OneNote Md Exporter is a console application running on Windows that exports your OneNote notebooks in different markdown formats.

This tool is usefull to :

• evaluate or migrate to an alternative Knowledge Management Software like Joplin, Obsidian or other softwares based on Markdown format
• backup your OneNote Notebooks in an interoperable and open file format

The tool is easy to install and use, and generally produces better results than other OneNote export methods.

Requirements

• Windows >=10
• OneNote >= 2013, OneNote for Windows (from the Windows store) is not supported
• Word >= 2013

Getting started

1. Download the last release of OneNoteMdExporter from the Releases page
2. Extract the content of the Zip archive
3. Launch OneNote and be sure that notebooks to export are loaded
4. Export your notebooks :
   • Start OneNoteMdExporter.exe
   • Select the Notebook to export
   • Select the export format
   • [Optional] Edit advanced settings
   • Go take a coffee ☕
   • At the end of the export the export folder is open in Windows file explorer

Command line is supported, run OneNoteMdExporter.exe --help for instructions.

Export formats supported

Markdown

• Sections and section groups are exported as a folder hierarchy containing pages :

  Notebook1
  - Section1
    - Section1.1
      - Page1.md
      - Page2.md
  - Section2

• Settings
  • ProcessingOfPageHierarchy : page hierarchy as parent folder of md file (ParentPage\Child Page.md ; default value) or as md file prefix (ParentPage_ChildPage.md)
  • ResourceFolderLocation : images and file attachments can be stored in a single folder at the root of the export or in a folder next to each md file
  • AddFrontMatterHeader : add a YAML header containing page metadata at the beginning of each md file

    ---
    title: Page title
    updated: 2021-11-11 14:55:00Z
    created: 2021-11-11 14:54:43Z
    ---
    Page content

  • PanDocMarkdownFormat : choose the markdown syntax to use among those supported by pandoc. Use GitHub flavor by default.

Joplin Raw Directory

• Import format of the Joplin app
• More details available here

Features and limitations

Export format:	Markdown	Joplin
Hierarchy of sections	✅ Folder hierarchy	✅ Notebook hierarchy
Page ordering inside a section	🔴 Ordering based on md filename	✅
Page hierarchy	✅ Page prefix or folder prefix	✅

---

---

All formats :
Attachments	✅
Image	✅
Table	✅
Folded paragraphs	✅
Image nexted into table	🔴 Known issue #48
Font color	🔴
Background color	🟠 Highlighted text
Drawing	🟠 Flattened as image
Handwriting	🔴 Lost
Text tags (task, star...)	🔴 Lost
Password protected sections	🟠 Lost unless unlocked before export
Notebook internal link	🔴 onenote:// url

Technical characteristics

• DotNet 8 self-contained console application
• Export page as DocX and translate them in Markdown using PanDoc
• Offline : no call to Microsoft cloud
• Based on Office Interop APIs
• Pre-processing stage of OneNote page XML structure
• Post-processing stage based on Regex to fix formatting issues

Licence

Released under the GPL, version 3.

This software carries no warranty of any kind. Some data can be lost during the export process. I recommend to review your notes after export and keep a backup of your OneNote notebooks just in case.

Pandoc licence terms

OneNote Md Exporter uses PanDoc universal markup converter.

Pandoc is available at https://github.com/jgm/pandoc

Pandoc is released under the following licence terms, full licence details can be found on the pandoc site.

© 2006-2021 John MacFarlane (jgm@berkeley.edu). Released under the GPL, version 2 or greater. This software carries no warranty of any kind.

Build sources

• Install DotNet 8 : https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet/8.0
• Clone this repository
• Extract pandoc.exe from pandoc-<Version>-windows-x86_64.zip from /src/OneNoteMdExporter/pandoc/ folder
• Build using Visual Studio 2019 or MSBUILD.exe (dotnet build do not currently support COMReference : https://aka.ms/msbuild/MSB4803)

Contribute

Bugs and feature requests can be reported under: https://github.com/alxnbl/onenote-md-exporter/issues.

You can contribute by adding an new feature or add translations. See this page for more details.

Support

I developed this tool on a voluntary basis, but if you like my work you can buy me a ☕.