Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@bbak
Forked from heardk/OneNote-to-MD.md
Created June 28, 2020 19:40
Show Gist options
  • Save bbak/5d36a2b506aa891334f0e51c8237601b to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save bbak/5d36a2b506aa891334f0e51c8237601b to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Convert notes from OneNote into Markdown

Converting One Note to Markdown

This is an example of how to convert notes from OneNote into Markdown to use in other, less annoying Note applications. I am using PowerShell on Windows here, but other shell/scripting environments would work as well. If you want separate .md files, you'll need to export your OneNote pages separately. Exporting a section, or a selection of pages creates a single .docx file.

  • Download and install Pandoc
  • Export each of your note pages to a .docx (Word) format using OneNote export from the File menu
  • Gather all of these .docx files into a directory
  • Open directory in File Explorer
  • Open Powershell from the File Explorer using File -> Open Windows Powersell
  • Run the following command:

ForEach ($result in Get-ChildItem | select Name, BaseName) { pandoc.exe -f docx -t markdown_strict -i $result.Name -o "$($result.BaseName).md" --wrap=none --atx-headers }

  • markdown-strict is the type of Markdown. Other variants exist in the Pandoc documentation
  • --wrap=none ensures that text in the new .md files doesn't get wrapped to new lines after 80 characters
  • --atx-headers makes headers in the new .md files appear as # h1, ## h2 and so on
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment