- Export your OneNote digital notebook

OVERVIEW

Target audience: Students, faculty, and staff members.

When you leave McGill, you will lose access to Office 365 applications. If you want to keep any OneNote notebooks this must be done before your account expires. For details on account expiry dates, see What IT services can I access after I leave McGill.

In this article:

Copying OneNote sections to a personal account
Exporting for work and school accounts
Exporting for personal accounts

NOTE:

Exporting content from OneNote is the sole responsibility of the individual; IT Services cannot export OneNote content from your McGill account under any circumstances. Ensure that all content is exported before your account expires. Importing and exporting notebooks through OneNote for the web is only available for notebooks stored on personal OneDrive accounts, not for those stored on OneDrive for Business or SharePoint. You must have the OneNote application installed on your computer to download/export documents. If you do not already have OneNote installed, download it here for free (PC and Mac).

Copying OneNote sections to a personal account

If you are leaving McGill and would like to keep a copy of a OneNote notebook linked to your school or work account, or notebooks stored on OneDrive for Business or SharePoint, follow these instructions on exporting a copy of your work. While this process requires that you have a personal Microsoft account, a paid license is not necessary for the basic features.

Exporting for work and school accounts

NOTE:

This feature is limited on Mac. Mac users will only be able to save single pages as PDF rather than export the whole notebook as a OneNote file (*.one). We recommend that Mac users use the copy option listed above instead.

Access OneNote online through the Microsoft 365 portal.
Locate the notebook that you wish to export. Click on the 3 dots next to the OneNote document that you wish to download/export, then select Open in Desktop app.

NOTE:

If your goal is to simply access your OneNote documents using the desktop app and you don't need to make a local copy, you can stop here. The document will be available directly from the desktop app in the future.
Once your OneNote document is open in your OneNote desktop application, you can save a local copy of the file:
- On Windows: select File > Export.
- On Mac: Select File > Save as PDF.

Exporting for personal accounts

If you have a personal (non-McGill) Microsoft 365 account and wish to export a notebook stored on your personal OneDrive account, follow the instructions below. This process applies to both PC or Mac using any version of OneNote (as long as it is a personal account).

Go to OneNote for the web.

NOTE:

We recommend using Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, or any other modern browser to export content from OneNote.
Enter your credentials for the Microsoft account containing the notebook you want to download.
Under My Notebooks, right-click (PC) or Ctrl-click (Mac) the name of the notebook that you want to export, then click Export notebook.
- - If you are not presented with the export option, then you are likely using a work or school account. Follow the instructions in the section "Exporting for work and school accounts", above.
On the pop-up window, click Export.
Follow your browser's prompts to save the file in the desired location. If the notebook you're exporting is large, it could take awhile to download your content. Ensure you have enough space on your hard drive to complete the download.
Each downloaded notebook is saved in a .zip file format. If you want to import a downloaded notebook, you'll first need to unzip the notebook folder from the .zip file, and then import it to OneNote for the web.