5

Using current version of OneNote (O365?).
The way search has always worked since the beginning of OneNote is: ctrl+e focuses in the search box with search scope set to all open notebooks. After typing the search string, a drop box of pages containing matching text appears. At that point, you can arrow down and cycle through the results with each matching page previewing in the regular note area as you do so. Hitting enter will take you to the selected page; escape will close out the search.
The arrow buttons stopped working for me for unknown reasons; all I can do is mouse click on each result (which sucks for me; I use it constantly).
I'm just fishing for suggestions, I can't think of anything to even look at.

1
  • After a few weeks, it magically started working again.
    – user15507
    Mar 10, 2022 at 21:05

1 Answer 1

14

This seemed to work for me with minimal resulting secondary changes. My OneNote search stopped working after I switched to a new work computer.

Fix: Resetting the OneNote Cache

If search does not work when the search scope is set to “All Notebooks”, then try recreating the cache, using the following steps:

  • Open OneNote 2016
  • Click the File menu, then select Options
  • In the OneNote Option window, click Save & Backup
  • In the “Cache file location” section, copy or make a note of “Path”
  • Click Cancel, to close the OneNote Option window
  • Exit from OneNote
  • Open File Explorer
  • Go to the directory specified for “Cache file location”
  • Rename the “cache” directory to “cache.old”
  • Start OneNote

Source

2
  • I'm using current ON, not ON 2016
    – user15507
    Mar 7, 2022 at 13:56
  • This made "stale" searches start working again. Before this fix, I would search for something, and it would only show results that were years old. Now the results are up-to-date.
    – Moby Disk
    Sep 28, 2023 at 1:23

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