Import OneNote 2010 Notebooks Into Evernote

Would you like to move your notes from OneNote 2010 into Evernote?  There’s no official way to import OneNote 2010 notes into Evernote, but here’s a solution that can help you get most of your notes transferred.

If you’ve been using OneNote 2010 and tried to import your notebooks into Evernote, you may have been disappointed and frustrated to be informed that Evernote only imports from OneNote 2007.  Even if you’ve converted your notebooks into OneNote 2007 format, you cannot import OneNote notes into Evernote 3.5 without having OneNote 2007 installed.  The Evernote team has mentioned on their support forum that they’re working on adding OneNote 2010 import, but for now, here’s a workaround to get OneNote 2010 notes into Evernote.

There are 2 great ways to import your OneNote 2010 data into Evernote.  First, you can just directly copy the content of your notebook sections, and then paste it directly into Evernote.  You’ll maintain most of your OneNote content and formatting this way, and can still edit and add to the notes.  Or, you can export whole notebooks as PDF, and then add the PDF files to Evernote.  This works good too, but you won’t be able to edit the notes in Evernote.  Let’s look at both options.

Copy OneNote 2010 Sections Into Evernote

Thankfully, copy and paste from OneNote into Evernote works great.  You can select everything on your note by pressing Ctrl+A, and then copy it and paste it into Evernote.  Here’s our notebook in OneNote:

Create a new note in Evernote, and paste the content from OneNote in it.

Here it is after we pasted it into Evernote.  It looks almost the same, but it didn’t copy the title correctly so you may want to copy that separately.  While you’re importing it into Evernote anyhow, you should add tags too so you can easily find your content.

Copying and pasting your data from each note could take forever if you have lots of notes, so instead you could copy a whole section at a time.  To do this, select all of your pages on the right side, right-click, and select Copy.  You can select all of the pages by selecting the first page, then holding the shift key down and selecting the last one.

Now, once again, paste it into a new note in Evernote.  This time, your note will be rather long, as it will contain all of the content from all the pages in that section.  It may take a minute for Evernote to display all of the data, but it should paste in with almost the same formatting as your OneNote Notebook had.  This is a much quicker way to get your OneNote data into Evernote, but still it may take a while if you have many Notebook sections.

Convert OneNote 2010 Notebooks to PDF

If you have lots of notebook sections in OneNote, it may be too difficult or time consuming to copy and paste them all into Evernote.  If so, the quickest way to import the notes into Evernote would be to export your notebooks as PDF.  This would let you get all the sections and pages from that notebook into Evernote directly, but you won’t be able to edit or add to the notes in Evernote.  Additionally, if you’re not a premium subscriber, you may not be able to search inside the PDFs as well.

To convert a notebook to PDF, right-click on the notebook in the left side of OneNote and select Save As.

Select PDF in the available file types, and make sure to select Current Notebook in the page range.

The conversion may take a few moments, depending on how many sections and pages you had in the notebook.

Once it’s finished, right-click the PDF in Explorer and select Send to Evernote.  Alternately you can copy and paste the PDF file into a new or existing Evernote note.

Do note that PDF files can be large.  One of our notebooks had over 150 pages with several images in most pages, and the final PDF was around 5Mb.  Free Evernote accounts can only upload 40Mb of data per month, so make sure you have enough upload space to add your notes all at once.

Once your PDF is in Evernote, you can browse thorough the pages directly in Evernote or double-click on the document to open it in your default PDF reader.  Note that each individual page from OneNote will be at least one page in your PDF, depending on how long your notes were.

If you want to save in other formats, check out our beginners article on how to save OneNote 2010 Notes to Different File Formats.

Conclusion

Although Evernote doesn’t currently support importing notes from OneNote 2010, it’s still not too difficult to get your notes imported.  Even if you prefer OneNote, this could be a way you could take your notes on your mobile device, as Evernote supports far more devices than OneNote.  We’ll be watching out for an Evernote update that adds support for OneNote 2010, and if one comes, we’ll be sure to let you know!

Links

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