My one note application keeps crashing, how do I fix one note to stop this from continuing to occur?

Anonymous
2025-07-07T02:17:32+00:00

I have onenote installed on my MacBook air, and no matter how many times I keep reopening, it continues to stall out, and become unresponsive until I force quite. My MacBook is relatively new, and I have had some issues in the past with one note becoming unresponsive, but never for this long, and seemingly endless. How can I fix this?

Microsoft 365 and Office | OneNote | For education | MacOS

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Anonymous
2025-07-07T02:35:33+00:00

Hi Taylor Ballantyne,

Thank you for reaching out to our community, I'm glad to be here to support you

I'm sorry for the issue you're experiencing persistent crashes with OneNote on your MacBook Air, and I’ve reviewed both internal documentation and current community advice to help you resolve this.

1. Clear OneNote Cache

This is the most effective fix reported by users:

  • Open Finder → Click Go in the menu bar.
  • Press Option to reveal the Library folder.
  • Navigate to:
    ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.onenote.mac
  • Delete the folder com.microsoft.onenote.mac.

This clears corrupted cache files that often cause freezing and unresponsiveness

2. Reinstall OneNote

  • Delete OneNote from your Mac.
  • Reinstall it from the Mac App Store.
  • Make sure you’re not using a beta or preview version.

3. Delete Keychain Entries

  • Open Keychain Access.
  • Search for “MicrosoftOffice” or “OneNote”.
  • Delete any entries that look corrupted or outdated

4.Open OneNote in Safe Mode.

Check the reference How to use a "clean startup" to determine whether background programs are interfering with Office for Mac (microsoft.com) and kindly refer to the Apple article in the last one to get detailed steps. Open OneNote in Safe Mode helps us to troubleshoot if the issue is caused by some background programs.

  1. Make sure OneNote application is up-to-date. For the reference: Update history for Office for Mac - Office release notes | Microsoft Docs or reinstall OneNote app: Uninstall Office for Mac - Office Support (microsoft.com).

Note: As unsynced notes will get lost when you close the notebooks or sign out the account which are the below ways to troubleshoot the issue, please make sure all edited notes in issue notebooks have been backed up well in other local documents in case any data loss will happen on your side.

  1. Please close all the notebooks and see if it won't crash when you launch OneNote app again with no opened notebooks. If it still crashed, please sign out and sign in again your account and see if it makes any differences. If it helps, then create a new notebook and test if the issue will disappear. This helps us to see if the issue is related with some specific notebooks.

If the issue persists after trying above suggestions, please share us more details for a further troubleshoot:

1.If other Office applications work fine like Word or Excel?

2.If there have any error codes when it says OneNote is crashed, share us the screenshots for a further check.

3.Sign in www.office.com and edit notebooks in browser to see if there have any crashes or freeze or delay when you are editing.

Hope it helps and do feel free to post back if above suggestions fail to fix the issue, I will offer further solutions based on more shared information and test results.

Looking forward to your update. Have a nice day! Best regards,Darren-Ng | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-07-07T03:03:24+00:00

    The first option worked! Thank you so much for your help!

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