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OneNote search/find function not working

Anonymous
2018-08-15T00:49:48+00:00

I have noticed this over the past couple of months. I click Ctrl+F to bring up the search/find box. I then enter my search term and push enter. While entering the search term some results come up, however after entering my full search term, it shows "No matches".  Which is incorrect as I can definitely see matches, even when there are matches in the current page. You can see this in the pic:

This is pretty poor, it is a simple function which should work.

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneNote | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2018-11-07T21:19:14+00:00

    Quite ridiculous.

    OneNote is a note taking application used in a variety of ways. Given this the text search which should be as flexible as possible. Instead of having it as flexible as possible, you have designed it to function in a non-standard way, which hamstrings users. This will happen often without users ever knowing there is a problem, because it is non-standard. MS Office Word doesn't work this way. Excel gives you the option. Notepad doesn't do this. Wordpad doesn't do this. Code editing tools don't do this.

    Nothing "only searches at the front of words" by default except OneNote. I am yet to see a reason why this is.

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-11-07T20:58:56+00:00

    [...] we only match starting at the beginning of the word.

    Substring search is available [...] only for Ctrl+F on the current page [...].

      Denise, OneNote Team

    Hi Denise,

    can you tell me what's the reason behind those restrictions? Is the speed of the search declining so fast that modern processors can't handle the load imposed on them? I mean it's pretty obvious that there are more possible matches with a variable search instead of a word beginning only search but I don't see why it should scale differently.

    With an average word length of about five I roughly calculated a factor of 3 to 4 with regards to possible matches. And we're talking about a highly parallelizable workload here.

    So I'm really curious about a hint on the math you've done in making that decision as I'm pretty sure I've only looked at half the picture so far :).

    Regards,

    Dennis

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-11-27T14:02:57+00:00

    It's the same with me, unfortunately got no satisfying answer. I also agree with Brent: The expectation on a search-function differs from OneNote 2016. And the best search-function works with any other software as expected and also with OneNote in OneDrive and also on my iPad pro.

    I cannot understand Microsoft or do they have another software similar to OneNote that has to be payed?

    This is really disappointing, as I told everyone: OneNote is my memory! And now ...

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-08-17T19:37:22+00:00

    Hello--

    This looks like you are using OneNote 2016.  This version of OneNote does not have substring search.  Basically you can

    find “Jeffrey” by searching “Jeff”, but it won’t if you search for “rey” or “effrey” as we only match starting at the beginning of the word.

    Substring search is available on OneNote for Windows 10 App but only for Ctrl+F on the current page though.

      Denise, OneNote Team

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