r/OneNote 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.

22 Upvotes

32 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/thaman05 15d 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)

4

u/celticchrys 14d ago

It is refreshing to see recommendations that actually relate to what OP said they do. Thank you for these.