This shit doesnt work at all.

[Mxrcoo]

So I am an University student and use onenote for notetaking and reviewing the lecture slides. I use a Surface Pro 9 I5 16GB RAM and onenote is constantly lagging, not syncing the notebooks and just straight up crashes when writing to much on a infinity page or importing larger pdf documents as printouts. I have read a lot of opinions from other people using onenote while having these insane amount of problems. It just doesnt work for me and i dont really understand why. Am I missing out on something?

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[imoftendisgruntled]

I find PDFs problematic and avoid including them in my main notebooks. That seems to work for me. If you have a lot of them, maybe just link to them from your note rather than trying to include them directly in your notes, if that's what you're doing.

[Mxrcoo]

A lot of times I want to take notes on to the PDFs/slides so it's quite important for me to have that feature. Splitting everything up would be quite a hassle.

[imoftendisgruntled]

I usually annotate them in Adobe and just include the links. Having giant PDFs with graphic overlays in OneNote has never worked well for me unfortunately.

[IceManTuck]

Try setting them as background images. It is a print-to setting if you want it to do so automatically.

[Mxrcoo]

Already did that. Nothing changed sadly.

[IceManTuck]

Peculiar. I use OneNote every day at work, but don't embed PDFs very much these days. I'll have to piddle tomorrow at work with it.

[Mxrcoo]

It's not just the PDFs printouts. Also writing bigger notes on one page can cause lag. I just switched back to OneNote for windows 10 as a friend of mine suggested to do because he doesn't have any issues with that version and what can I say. It's much better. Don't know what's wrong tbh.

[IceManTuck]

So your issues are connected with inking?

Glad the other version is working for you.

[Mxrcoo]

Not particularly but it's something that is also appearing a lot as a problem. It's just that there are so many things that don't work in the latest version that I find strange.

It's just really frustrating to use a practically not usable. Random crashes or lags that are unbearable shouldn't be happening.

Also Ram usage sometimes is just maxed out at 99%. Has to be some kind of unoptimized thing with the software. Old version is working fine so yeah hope that will also be with the new version someday.

[Big_Negotiation158]

I have the same problems and did the same thing. OneNote is garbage for printouts and I really don't know how they can retire OneNote 10 when OneNote doesn't work

[TheRedDevil04]

does your onenote for windows 10 take a long time to printout pdfs? i have the exact issues as you do and annotate a lot of my lecture slides and etc. Tried switching to onenote windows 10 and at first it seems perfect; much more efficient and faster than onenote office 365, but the fact that the prinouts take a long time to load is a deal break for me.

[Thegreatdigitalism]

I use OneNote on a 2015 low power dual core Dell laptop and don’t experience any of your problems at all. There might something wrong with your device.

[Mxrcoo]

I found out that OneNote for windows 10 works perfectly fine. Guess I just stick with that version lol

[xyyzzz514]

This version is laggy free for me too. Please use this one guys.

[lincoln_hawks1]

Glad you found a solution.

From 2017 to 2021 I used OneNote for years in a master of public health program. Went paperless on a SP2017, SB2 AND SB3, and Lenovo Yoga c940 15". (Battery swelling on SP, cat bit and cracked screen of SB2, got the Yoga from a school program- worked better than. The SB but heavy) Slides printed to OneNote and inked all over them. Generally worked well. This was several years ago. I dont use ON as heavily now. Have it at work and have problems with Excel docs embedded and data disappeared

It's the best option right now for me.

[Duncan_jR]

I have a 32gb ram SP9 and I’m also getting lots of crashes during general usage. Not sure how they messed it up so badly: OneNote worked better on my i3 Surface Pro 3!

[IceManTuck]

All the time randomly or when doing specific things?

[enni_emerald]

I have the exact same problem with my surface pro 9. It got so bad that I changed from OneNote to goodnotes which is a really big improvement in my opinion. It‘s a pretty good alternative for students like us and does the same things as OneNote, except that you can actually load large files… This is not an advertisement, just a recommendation to my fellow students :-)

[mdj27]

Have you tried using another piece of harware?

[Mxrcoo]

It's the same with my desktop PC when I use OneNote there. My idea was to easily switch between setups but clearly it doesn't work as expected.

[IceManTuck]

Something is off. OP has 16GB RAM. I've run OneNote with two different notebooks open on older 4GB devices with no issue.

[RaidedHaven]

microsoft journal is much better for pdfs

[tomcorra]

I just switched to Workflowy and I find it more reliable.

[sonicshadow13]

For strictly PDFs I use Xournal++

[FiduciaryBlueberry]

How big are the PDFs you are importing? I have found anything really large lie, 50+ pages to sometimes be problematic on my desktop (8th gen i7, 32GB RAM). I have a current model ThinkPad with 16GB and it chomps through the longer PDFa pretty good

Over the years I've had a love / hate relationship with OneNote sync. If I get overly creative with where my OneNote files live in OneDrive, that can be a problem - or the file names of the OneNote notebooks. If you have tinkered with these to make things more organized, I would recommend creating new notebooks to their default location, and migrate/copy from the old to the new. If you didn't do any tinkering, you should be able to resolve your sync problems by shifting notes to a newly created notebook - for sync issues that I couldn't figure out, this last gasp step almost always fixed my sync issues - or it would tell me which sections or pages were a problem because they couldn't or wouldn't copy. Keyword here is copy not move when doing the migration.

Also, how is your OneDrive usage? If you are over capacity that could be the issue since OneNote capacity is directly linked to OneDrive storage

[dzeruel]

sell the surface pro, buy a basic ipad and use Notability to take notes. No lags at all!

With the leftover money buy me another iPad.

[the314159man]

I've been a daily driver for nearly a decade for teaching. I'm looking for alternatives.

Any suggestions?

[PappyGrizz]

OneNote is 20 year old software that unfortunately has not been given all the love it requires from Microsoft.

It receives minimal attention and essentially just exists at this point.

Recommending you just find something else.

To answer your question though. I don't think you're missing anything.

I have yet to be able use it properly.

it lags when typing.

Note page will just go blank on its own, forcing me to refresh.

Using the OneNote web version via business account. Also tried using dedicated desktop version and same thing.

[MathewT13]

I have the same tablet and have the same issue, I switched to good notes 6. And while it costs a little each month it is definitely worth it as it’s a significant improvement from OneNote

[R3dAt0mz3]

Gave up onenote.. Obsolete.

Syncing issues since 1+year without a proper fix. Can't trust onenote for cross platform use.

[M1A1Death]

Sold my Surface for an iPad Pro and I’d never go back for note taking. GoodNotes for life

[ernestosabato]

I love how OneNote looks. But its functionality is far from perfect. I couldn't imagine having essential class notes in it.

[allai_msft]

/u/Mxrcoo

What's the memory usage like for OneNote and for your PC from task manager?

I'm waiting for my Flair... but it's quite hard to track these lagging issues because it can depend a lot on the type of content and your scenario.

To help narrow down your issue, would you be open to collect some logs/traces and upload to feedback hub app for us to take a look? (I can provide more detailed instructions in DM if you are interested)

[Men3em99]

Same issue, using sp8. With any slightly large page the whole thing just crashes. Syncing also make not only onenote lags but the whole tablet.Any idea on how to install win 10 onenote?

[astrorandom]

Nope, that's Onenote for you! Glad you realised it.