Importing from OneNote for Mac

Is there any way to import my notes from the latest version (15.32) of OneNote for Mac into DTOP?

TIA,
Martin

Not that I am aware of, unfortunately.

My ‘import’ process involved printing individual pages as PDFs, and pulling them in like that. Not at all ideal, with numerous spacing/paging issues as a result of how the ON ‘canvas’ is converted into PDF, but better than nothing…

If you find something - please share!

Well, I did come across one possible solution. It requires Windows. In Evernote for Windows under File -> Import, there’s an option to import from OneNote. That option isn’t on the Mac version of Evernote.

Theoretically one should be able to import from OneNote on Windows into Evernote. Then synch Evernote on your Mac. At that point EN should have all the ON content in it and you can import the EN notes into DTPO. That’s the theory.

I’m going to try it tomorrow and see if it works. I’ll report back.

IT WORKED! Actually it worked rather well! It did, however, require a Windows machine. I happen to have access to one so that was no problem.

On Windows I downloaded the Evernote and OneNote desktop apps, signed in and waited until EN and ON each synced on the Windows machine and I was able to see my stuff – I had a few things in EN but the vast bulk of what I wanted to get into DTPO was in ON (1,560 items).

In EN I went to File -> Import -> Microsoft OneNote (that’s not available on the Mac which is why you have to use Windows). A dialogue box opens that has a drop down list of all your notebooks in ON and you select one and click OK. The ON notes in that book are imported into EN.

This can be a kind of slow process depending on how many notebooks you have in ON because you can only do one at a time. There were a couple that, for some reason, bombed out and couldn’t be brought into EN, but a very, very few.

Once everything was in EN I went to my Mac, opened DTPO and EN (the desktop version) and then in DTPO chose File -> Import -> Notes from EverNote.

And then DTPO just did its thing. A dialogue box opened and showed how many notes out of how many had been imported. I had a total of 1,698 notes, the ones I had imported from ON into EN and some that were in EN.

It was a long, slow process – hours. In fact I went to bed before it was done – there were still about 100 notes remaining to be imported.

When I looked at my machine this morning, it was done and there were 49 folders (and many sub folders within those) with 1,698 items in DTPO. I’ve only given it a cursory look so far but all in all it looks quite good, better than I expected.

A couple of things I’ve noticed:

Web pages that I imported had been created both with the EN web clipper and the ON web clipper. (I had previously imported my EN notes into ON when I first started using ON). The ON clippings look much better in DTPO than do those which were clipped with the EV web clipper. Back in November when I imported from EN into DTPO I thought the clipped web pages looked really funky and discussed this here on the forum (Problems with import from Evernote) and Christian said that it had to do with how EN exports. Nevertheless, as I said, the things clipped with ON look much better in DTPO than the things clipped with EN.

Some documents look much smaller in DTPO than they did in ON or EN, but they’re still readable.

When you look at something in DTPO the links at the top of the window are all to EN, which makes sense, I guess, because the items were all imported from EN. But when looking at web pages that were clipped with EN you don’t have a link back to the original web site. However, those that were clipped with ON have the link right on the note page so that you can get back to the original site easily.

So the bottom line is that the whole process was quite successful, and I hope this description will be of help to anyone who wants to move from ON to DTPO.

I’ve got my work cut out for me now. Even though I was an early DTPO user (I joined the Forum back in 2003) I’ve really used it very little over those years. Now that I’m committed to it, I have lots to learn. There’s the task of organizing everything now, thinking about databases, going through all those notes – which is something I’ve been putting off for a long time, both in EN and ON – getting rid of a lot that I don’t need any more, reorganizing, learning more about how to use DTPO more effectively, etc., etc. But I feel I’m in a good place to begin.

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Thanks for the thorough discussion and notes. Glad it’s working as you hoped and I’m sure others can benefit from your diligence. :smiley:

For the import of the odd page from OneNote, or if a Windows machine is not available, consider the following. While the output from print to PDF in the Mac program has never worked well for me, the print to PDF function in the web version of OneNote is quite decent. Strange that a web version should work better than a native version of a program…