Getting OneNote notebooks into SureRedact

Pupils’ work, teachers’ feedback, meeting notes and safeguarding jottings all live in OneNote, and a request about a pupil often reaches them.

Menus move; if a name below is not what you see, look for the nearest match.

Which OneNote

OneNote for Windows — the desktop app, the one with a File menu that offers Export. This is the version that can export a section or a notebook in one go.

• OneNote for the web prints one page at a time (File › Print, printer Microsoft Print to PDF; on a Mac, File › Export as PDF). Microsoft’s page says it plainly: “You can’t export an entire notebook or section to PDF.”
• OneNote for Mac saves one page at a time (File › Save as PDF).

If you only have a Mac, ask a colleague with OneNote for Windows to do the export, or resign yourself to a page at a time.

Where the notebook is

A Class Notebook or Staff Notebook lives with its team in SharePoint. Open it from Teams (Class Notebook › Open in app) or from OneNote’s own notebook list. Export from the live notebook, not from .one files that a Purview or OneDrive export produced — SureRedact cannot read those, and says so beside the file: “OneNote sections cannot be opened here yet. In OneNote, open the notebook and use File → Export to save the section as a PDF, then add that PDF to this Matter.” The notebook itself has everything in one place: every section, every pupil’s section group, and the page history.

An export folder also holds .onetoc2 files. They are a notebook’s table of contents, not its pages; there is nothing in them to review, and SureRedact says so when it meets one.

What to export for a pupil’s request

A Class Notebook has three parts, and a request about one pupil can reach all of them:

1. The pupil’s own section group — their work, and the teacher’s feedback on it. Each pupil has one; the pupil sees only theirs.
2. The Content Library and the Collaboration Space — shared with the whole class. In scope wherever the pupil is named or identifiable, and every other pupil in those pages is a third party.
3. The Teacher-Only section — the teacher’s private notes, which pupils never see. Notes about the pupil are the pupil’s personal data whether or not the pupil could see them. This is the part most often forgotten.

A Staff Notebook is the same shape without pupils: a leadership section, each member of staff’s section, and a collaboration space. Search it for the pupil’s name.

Search before you export. In OneNote for Windows, Ctrl+E searches every open notebook. Search the pupil’s name, their initials and any nickname the staff use, and note every section that has a hit.

Exporting

1. Open the notebook in OneNote for Windows and click into the section you want — or into any page, if you are exporting the whole notebook.
2. File › Export.
3. Under Export Current, choose Section or Notebook. (There is no choice for a section group; export each of its sections, or export the notebook and withhold the rest in SureRedact.)
4. Under Select Format, choose PDF (*.pdf), then Export. (Page and Section also offer Word; Notebook offers PDF, XPS, a OneNote package and a single-file web page. PDF is the one to use.)
5. Name the file for what it is — Year 7 Science — Teacher-Only.pdf — and save it into the Matter folder.

Microsoft’s note applies: the PDF is a snapshot. Anything changed in OneNote afterwards is not in it.

What the PDF keeps, and what it does not

Keeps: typed text, which stays searchable; tables; pictures; links; handwriting and drawings (as pictures); each page’s title with its date and time; and, in the footer of every page, the section name and a running page number — so a whole-notebook export still tells you which section each page came from, even though the PDF has no bookmarks.

Does not keep — check each of these before you decide the export is complete:

• Files embedded in pages. A Word document or PDF dropped onto a OneNote page shows in the PDF as an icon, not its contents. Right-click each embedded file in OneNote, Save As, and put it in the Matter folder. A PDF is read by both editions; SureRedact Professional converts a Word or Excel file, and Free lists it as not imported and says so.
• Audio and video recordings. Not in the PDF. They are still personal data; listen and decide outside SureRedact.
• Earlier versions of a page. OneNote keeps a page’s history (History › Page Versions). If the request reaches drafts or what was later changed, those versions are held data too, and each would need exporting as a page.
• Deleted pages. OneNote keeps deleted pages in the notebook’s recycle bin for a time (History › Notebook Recycle Bin). Held is held.

In SureRedact

The PDFs go into the Matter with everything else. Two things to know about reviewing them:

• Typed text is text. In both editions SureRedact finds signatures, phone numbers, email addresses and credentials anywhere in the typed text; Professional adds UK postcodes everywhere, dates of birth after a label, and names, addresses and dates of birth in tables and CSV files. A notebook is mostly prose, and prose is not scanned for names — the coverage statement on every page says what was and was not scanned, and the names on a page are found by eye.
• Handwriting is a picture. No detection reads ink. A page of handwritten feedback is reviewed by eye, and redacted by drawing boxes, exactly as a scanned letter is.
• So is a screen clipping, and so is a photo of a worksheet. A OneNote page that mixes typed text with a picture of text — a screen clipping under a typed heading, a photographed letter — is read only for its typed text: the words inside the picture are not read, and the page still counts as read. SureRedact 1.2.0’s release notes record this as a known issue, with a fix planned for a later 1.2 release. Until then, check every clipping and photo by eye, and treat its words as unscanned.

Every other pupil’s name, work and photograph in the shared parts of a notebook is third-party personal data — the ordinary Class Notebook page is a page of third parties with one data subject on it.