If you’re a heavy OneNote user, there’s a possibility you might have some information saved that you don’t want anyone to access. Whether you have it stored locally or in the cloud like OneDrive, you might also want to password protect your notebook with a different password. Unfortunately, there’s not a way to password protect the entire notebook from within OneNote. Instead, you can password protect specific sections of your notebook.
– Open the OneNote notebook section that you want to password protect, right-click the section tab, and choose Password Protect this Section.
– In the Password Protection taskpane that opens on the right, choose Set Password, and enter your password in the Password Protection dialog box.
If you lock the notebook, you’ll be prompted to enter your password to access the data.
You can also change a couple of settings. Check out File > Options > Advanced. You can change the timeout settings, or you can even set it to lock the section as soon as you navigate away from it. By default, OneNote will lock the section after 10 minutes of inactivity.
Note: Password-protected sections aren’t included in the results when you search a notebook. To include them, unlock the password-protected sections.
“By default, OneNote will lock the section after 10 minutes of inactivity.” The “by default” means the user can change the setting. Not true. It is not a default setting. It is the only available behavior. There is no user-configurable setting to change away from the “default”.