I am an old user of OneNote, using it for more than 10 years for personal and professional usage. I have accumulated over 1 GB of notes, in 10 different notebooks. I am in the way to regain control over my online data, and I thus evaluating OneNote alternatives, privacy friendly, self-hostable and opensource. Joplin seems to be a great app, and I very excpited to start to make the switch, but I am facing difficulties to migrate my OneNote notebooks to Joplin.
I first followed the strategy of Joplin documentation : convert my OneNote notebook to EverNote and then import it in Joplin. It failed during EverNote import even with a very simple notebook. It seams that the solution no longer work with OneNote 2016 and EverNote 10.5, or I face an issue specific to my configuration...
I then look for different solutions to do the migration, including in GitHub projects. I did not found any satisfying solution for me. So I started to develop a new migration app based on Microsoft Office API (interop) and on Pandoc. The app extracts notes into .md files in a folder tree that I can then import into Joplin.
If someone can guide me on theses two points, that would help me to improve my migration script :
Is there a way to specify the order of the pages (.md files) of a Notebook that will be kept during Joplin import ? If there is no solution for "Joplin .md import", can "Joplin Export Directory" can be an alternative solution ? If yes, any specification or documentation would be welcome.
What is the good way to import picture linked to .md files ? Store all pictures in /_resources/ folder and then link to them using relative path from .md files ?
As much as I can, I would be pleased to spend some time on this development to simplify other OneNote users migration to Joplin. Any idea or suggestion is greatly welcome.
You should try again with the latest Joplin version as it includes several fixes for Evernote import. If it still doesn't work, please provide the log and if possible an enex file that shows the issue.
I finally found my issue with EverNote import. Last version of EverNote (version 10+) no longer provide the OneNote import functionality (cf this link). So I installed an older version of EverNote (available here) and updated Joplin to version 1.5.14 and I have been able to perform the ENEX MD import.
However, the import result is not satifying for me. I heavely use notebook tree to organize my notes (sections and group of sections in ON) and all this tree is flattened as a list of Tags in Joplin. And all text formats are lost (bold, italic, etc), except with HTML import that I preferer to avoid to keep clean MD based notes.
Except if you know an alternative solution I think I will continue to develop my own importer. Using Joplin MD folder import I have already been able to recreate my Notebook tree. And my main issue is how to provide to Joplin the order of notes inside a notebook... Don't want to take you too much of your time but If you have a hint to solve that issue, I would be very gratefull !
I don't know if you mean that literally or not. If some are lost, that might be expected, but if all are lost it's most likely an error. It would help if you could provide an example enex file that shows the issue.
Thank you @laurent to have quickly solved my two GitHub issues.
For my usage of OneNote, the migration based on EverNote is not satisfying due to the loose of my section hierarchies (flattened as tag) and page ordering inside sections.
So I decided to continue the development of a tool to migrate directly from OneNote to Joplin without using EverNote. I finished with a first version that I published on this Git Hub repository : OneNote Md Exporter. If you have any feedback (positive or negative ), they would be welcome.
I am using RAW Joplin Directory, I guess that it is not necessary the good way because it is proboably aim at beeing an internal file format, but maybe I can replace it in the future by some Joplin Public API calls.
Looks good, I would suggest posting it to /apps as that could definitely interest other users.
Any reason why you are not able to export resources from OneNote? The Joplin RAW format supports resources and it shouldn't be too hard to make it work, at least on Joplin side.
Thank you for the feedback. I did not know the /app section, I will add a message.
Indeed, I have not yet started to implement attachment export, but I will do it soon. I also don't expect it to be much complicated.
If I may do a suggestion, I think it would be useful to add a page to the Joplin documentation that summarize the principal ways to migrate from other note apps to Joplin. Especially for non-technical users.
Or at least a link to @alxnbl's OneNote exporter as a response to an FAQ question about how one can migrate from OneNote to Joplin. It's great to have this converter, but only if OneNote users know it exists.
), they would be welcome.