Exporting OneNote sections to Word

Here’s something I discovered about exporting from OneNote today: To export both pages and subpages of a section from OneNote to Word, expand the pages first.

I did some reorganizing of my Journals which are set up as Section > 2016, Page > September 2016, Subpages > September 16, 2016 & September 15, 2016, etc, and had them collapsed so the sidebar wasn’t too long (365 pages is a lot of pages for one section and I wanted some white space in that list!).

What happened, though, when I did my usual export to Word to back up my entries by section (year) is that most of the subpages didn’t export. Only those that were expanded were included in the Word docx file. :o

That wasn’t good, so I went back and expanded everything, then exported again, and it worked exactly as I expected.

I tried to find mention of this online, but I couldn’t find anything. So here it is, a tip for anyone who might be wondering why OneNote doesn’t export subpages to Word when exporting. See if your pages are collapsed and if they are, expand them before you try to export again.

I’d rather it not be this way, but as long as I have a workaround I’m satisfied.

Sometimes I still miss Evernote, but one of my favorite things about OneNote is how easily I can export pages, sections, or notebooks directly from OneNote to Word. I couldn’t do that in Evernote, and exporting to HTML wasn’t really what I wanted. I do it to back up important notes in a format I can access easily if my OneNote files were to become corrupt.