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Ash Chaudhury's avatar
Ash Chaudhury
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Dec 11, 2017

Need the current limitation/guidance on size of OneNote files.

Our public sector customer has a Shared OneNote that they are dragging a lot of content into and the size keeps growing.  The files are now 2.4 GB in size and are failing on some older PCs.  This is a high priority item as the Deputy Ministers offices are using OneNote to orchestrate their entire schedule.  While a great use of the product there are clearly some “hidden” limitations we don’t publish.  The backend is SharePoint On-prem but that is not really a factor.  

 

We are aware that once they move to OneDrive/SPO there is a OneNote limitation of 2 GB per notebook.  They are also looking for clarity on the “History” function of the tool and if there is a way to exclude files that are emended which will also “bloat” the total file size.

My team member has done an exhaustive internet search already as a side note 😊 I.e this document: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Resolve-the-0xE0000025-File-Too-Large-error-in-OneNote-22F8FC8B-92EE-4F8F-B334-0126A3D1F67A  All we can find is “there are no hard limits”.

 

  • I have also run into an undocumented limitation with OneNote's note container length.
    My OneNote Notebook is 285MB, but has a page that when exported to Word is 1,286 pages long. Somewhere around 1,123 pages, the OneNote note container truncates my note. If I perform a search, it will return a count indicating that there are matches below where the note container cuts off visibility to the rest of my document.

    Interestingly, when I was only using OneNote 2016 (16.0.5014.1000), the entire page would display. When I accessed that page from OneNote 365 (16.0.14326.20164), it truncated the page for both OneNote clients.

    So, OneNote can export the full page to Word, but cannot display the whole page. I've attempted to duplicate the page without success. I've attempted to paste the Word export into a new page and it still truncates the pasted text.

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