Moving your notes · Updated October 8, 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.

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 license. It is tested against forty real notebooks, compared page by page with OneNote itself.

1. 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 .one file per section, a .onetoc2 file, 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.
2. Run it on the notebook’s folder, with --tidy to make the export ready for a notes app:

   git clone https://github.com/rans0r/onenote-to-markdown
   cd onenote-to-markdown
   python3 -m onenote_to_markdown "path/to/My Notebook" -o notes --tidy

   For several notebooks, name every folder in the one command, one after another, so that one report covers them all.
3. 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) with its pictures and attached files beside it. A page with subpages is a folder of the same name, holding the page and then its subpages, so it opens in Skysa Notes as a notebook inside the section. Each page starts with front matter that keeps only its title, created and modified, and then the page’s own words. Beside notes is notes-tidy-report/: its report.md starts with what needs your attention, such as possible passwords and keys (masked), links that lead nowhere and files no page uses, then lists every change, and renames.csv lists every title it gave.

--tidy is what turns an archive into notes. It leaves out the exporter’s index files, the older versions, the recycle bin and blank pages; puts back together the Pages 1-100, Pages 101-200 sections OneNote splits a notebook imported from Evernote into; gives a title to each page OneNote named after a cut-off first line, a link or nothing; drops the heading and date line that repeat the front matter; and gives pictures called image-1.png a descriptive name. It never edits the words of a note, and never deletes a page with anything on it or any attachment. Without --tidy you get the archive instead, with an index in every folder and, with --versions, every older version OneNote kept of each page; it is worth running once that way too, into another folder. Already exported without it? python3 -m onenote_to_markdown.tidy notes writes a tidied copy to notes-tidy. The tidy guide has every step.

Either way, 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. It does not keep font colors 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 .one files 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 organization’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 afterward

• 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.
• Passwords and keys. Notebooks collect them. The tidy report lists what looks like one, masked, with the page it is on; move them to a password manager before your notes sync anywhere.
• Titles. --tidy takes a new title from a page’s first line, cut at about 60 characters. To choose your own, edit the new_title column of renames.csv and run the export again, into a new folder, with --tidy-renames notes-tidy-report/renames.csv.
• Counts. Check the pages it counts for each section as it runs, or the importer’s report, against the notebook; the tidy report names the blank pages it left out. Pages with the same title are where converters trip.