13. Secure Notes in “OneNote”

With “OneNote 2010” you can protect your notes with the help of passwords. Whether you use “OneNote” at work for making drawings during meetings, or at home for storing personal data, passwords play an important role in managing access to notes.
13.1. The benefits of passwords in OneNote
Here are some common reasons for creating passwords, in order to provide secure access to information in your notebooks:

 

Privacy
Your notebook may have a special section or folder containing personal information such as home address, phone numbers, Social Security number, bank account numbers, credit card information, login information for websites, etc.. Identity Theft is becoming much more common nowadays. It is, therefore, prudent to secure your data. In “OneNote”, your personal information is protected by secure encrypted “Notebook” “Sections”.

Flexible security
If you use “OneNote”, both at work and at home, you probably have two separate “Sections”. Depending on how you want to share information with others, you can create different passwords with access to different “Sections”.

Secure mobility
With a computer password, access to the computer is protected, but the individual files that are stored on the computer are not. A “OneNote” “Section” password is different because it is linked to the “Notebook” file. “Sections” in the notebook, therefore, remain secure when the “Notebook” file is copied to another computer or a file server and also if the computer is lost or stolen.

 

13.2. Applying or removing password protection

To prevent unauthorized access to your notes, you can secure certain “Sections” in your notebook with a password.
– Right-click on the “Section” you want to protect with a password.

 

 

Then click on the “Password protect this section ..”option.. The following menu appears to the right of the application window.

n the task pane click on the “Set Password” button, and then type the desired password in the first text field of the dialog box that opens and then click on OK after confirming the password.

 

If there are un-protected back-up copies of this section, you will get the following message:

 

This speaks for itself. You have to make a choice. When you are working on a password-protected “Section” of your “Notebook”, this “Section” will remain unlocked for a certain period of time. This time is user-dependent. For better security, you can ensure that protected “Sections” are locked when you leave those particular “Sections”, or when you exit “OneNote”. When a protected “Section” is locked, you must enter the correct password to display and edit the “Section”. You can change or delete the passwords for sections in your notebook. You can adjust these settings in the “Password options” tab.

 

Note. Use strong passwords that combine uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters. Weak passwords do not contain these combinations. “Y6dh! Et5” is an example of a strong password. “House27” is an example of a weak password. Passwords must be at least eight characters in length. You might have a problem if you forget your password. To avoid this problem, you should make a note of it and store it in a safe place.

 

Notes
Passwords can only be applied to individual sections, and not entire notebooks. Passwords are case sensitive. Make sure that Caps Lock is off when you enter a password.

 

The password-protected sections are activated after a certain period of inactivity or after you exit “OneNote”. You can change these settings by clicking on the “Password Options” tab.

 

“Sections” that have been locked with password will not be included in the search, when you perform a search in a “Notebook”. If you want to include your notes in a secure section in your search, you must unlock that particular section before you start the search.

Note markings used on the “Pages” in a secure “Section” are not included in the list of note tags, unless you first unlock the “Sections”.

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