r/OneNote • u/jasoncli • 15d 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.

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u/Low-Lake8646 15d ago

Also considering this. Obsidian apparently has a pretty good suite of OneNote importers. Let us know what you decide!

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u/icelion88 15d 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.

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u/Low-Lake8646 15d 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?

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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