A trip down OneNote lane

I’d kind of forgotten how I used OneNote for a few years as my note-taking app1Skip to the last paragraph to find out why I am randomly discussing OneNote. It’s multiplatform–basically everything but Linux2Unless you use the web version–and while the UI is a bit odd, it makes sense once you realize it apes real world use: a series of notebooks (sections), each with their own pages (sets of notes).

Unlike something like Obsidian (which I use currently) it’s all in a proprietary format and your notes are saved to a folder somewhere on OneDrive, so exporting your notes to another program is not exactly a straightforward task (I only see an option to export pages as PDFs). Which also explains why none of my OneNote notes are in Obsidian.

On the plus side, this is a full WYSIWYG app, so you can easily add audio, video, images and other files, mess around with different fonts and styles and basically go crazy doing things that are impossible in a plain text file. That has definite appeal to a visually-minded dope like me.

I’m…somewhat tempted to try it again. I shouldn’t. Having text-only notes keeps me focused or sane or something. I don’t need to be able to dictate my notes using a microphone.

Do I3No, I do not. Yet I want to do so now. Badly. I am bad and should feel bad.?

Look, I’m sticking to Obsidian and there’s nothing I can do to convince me otherwise. Probably almost for sure.

This post brought to you by the seeming death knell of Evernote and the comments offering suggestions for replacing it.

UPDATE, a day later: I haven’t started using OneNote again, but I have started to copy and paste relevant notes from it into Obsidian.

Leave a Comment