Moving your notes · Updated October 6, 2026
Get your notes out of OneNote
OneNote exports to its own formats, PDF and Word on Windows, to PDF one page at a time on a Mac, and to nothing on the web. The way out is to read the notebook files themselves, straight from OneDrive.
| Official export | On Windows, in the Microsoft 365 desktop app: a page or section as .one, Word or PDF, a notebook as a OneNote Package (.onepkg) or PDF. On a Mac, one page at a time as PDF. On the web, and in the retired Windows 10 app, nothing. |
|---|---|
| Pictures and files | Kept by every converter here, in a folder beside the pages. |
| Dates | Each page’s created and modified times. onenote-to-markdown writes them into the front matter. |
| Best free tool | onenote-to-markdown, on any system, straight from the files in OneDrive. Obsidian’s importer without a terminal. |
| Time | An hour. An afternoon for many notebooks. |
Why people leave
OneNote’s notebooks are a binary format of Microsoft’s own, stored in OneDrive, and the ways out are few. The Windows desktop app exports to Microsoft’s formats, Word and PDF; the Mac app saves one page at a time as PDF; the web app and the “OneNote for Windows 10” app export nothing at all. That last app, which many people used for years, reached its end of support on October 14, 2025 and is read-only now, after Microsoft slowed its sync from June 2025 to move people along. Sync itself is the other complaint: misplaced sections, “conflicted copy” notebooks, and the occasional notebook that comes back with pages a month old and no way to roll it back; a section that grows past 2 GB stops syncing altogether. And underneath it all is the free-form page, where text, pictures and ink can sit anywhere, which no linear format can hold as it was.
What the export gives you
In the Windows desktop app (OneNote for Microsoft 365, 2024, 2021 or 2016), choose File › Export. A page or a section can be saved as a .one file, a Word document, a PDF or a web page; a whole notebook only as a OneNote Package (.onepkg) or a PDF. The export refuses sections that have not fully synced, so wait for sync to finish first. Keep the .onepkg files: they are the archive, and the converters below read them. On a Mac there is only File › Save as PDF, a page at a time. The web app has a page-to-PDF too, and for personal accounts an Export notebook button on onenote.com that people have reported missing since early 2026. The Windows 10 app has no export; what it never synced can be recovered through File › Open Backups in the desktop app.
What none of these produce is Markdown. For that, something has to read the notebook, and there are two ways: through Microsoft’s own files, or through the OneNote desktop app on Windows.
Straight from the files
onenote-to-markdown reads the .one section files exactly as OneDrive stores them, and writes a folder of Markdown. It needs nothing but Python 3.9 or newer, no OneNote installation, no Microsoft sign-in, and runs on Mac, Windows and Linux. It was written by David Furman, who built Skysa Notes, to get his own notebooks out, and it is free under the MIT licence. It is tested against forty real notebooks, compared page by page with OneNote itself.
- Get the notebook’s files out of OneDrive. OneDrive’s website offers no download for a notebook, but it will download a folder: on onedrive.live.com, right-click the notebook, choose Copy to and put the copy in a new folder, then open that folder and choose Download. You get a zip with one
.onefile per section, a.onetoc2file, and a folder per section group. If the OneDrive app syncs the notebook to your computer, the same files are already on your disk (on a Mac, under~/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/). The download guide has the details. - Run it on the notebook’s folder:
git clone https://github.com/rans0r/onenote-to-markdown cd onenote-to-markdown python3 -m onenote_to_markdown "path/to/My Notebook" -o notes --versions - Read what it wrote. Under
notes/My Notebook/is a folder per section, and in each a numbered Markdown file per page (01 - Project kickoff.md, in the notebook’s order), anassetsfolder of the pages’ pictures and attached files, and aREADME.mdthat lists every page with its created and modified dates and any warning: something it did not understand is counted and named there, so nothing is lost silently. Each page opens with front matter (title,notebook,section,levelfor subpages,created,modified), its heading, and the page’s own date line.
