Bring your OneNote pages into River

OneNote keeps your pages in a file no other program can read, River included. Export the pages as HTML or MHT, then drop those in. They arrive as ordinary notes. How faithfully they come across depends on how OneNote wrote the export; River reads what is there.

River cannot read a .one file. Export something you can read, then drop that in.

getting your notes out

In OneNote, export the pages or a section as HTML or MHT. Zip the files, or drop them in loose. Native .one, .onetoc2, and .onepkg files are refused by name.

A zip up to 100MB, or loose files up to 10MB.

what arrives

The page text, converted to Markdown. The section or folder name as a tag when the zip path includes one. Images sitting beside the pages, within your plan's image allowance.

what the export leaves out

The native OneNote package. Anything the HTML export did not include. There is no live link to OneNote or Microsoft Graph.

nothing goes missing quietly

Anything that cannot come across as a file is handed back to you. When the import finishes you get a leftovers file — a zip holding the actual files, with a short note against each one saying why it stayed behind.

Empty notes, and notes River already holds — say the same item is coming through again — are counted rather than packed. A matching title is not the same note. Extra writing for a day you already have arrives as an ordinary note, not as leftovers.

Download the leftovers file before you carry on. It's held for fifteen minutes after the import, and then it's gone. It lives in the page for that window — a refresh lets it go early — and it is never written into your browser's storage.

Pictures stay in the note on every plan, up to its image allowance. Free has 100MB of retained encrypted image storage; pictures beyond that come back in the same leftovers file, with the writing still in River. Paid has no ceiling on the total. Voice recordings come across on every plan. Audio in a format River does not support, or recordings larger than it can keep, come back in the leftovers file.

The same fifteen minutes is your window to undo. One tap, then a confirm, and the whole import goes to deleted. After that, the notes are yours, and can be deleted one at a time or in multiples like anything else.

start here

Write today, even if nothing has come across yet. The archive can come when you're ready.

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