo]

I forgot to mention...
This is OneNote 2007 fully updated and I have WDS installed which by the way
finds all instances of my search in my Notebooks but clicking on any one of
them does not pull it up in OneNote. Nothing happens. I rely on the search
in OneNote so I really need this fixed.

 

[Theo]

Anyone know why my OneNote won't search All Notebooks anymore? Anyone?
Please?

 

[Ron Rosenfeld]

Something weird started happening with my OneNote today. I typed a word in
the search dialog near the upper right hand corner. The results that come
back are only for the section that is currently visible on my screen. I know
for a fact that the word I am searching for is in multiple places in my
Notebook but it refuses to search anything but the section showing on my
screen. I've tried toggling the different search areas but nothing changes.

How can I get this thing to search All Notebooks again? What broke? I rely
on this search function to search my notes and now I cannot which will make
this thing useless to me. Please help.

Thank you.

I'm no expert, but just to the right of the search window there is a little
down arrow. Clicking on that down arrow reveals a menu where the search scope
can be defined. Probably you need to reset that there.
--ron

 

[Theo]

Yes. I've tried every option in that drop down box. When All Notebooks is
checked, it still won't search All Notebooks. It wil only search the page
that is in my view. This is why I need help. The 'All Notebooks' search is
not working. Please! Does anyone know how to fix this?

 

[Rainald Taesler]

Yes. I've tried every option in that drop down box. When All
Notebooks is checked, it still won't search All Notebooks. It wil
only search the page that is in my view. This is why I need help.
The 'All Notebooks' search is not working. Please! Does anyone know
how to fix this?

The only thing that comes to my mind:
Run a "Repair" of ON from the list of installed software (Control Panel).

Rainald

 

[Theo]

Rainald,
Thanks for the suggestion. I just ran a "repair", re-booted, and it still
does not work. =( Interesting... As I started to write this reply an a
'Microsoft Error Reporting' window popped up. Here was it says," Some
unexpected errors have happened to software you recently used. You were not
asked to send these error reports at the time they occurred." I have never
seen this before. In the details pane it lists Microsoft Office as the
application and the Error Description is 'Microsoft Office Diagnostics
Report'. I'm on Windows XP fully patched by the way. I wonder if this is
related to the repair I just did. I have not opened any other windows since
the re-boot except IE8 and OneNote 2007.

Any other suggestions? Should I create a new notebook and start copying and
pasting my data into the new one and see if that helps? I'm really at a loss
here. Does anyone from Microsoft or the OneNote team read this forum. Is
there a way to contact the OneNote Team?

Thanks.

 

[Theo]

Hooray, I fixed it.

I decided to create a new Notebook. First I closed my existing notebook.
Then I tried to open it again to see if that would change anything. When I
clicked on File > Open it the Open Dialog pulled up my notebooks but they
were showing as being in my backup folder under my user's Documents and
Settings. This is not where my notebooks were. They were in My Documents
folder. So I changed the path to there, found my Notebook and re-opened it.
Ran my All Notebooks search again and walla.... it worked.

I cannot figure out how or why it was lookiing in my backups folder. The
notebooks in there look identical to the notebooks in my OneNote folder
located in my My Documents folder. Oh well. This was frustrating but
problem solved.

Thanks everyone for at least reading this and thinking about it. Much
appreciated!!!!

 

[Rainald Taesler]

Congratulations!!
Thanks for your success report.
Glad to hear that you got things going again.

I've no idea on why the backup folders might have got into the game.
For safety reasons pls check the paths in
Tools | Options
Then close all notebooks and re-open them from proper location.

Rainald

 

[Paul Kraemer]

Hi Theo,

Thanks for posting what you learned. I had almost exactly the same problem,
and following your lead, I simply closed all of my notebooks and reopened
them. This seems to have solve my problem too.

Unlike you, when I started having this problem, I would search all notebooks
and OneNote would return results from my current notebook and also from
*some* other notebooks - it just wasn't returning *all* of the results that
it should have been.

Now I don't feel like I can trust OneNote's search capabilities at all.
After all, how do I know that it is returning everything that it should, and
how do I know how often I should do your fix of closing and reopening all
notebooks?

I wonder how many people other than you and I have come across this problem.
If this is pretty common and we will have to do your close/reopen fix fairly
often, hopefully Microsoft will come up with a fix so we do not have to keep
doing this and so that we can feel like we can rely on OneNote - because I
really do think it is a good product.

Thanks again for your post - and hopefully Microsoft will help us out.

Kind regards,
Paul

 

[Rainald Taesler]

Hi Paul,
I for one cannot recall to have ever had this problem.
I had problems based on the WDS indexing not working properly, however.

In order to make MS aware of the problem you had to face, you might post
a
bug-report in OneNote, the place for bug-reports and suggestions.
www.connect.Microsift.com/onenote

Rainald

 

[Theo]

Wow. I'm glad my post helped someone. God knows I've been helped by other
people's posts many, many times.
Take care Paul.

 

[DPH]

While this solution works, it's annoying to have to close and re-open all my
notebooks nearly every time I open OneNote. The search function appears to be
going to the backup in the application data folder rather than the main
notebooks folder, as was pointed out earlier. (The search function wasn't
working, and after I backed everything up it worked, but if I wrote something
new before doing another backup, the search engine couldn't find it.) Is
there a way to change the path the search function uses?

 

[Rainald Taesler]

DPH,
are you still listening?

Rainald

While this solution works, it's annoying to have to close and re-open
all my notebooks nearly every time I open OneNote. The search
function appears to be going to the backup in the application data
folder rather than the main notebooks folder, as was pointed out
earlier. (The search function wasn't working, and after I backed
everything up it worked, but if I wrote something new before doing
another backup, the search engine couldn't find it.) Is there a way
to change the path the search function uses?

 

[aprilshowers778]

For future reference, here is a solution to the 'broken' search feature.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...ature-in/17b2c945-5f7f-4476-8704-3acde287e3a4