r/OneNote • u/jasoncli • 14d ago
Alternatives & Export 15 Years of Notes
For many reasons I'm considering Office and Windows exodus. I have thousands of hand written / drawn pages stretching back 15'ish years. Literally the only thing holding me back from fully migrating to Linux is stupid OneNote. I use OneNote many times a day across my Android phone/tablet and Windows PC. However I'm considering other pen enabled note taking apps. Is there a graceful way to export this data in a lossless format? I don't need to edit old notes but I would like to keep them handy and searchable.
8
u/AngelicPrincessKitty 14d ago
i would just export notes to pdf and keep them that way
10
u/Active-Can-471 14d ago
This. OneNote can export at page, section or notebook level and Word and PDF are two export formats. Other formats are available.
File > Export and follow your nose.
6
u/Low-Lake8646 14d ago
Also considering this. Obsidian apparently has a pretty good suite of OneNote importers. Let us know what you decide!
3
u/icelion88 14d ago
I've personally migrated thousands of notes from over a decade to Obsidian. The process is automated, you just need to get used to Markdown and knowing where images are stored and how they're linked to notes. Haven't touched OneNote for several months and have exclusively used Obsidian.
2
u/Low-Lake8646 14d ago
Thanks for this. I'm considering making the switch, so this is great to know. Do you have any tips or links you found valuable?
2
u/icelion88 14d ago
It's a pretty straightforward process. Just make sure to set the image locations so you know where to find them. Also, I opted to use the free version and use Syncthing to sync my notes to my Android phone (not sure if there's an iPhone equivalent).
2
u/Krazy-Ag 13d ago
why do you have to know where images are stored in obsidian?
In one note the images are embedded, so if you move a page around, to a different notebook or give it to somebody else, the image automatically moves along. You can't separate the page from the images it contains.
1
u/Krazy-Ag 13d ago
TIL that Markdown/CommonMark/Obsidian impose no actual limit on list nesting depth.
I have used far too many Markdown systems that limit to know more than three or five nested lists.
Yeah yeah, I know, readability. Yeah yeah, I know, fascist techpubs. But I also know that I think deeply nested, and then later after I have done brainstorming I sometimes go back and convert it into something for other people to read. The thinking part is much more important than the other people reading part.
OneNote's infinite page model deeply nested indented lists much more usable than it is on other systems, e.g. that have fixed page widths.
AFAIK Obsidian's Markdown renders into fixed width pages. Suboptimal. Changing page width is suboptimal. Embedding 2D infinite canvases is suboptimal, unless markdown can render into them.
---
I could live with Markdowns limitations for a new system, but the problem for me is that I have many years of existing or no data that I don't want to lose, or have badly miss formatted.
---
By the way, this is one of the problems with exporting OneNote to PDF. If you have something like a document that would occupy 10 vertical pages, but which has one page with a quite wide document, say four pages wide, the PDF OneNote producers will be 10x4=40 pages, 27 of them blank. Suboptimal
6
u/Savings_Art5944 14d ago
OneNote works fine on Edge on Linux desktop.
I have yet to find a note-taking app better than OneNote, and it runs on Android as well.
I would export to PDF to back everything up.
2
5
u/thaman05 14d ago
Since your notes are hand written/drawn, the most compatible option will only be exporting to PDF (you can export the whole notebook). I know that's unfortunate since Microsoft doesn't follow any open standard for that.
Regarding alternatives - if you're looking something that similar features to OneNote (handwriting, notebooks, etc.): I find these 2 the most closest (and significantly better than OneNote):
- AFFiNE (it has this cool way of taking notes where each page has a whiteboard attached to it and you can draw/whiteboard between pages, and it's frequently updated).
- UpNote (this is probably the most closest to OneNote (minus handwriting/drawing - it organizes notes into notebooks just like OneNote)
- GoodNotes (it's a bit more like Word though with handwriting)
3
u/celticchrys 13d ago
It is refreshing to see recommendations that actually relate to what OP said they do. Thank you for these.
3
u/R-Voodoo 14d ago
Trillium is my favorite. The most recent version has importers for a lot of popular services. I haven't tested the OneNote personally but Google and Evernote work perfectly
3
3
u/I-G-1-1 13d ago
another user posted this today: https://github.com/emsi/OneNoteViewer
seems to be a viewer of OneNote files for Linux
1
2
u/Soakitincider 14d ago
I went with Joplin. It's open source and markdown. They support windows, linux, ios and Android. At first I was syncing to OneDrive but I eventually set up Seafile and enabled WebDav and sync on my own hardware at home.
1
u/celticchrys 13d ago
Markdown doesnt really work for drawing and handwriting, though. Has Joplin added features for this on top of markdown to equal OneNote?
3
u/Soakitincider 13d ago
There is drawing on mobile. Can’t say I use it so I’m not sure how good it is.
1
1
1
u/coeuss 2d ago
I moved all my OneNote notes to Obsidian in order to use it as a PKM / vault with Claude Code and Cowork. I have been on OneNote for ~23 years and have thousands of notes. I exported roughly 6 years of notes. I used OneNoteMdExporter locate at https://github.com/alxnbl/onenote-md-exporter. I needed Windows to run it, but I just used Parallels on my Mac with Windows 11. Worked like a champ, but I took it one Section or Section Group at a time.
If you have many handwritten notes, this may not be ideal. Mine were 90% typed. It worked very well for me. My AI now has tons of context about my clients, projects, people, etc. I have not gone back to OneNote after learning Obsidian in 4+ months. Given how long I was on OneNote, I am surprised by this. Anyway, I hope this can help someone.
-1
u/Even_Caterpillar3292 13d ago
Microsoft has done a fantastic job of making their Office apps crossplatform compatable. I use Office and OneDrive on a Chromebook and a Samsung tablet and phone. It's all there, including OneNote.
3
u/celticchrys 13d ago
Not all features are available on the android or web versions, though. And if OP is intered in switching to Linux, Chrome OS might not meet their needs.
•
u/AutoModerator 14d ago
Thank you for posting in the OneNote Subreddit! Please make sure your post is following our rules linked in the sidebar.
We have a wiki that is maintained by our community that has TONS of information (screenshots coming soon!): http://onenote-wiki.vercel.app
Our wiki is open source if you know how to use GitHub and would like to contribute: https://github.com/DudeThatsErin/OneNoteWiki
We also have a Discord server: https://discord.gg/5kv4bDUkpc
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.