Importing notes from local OneNote to Obsidian

Use case or problem

For the past day I’ve been trying to migrate from OneNote to Obsidian. It started when I noticed the onenote search feature doesn’t work well at all for unicode, non-english/numbers, characters (and my mother tounge isn’t English, so I need it to work). I tried looking for a fix to that (spoiler, couldn’t find one), but stumbled accross Obsidian on the way. It seemed to good to be true, but I tried moving over my notes. The built-in importer plugin requires cloud notebook, not local ones, and mine are local so I didn’t try it. I tried converting my notebooks to markdown with about three different tools (two of them from posts in this forums from a couple years ago), but none of them did it correctly and moved everything over. Finally I gave it, uploaded a notebook and tried the importer, but it completely failed to convert my equations, lost the structured notebook style and didn’t move over quite a few other things. I gave up, went back to onenote, and right now that’s the only thing keeping me from moving to Obsidian.

Proposed solution

I propose extending the built-in importer plug-in to work with local onenote notebooks, and to convert all the content in the notebooks (minus the drawings/handwriting, or a few other things) to markdown format. I do not know how to implement this feature (after all, I’m not a dev working on this), but I feel like it would remove a big barrier blocking new users from migrating over.

Current workaround (optional)

Right now there aren’t any great ones, but I’ll link the ones I tried:
CLI tool
Another CLI tool
OneMore

Related feature requests (optional)

Not exactly a feature request but…
Another help post

Unfortunately, Microsoft did a good job in building a solid barrier. The OneNote format is documented, but it’s really complex.

I guess you need to try more tools and merge the best results. To throw one more tool in: I tried GitHub - DissectMalware/pyOneNote: A python library to parse OneNote (.one) files once, but don’t remember how well it worked, though.

It’s better you post importer feature request here

I see the problem. Thank you for the suggestion.

Alright, I was unaware of that. I’ll post an issue there. Thank you.