Convert notes from OneNote into Markdown

OneNote-to-MD.md

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

In pandoc 2.11.2 it has deprecated --atx-headers. Use --markdown-headings=setext|atx instead:

ForEach ($result in Get-ChildItem | select Name, BaseName) { pandoc.exe --from docx --to markdown_strict --output "$($result.BaseName).md" --wrap=none --markdown-headings=atx $result.Name --incremental }

For anyone coming back to this: I indeed tried to get it working with the Graph API, but it seems like the Graph API for onenote is a bit sketchy... not all of my files were showing up there and so I eventually just gave up and started manually copy-pasting.