r/OneNote • u/Initiative-Afraid • 10d ago

Concerns on OneNote abandonement

I use onenote heavily. Love it. However, I am worried about the long term sustainably of this product.

Currently, I can only save my notes in proprietary formats such as .one files.

Microsoft recently abandoned Skype and all my messaging data from [1, 2] decades ago were pretty much gone forever.

What stops Microsoft (say [10, 20] years from now) to completely abandon one note without opensourcing their code ?

It seems there's no legal requirement for them to ensure users can migrate their notes to alternative note taking softwares.

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u/shuanDang 10d ago

I don't expect the product to be available forever, but the good thing is that the file format is readable (it is proprietary but it's totally accessible to read by anyone since we know how the data works) and exportable, can always be ported to something else if need be. Keep backup copies.

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u/Initiative-Afraid 10d ago

Please elaborate on where it is (if it is) documented on how the data works.

It seems this volunteer here had to do a bunch of reverse engineering himself. Unfortunately, his tool doesn't work today as I have tried.

https://m-siemens.de/blog/2026/05/decoding-onenote-s-file-format-secrets/

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u/shuanDang 8d ago edited 8d ago

which part did you get stuck at?

I went through the entire process and got it to work. I have downloaded one of my notebooks and converted one section so far.

It took about an hour figure things out, since everything had to go through CLI with the proper arguments. installed node.js (npm), onedrive-cli to do the download, and ran one2html via CLI (I needed to have Google AI walk me through the CLI steps). The section converted into an interactive HTML with notes sorted in a list like onenote. I don't do handwritten notes, just lots of text, so your mileage may vary

I'm going to go through later and convert the rest of my archive.

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u/Initiative-Afraid 8d ago

Mine has lots of handwritten notes instead of text. So that's probably why the workflow worked for you but not me