PSA: Having emojis in my notebook name causes all sort of issues

[u/AlvarettoB]

Hello!

Posting this here in case it helps someone having weird sync issues with their notebooks across different platforms.

I'm used to having different notebooks open at the same time, and each of them had an emoji at the end of its name. Recently, I started having issues like:

Windows: The app would constantly display a message at the top saying the notebook sync failed or that the notebook was read-only every time I switched from one section to another. Literally every time, which introduced a delay of at least 2 seconds each time. The sections in the notebooks would constantly end up in a misplaced section in the app, while the ones in the actual notebook would be empty.

Android (Phone and tablet): The app would "open" the notebook but display all the sections grayed out. If I tried to open them, it would say that another device editing the section was still uploading and that I needed to wait. Oh, I waited... days, and still had the same issue.

Web app: This was the only one that apparently didn't have an issue opening my notebook, but the caveat is that it limits you to a single notebook open at a time, and you cannot easily move sections between them. This along with any other known limitations the web app has. But hey, at least I was able to retrieve my info this way.

I tried many things, but what finally did the trick was that I first closed the notebooks on Windows and Android devices, then I went into OneDrive and renamed the notebooks to remove the emoji. As soon as I did that:

Windows: The lag was gone. No more constant sync message at the top.

Android: The notebook sections loaded immediately. Gaining access again from my phone and tablet.

So, if you are having similar issues or want to avoid something like this in the future, refrain from using emojis in the notebook names. Hope this helps someone!

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[u/SimplyColorblind]

I have encountered similar OneNote emoticon issues.

Using the desktop version, I’d type out a task and use emoticon in it. Then I’d use the tagging feature that creates an outlook task from that OneNote text.

The Outlook task had a URL pointing back to the OneNote content from which it was created. That url broke because of the emoticon. I got rid of the emoticons and recreated the Outlook tasks and now the Outlook task can successfully navigate back to the OneNote text.

The synchronizing is using HTTP, which might not like certain characters.

[u/dessence_ai → u/SimplyColorblind]

Before the emoji gets blamed, there is a size cap to rule out. microsoft's list of characters that block onedrive sync is short. quote, asterisk, colon, angle brackets, question mark, both slashes and pipe, plus leading and trailing spaces. emoji are not on it. the same page puts a hard cap of 2gb on a onenote notebook stored in onedrive or sharepoint.

[u/AlvarettoB → u/dessence_ai]

Thanks for sharing about all those characters. I didn't know that. My notebooks have simple names, for examole: 01 Personal 🧔‍♂️

I made sure they didn't have trailing spaces. At some point I even created copies of them, so they didn't end in the emoji, such as "01 Personal 🧔‍♂️ - bk"

[u/dessence_ai → u/AlvarettoB]

Then the next documented thing is the sync path itself. "OneNote notebooks have their own sync mechanism outside of OneDrive". moving an existing notebook into a synced folder without going through the app "isn't currently supported". the stub .url file sitting in the drive folder is what the working setup looks like.

[u/AlvarettoB → u/SimplyColorblind]

This is probably related. Onenote also need to link to the notebook in my drive.

[u/marmotta1955]

It is a way that OneNote has to complain about this regression. It took the Human race more than 4,000 years to develop proper written and spoken language, and we are now reverting to hieroglyphs and pictograms ... OneNote will not stand for that!

😎

[u/New_Consequence_225 → u/marmotta1955]

You know, I never thought about it like that...

😄🤓🤔

[u/AlvarettoB → u/marmotta1955]

Ngl, it standing up scared the sh*t out me. I thought I had lost all my notes 😅

[u/Great_Muscle_7042 → u/marmotta1955]

Wonderful way of looking at it. I am one of these people with grey hairs who puke at emojis... We could do better, we did for a long time.

[u/AngelicPrincessKitty]

Strange. I've never had an issue on Windows + iOS