It keeps the order of sections and pages, subpages and section groups, bold, italic and the other text styles, nested lists, to-do tags as task lists and other tags as labels, links, tables (a table inside a table is flattened into its cell), pictures and attachments, and, with --versions, the older versions OneNote kept of each page. It does not keep font colours and sizes, turns a. and i. numbering into plain numbers, and marks ink with a placeholder rather than drawing it. One thing to know: it reads OneDrive’s packaging of .one files, not the different format the desktop app writes when you export, so feed it the files from OneDrive, not a .onepkg.
Without a terminal
Obsidian’s importer has two ways to read OneNote, and both leave a folder of plain Markdown files you can take anywhere.
- From the files (added August 2026): on Windows, export each notebook from the desktop app as a OneNote Package, then in Obsidian choose Settings › Import › Microsoft OneNote (.one, .onepkg) and pick the files. Sections become folders and pages notes, with their attachments beside them and ink as SVG drawings. Password-protected sections are skipped; remove the password first. On a Mac the same import can read the
.onefiles the OneDrive app syncs to your disk. - With your Microsoft account: sign in, and the importer reads your notebooks through Microsoft’s API. This works best with a personal account; a work or school account may need your organisation’s approval. Microsoft limits how fast it can read, so a large notebook pauses for up to an hour at a time. Ink arrives as a drawing at the end of each page.
Joplin (free, open source, any system) can do the same two hops from a .onepkg: File › Import, the OneNote option, then File › Export all › MD - Markdown + Front Matter, which writes each page’s created and updated dates. Its OneNote import improved a great deal in version 3.6 (May 2026), handwriting and PDF printouts especially; use that or newer.
With OneNote and Word installed on Windows, two older tools drive OneNote itself: OneNote Md Exporter, which writes dates into the front matter but loses the order of pages within a section, and ConvertOneNote2MarkDown, a PowerShell script that keeps the order. Both lose handwriting.
What to check afterwards
- Pages with things side by side. Two text boxes next to each other, or a caption under a picture placed by hand, come out one after the other in some order. Every converter does this; none knows which order you meant.
- Ink. A placeholder, or a drawing at the end of the page, or lost, depending on the tool. Handwriting is never turned into text.
- Printouts. A PDF or document inserted as a printout is a stack of pictures plus the file. Expect both.
- Password-protected sections. Skipped everywhere. Remove the password in OneNote before you start.
- Counts. Check the README index, or the importer’s report, against the notebook. Pages with the same title are where converters trip.
Then bring them into Skysa Notes
Once you have a folder of Markdown files, the rest takes a minute, and it works the same whether you use the free app on one device or have storage connected.
- Open Skysa Notes. In the storage panel, open the menu (the gear, or the ⋯ beside a source) and choose Import a folder, then pick the folder the converter made. Import files takes a zip or loose .md files instead.
- The app shows what it will add and asks first. Nothing already there is changed or replaced; a name that is taken gets a number.
- The folder’s subfolders become notebooks, as deep as they nest. Every .md file becomes a note. Every other file, pictures and PDFs included, is kept beside the notes at its own path, so a note’s
still shows the picture.
Titles and dates. A note’s title is the title in its front matter, else its first heading, else its filename. Its dates are the front matter’s created and updated (modified, date created, date modified and lastmod are read too), which is why the guides favour converters that write them: a note without them is dated the day you import it. A tags list in the front matter is searchable. Front matter and the rest of the file are kept byte for byte until you next edit the note.
What renders. CommonMark and GitHub-flavoured Markdown: headings, lists, tables, task lists, strikethrough, footnotes, code, and HTML left as written. Not rendered: [[wikilinks]], math and Mermaid diagrams, and a note with reference-style links opens as raw Markdown. Callouts show as plain quotes. Files larger than 25 MB, and hidden files and folders (names starting with a dot), are left out.
On Dropbox there is a second way in: copy the folder into Apps/skysa-notes with the Dropbox desktop app, and the notes sync in. On Google Drive the app can see only the files it made itself, so use Import there.