How to password protect OneNote notebook

OneNote is undoubtedly one of the best Windows apps when it is about taking notes and saving your ideas. It is a full-fledged notes-making app that lets you save and organize all your notes, emails, web pages, notebooks, sections and much more. Do you know that all your notes stored in OneNote are easily accessible to everyone who uses your PC? Thankfully, there is a feature to protect your OneNote notes with a password.

While most users use OneNote to store their casual notes, if you are one of the users who store some sensitive or confidential data on your OneNote account, it is always suggested to have password protection. While OneNote is a simple and user-friendly app, you still need to learn the basics of using the OneNote app in Windows.

In this post, we will learn about how to password protect your notes in OneNote, how to lock all your notes in one go, and how to change or remove the password from your notes.

Password protect OneNote Notebook

To password-protect a OneNote section in Windows:

1. Launch OneNote
2. Select the section
3. Right-click on it
4. Select Password Protect This Section
5. Click on Set Password and enter the desired password.

That’s it!

Remember that you can add password protection only to your sections and not the particular notes. To add password protection, first, launch the OneNote desktop app and go to the section you want to secure. Right-click and select ‘Password Protect This Section’ from the dropdown.

It will open a task pane on the right side of your screen. Click on ‘Set Password‘ and enter the desired password in the small pop-up window, confirm the password and you are done.

Please note that if you lose your password, no one can help you retrieve it back, not even the Microsoft technical support team. Thus, it is advised to select the password carefully, select something you can memorize easily. It would be a better idea to note down your password somewhere in case you forget it.

Lock all your OneNote sections in one go

OneNote lets you lock all your sections with a single click, with a single password. Right-click on any of your sections and select ‘Password Protect This Section’ from the dropdown. From the task pane, click on ‘Lock All’ tab. You can also use the keyboard shortcut- Ctrl+Alt+L.

Change or Remove OneNote Password

To change or remove the password from any of your sections, right-click on any of your sections and select ‘Password Protect This Section’ from the dropdown. click on Remove Password in the task pane.

Notes Password Protection – Advanced Settings

That’s not all; OneNote further lets you adjust the password protection settings. From the right task pane, click on Password Options and go to the Passwords section.

Here, you can choose to get your sections locked automatically after a specific amount of time you have not worked on it. Select the desired time from the drop-down and click on OK. You can also select the sections to get locked right after you navigate from them or to make them accessible to other programs temporarily.

This is how you can password-protect the OneNote Notes section with a few simple clicks.