OneNote Hack Follow-Up: How To Make a Single Quick Notes Section Work Across Devices

Last week I shared a hack with you that allowed me to have a unique OneNote Notebook with a default Quick Notes section for each of my devices.

I implemented this process because I ran into an issue setting up a Quick Notes section for each of my devices in the same OneNote notebook. Each device I added to use that same Quick Notes section ended up creating and pushing out an entire list of Quick Notes sections labeled Quick Notes 1, Quick Notes 2, Quick Notes 3 etc. across all of my devices.

It was because of that apparent issue that I opted to setup my unique method to have stable Quick Notes on each of my devices because of how often I share items from Microsoft Edge to OneNote during the week for my weekly Observed.Tech Podcast.

I wanted that stability and that process worked well however, turns out there is a simple solution to make a single Quick Notes section from one notebook work on all your devices.

Shortly after posting my work-around last week, I was contacted by one of the Program Managers from the OneNote team and they had a suggestion for me.

What they asked me to do is on one device select a notebook to hold the default Quick Notes section, you can use a current notebook or create a fresh one because either will work, and then let that notebook fully sync with the updated defaults.

After that, I moved to each of my devices, opened up that same notebook and then allowed it to fully sync to that device. Once that completed, I then selected that notebook as the default location for Quick Notes on that device. One by one I added this same notebook to all of my devices and after it was fully synched I selected it as the default Quick Notes notebook.

Since I allowed the notebook and Quick Notes section to fully sync on each device, I only ended up with one Quick Notes section across everything. While hyper-organized individuals may still like having individual notebooks and Quick Notes sections, this single option will and does work very well.

Now my OneNote layout in the Universal Windows Platform app looks like this:

I have decided to move to this much more streamlined option for my OneNote item sharing and would like to hear if you were able to adopt the same process.

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