Ok, this isn’t about BizTalk, Windows Azure, Kitesurfing, Mtb’ing or any of the other things I am likely to blog about in the future. It’s about OneNote, a personal pet project of mine to attempt to rid my life entirely of pen & paper and those silly pesky notebooks that everyone carries with them but then can never find anything again …
Using OneNote it’s really easy to share a Notebook to a Windows Live SkyDrive folder (and network share and SharePoint library, but those are another story on their own);
Click Share, as shown above and then …
Choose where you would like to put it. In this case I’m sending it to my Windows Live SkyDrive account.
Great! Easy!
When all is happy your workbooks appear like this, notice the cool Web Icon now present on your workbook tab.
But what happens when somewhere down the line you go remove that folder on SkyDrive, and OneNote still thinks it’s meant to sync with this location?
Notice the unhappy Web icon with the big red circle through it
I couldn’t see how to change the Shared location, all I get is;
So, where is the UNShare button?
I searched and searched for ages and could not find it.
Then i noticed on the “Settings” screen, which is under “Info”
There should be a “Settings” section for each Notebook as below;
Clicking the “Settings” block next to the broken Notebook, The going to “Properties” gives you the option to “Change Location”
I can only see how to change location to a local folder, but then at least you can do the whole setup thing again to a valid Web location.
A bit of a PITA if you ask me! But at least now I can get my Notebooks sync’ing again!
Hope this saved somebody else some headaches out there.
Ryan Crawcour's Blog 
Ryan,
Thanks a ton for this. I was so happy to have my notebook shared but not too happy to see that there is no “unshare” button! I thought OneNote moved a copy to that shared location, so if you move it back to the original location does it overwrite the original?
Thank you for this post – I had trouble syncing my OneNote notebook up to Sky Drive after awhile (not sure why), but this helped me solve it. I unshared and then shared it back again, and it works fine now 🙂
Can’t tell you how great the (un)sharing section is. You made my day!
You just saved me hours and hours of frustration! I love OneNote and use it as my research notebook, but there is so much it’s capable of, I feel like a total noob.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Half an hour on stupid Windows Sky Drive help, and your explanation took me less than 30 seconds. Fantastic!
Ryan,
Thank you for saving me a bunch of time. This was driving me batty. It seems there are all kinds of convoluted solutions out there. It was nice to find someone who’s actually done it.
This is the kind of thing that really makes you wonder what Microsoft is thinking. Before Googling for answers and finding your link, I tried Microsoft’s Onenote support and found not one mention of “un-sharing” or stop sharing, etc. It’s like it never occurred to them that someone might want to stop sharing a notebook. Thanks again.
I don’t want to “change location”. That isn’t “unsharing”. Unsharing is REMOVING a location entirely. This is what I want to do. Literally UNSHARE — thereby making it NOT shared. To any location. How is this done?
To completely remove the location, change the location to local computer and now delete the location on your machine. You have control of it once it is on your local machine.
God Bless you dude!!! This was worth a million to me….
I synced my Personal Notee on Network & then thought that i don’t want it there. So I deleted the whole of the notes.
And guess what? all my notes were deleted.
but luckily Onenote keeps all the data in a place called as “Misplaced Notes”. I retrieved all my data & chaged the settings as you specified to my harddisk.
Thanks once again.
You can stop sharing a notebook by simply moving its folder from a shared network or Internet location to another (or deleting it). If the shared notebook is in a file share on your hard drive, you can revoke the access rights that you previously granted for that file share. Before moving or deleting content that others may rely on, be sure you make and keep a backup copy of the entire notebook.
Michael C. Oldenburg [MSFT]
Is there a way to see who you have shared with and remove individuals?
Not that I know of unfortunately.
Ryan…thanks a ton for this! Just when I was going to explode in rage cause of this apparent inconvenience your post helped me to attain the “zen” state once again 🙂
It’s hard to come by educated people for this subject, however, you seem like you know what you’re talking about! Thanks