Importing OneNote not working, looking for alternative route using intermediate tool

Support
1

Operating system

Windows

Joplin version

3.4.12

Desktop version info

Joplin 3.4.12 (prod, win32)

Device: win32, AMD Ryzen 5 5500U with Radeon Graphics
Client ID: 9ecb32ea0acf4f609e6f9df22db333e3
Sync Version: 3
Profile Version: 48
Keychain Supported: Yes
Alternative instance ID: -

Revision: e9a9f68

Backup: 1.4.3
Freehand Drawing: 3.1.0

What issue do you have?

This isn't a true support need, but I know y'all are trying to improve your onenote .zip import process, so I figured a report from a user in the field would be useful.

So Importing my onenote .zip backups, 3 key sections from each of 2 key notebooks are missing. The corresponding .one files are inside the .zip files, so tentatively it looks like an import issue, not an export, but I honestly don't trust OneNote, either). I did a onenote sync of all my notebooks on my phone, to see if that helped (I am NOT re-installing that satanic POS on my laptop), and even made a dummy page with some text in each section that was skipped in online onenote. One previously missing section showed up when I re-exported my notebooks to zip files.

I am entertaining a few avenues: Import into Obsidian and use their onenote import plugin, then export results as markdown directory, then import that to joplin. I'm leaning towards trying this so far, as it seems the simplest route. Then there's use OneNoteMdExporter, onenote_to_markdown, or similar tool, then import into Joplin. But I'm open to suggestions if you know of another .one file to markdown converter.

Even copying a single page of all text in online OneNote and pasting it into a txt file in notepad doesn't work, my neat concise list ends up with muiltiple lines of space (I can paste it into LibreOffice first, then into notepad, and its fine, but seriously...).

On a positive note, 7 out of 10 sections per notebook were imported ok; formatting is rough in spots, but most of them are ok for my purposes, which is for reference and research, not for documents to print or show others, no images, etc.

2

I find OneNoteMdExporter doing a pretty good job. Sometimes some attached images in OneNote take a long time to load and OneNoteMdExporter won’t wait, so you need to check after the conversion whether such images have been migrated.

3

I will second this recommendation - OneNoteMDExporter it is the application I ended up using to convert my entire OneNote over to Joplin. https://github.com/alxnbl/onenote-md-exporter
There were a couple of things I found troublesome that I would recommend watching out for.

  1. Try the different formats offered to see which one does the best job of preserving or converting your notes into something usable. I ended up using different formats for different notebooks.
  2. Make sure OneNote has fully loaded each of the pages and images already. The importer does not wait long for OneNote and if OneNote does not already have the page cached locally then I lost that page. Just clicking the OneNote option to load everything was not enough - I had to visit every page in OneNote to encourage OneNote to load them.
  3. Related to 2 - after importing a NoteBook from OneNote I had to check Joplin to make sure each page had been imported. The ones that were lost I ended up copying and pasting by hand to fix.
  4. Still related to 2 - I had spun up a Windows instance under Linux and installed OneNote to do the conversion. I did this on a fairly old laptop. I suspect the slowness of the windows instance was part of the import failure. After some import failures I gave the virtual machine more processor cores and I seem to have had less import losses. My takeaway - do the conversion on the fastest Windows machine you have.
4

If you end up resorting to copy/paste, my paste as markdown plugin might help: Joplin Plugins - Paste as Markdown

Pasting from OneNote isn't perfect (OneNote's clipboard content doesn't use semantic HTML for bold/italics/headings so it's not converted to markdown by turndown), but it will at least maintain lists/overall structure (and I added an option to remove space between list items)

It can also automatically convert embedded images to joplin resources on paste (if you enable that option in the settings)

Alternately, you can paste into the Joplin rich text editor which will also convert HTML formatted text to markdown (but this may not preserve tight lists)

5

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.