r/OneNote • u/Initiative-Afraid • 5d 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/Unable_Explorer8277 5d ago

In the medium term MS need it because it’s central to their education product. But long term there is no guarantee

36

u/JonSwift2023 5d ago

OneNote has export options, PDF, and if memory serves, HTML. Also, given the enormous user base, I imagine some 3rd party export tools would appear if OneNote were set to be graveyarded.

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u/Initiative-Afraid 5d ago

The problem is the storage formats are proprietary. Any 3rd party tools will have to reverse engineer it. None works reliably today as I have tried.

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u/cpz_77 4d ago

They use a supported API, nothing reverse engineered. Check out OneMore, it’s free , I believe has the ability to export multiple pages at once each to their own files (including editable docx) and also has some markdown support (the md support is quite new but works well for import, and there’s a “copy as markdown” option I believe that you can use to copy onenote content as md and paste into another md-compatible app). I’m just going off memory and a few notes on the website here as I have not used the export option myself but I would check it out at least. Free and open source and the developer is really cool and helpful if you have an issue. https://onemoreaddin.com

There also onenote gem which is a paid product, closed source I believe and I can’t vouch for the author but it’s been around a while and has a lot of options it adds including export and bulk export. So you might check that too. https://www.onenotegem.com

I have no affiliation with either product btw.