Three ways to get your content out of OneNote (including Obsidian Importer)

OneNote is the hardest of my three note sources to migrate — Microsoft provides no markdown export at all. Three routes work; choose by how many notes you have.

Route A: Obsidian Importer (recommended first try)

Obsidian’s official Importer plugin supports OneNote directly:

1. Install the official Importer plugin in Obsidian;
2. Choose OneNote and sign in with your Microsoft account (it reads cloud notebooks via Microsoft Graph);
3. Pick the notebooks/sections to import; they arrive as markdown in your vault, images included.

The official importer repo — OneNote, Google Keep and Evernote are all on the supported list

Pros: no OneNote desktop install needed, reads the cloud directly, output is already markdown — just copy the publishable ones into the blog.

Caveat: it only imports notebooks that live on OneDrive — purely local notebooks must be synced up first.

Route B: OneNoteMdExporter (bulk, fully automatic)

alxnbl/onenote-md-exporter on GitHub:

• A C# command-line tool that requires the desktop OneNote (the Win32 version, not the Store one);
• Exports whole notebooks into markdown or Joplin format, preserving hierarchy and images.

Best when you have a large corpus and want a one-shot full export.

Route C: Via Word (a few hand-picked notes)

If you only want to rescue a handful of pages, the crudest way is fastest:

1. In desktop OneNote: File → Export, format Word (.docx);
2. Convert with pandoc:

pandoc note.docx -t gfm --extract-media=./img -o note.md

--extract-media pulls the embedded images into a folder and rewrites the references.

Shared pitfalls

• Handwriting / ink: no route exports it as text — it becomes an image or disappears. Pages with ink need manual review;
• Tables: complex ones almost always need hand-fixing after conversion;
• Free-form layout: OneNote lets you scatter text boxes anywhere; linear markdown may scramble their order. Read everything once after importing.

My pick: Route A for a full import into Obsidian as the archive, then curate the publishable pieces from there.