Out of OneNote and into Notebooks with Scrivner

Since we’re in the final days of the year, the tradition is to get rid of the old and bring in the new. One of the things I plan to do for the new year is move all of my writing from OneNote over to Notebooks and Scrivener. That is a big change for me as I’ve been using OneNote for nearly 5 years now.

So why move away from it?
– I’m still using OneNote 2007 because I simply can’t stand the UI of the more recent versions
– The file format doesn’t translate well from Windows to Mac to iOS
– OneNote has almost nonexistent export functions
– OneNote doesn’t integrate with anything
– While OneNote may be free, Microsoft is trying too damn hard to tie it to their cloud services and I simply can’t trust that
– UI aside, it’s becoming bloated with useless features giving it a huge footprint

For the future, I’ve decided to go with Notebooks for Windows as well as Scrivener. These were on sale for Black Friday so I took advantage and got the Windows and Mac versions.

So now what? The first goal is to get everything out of OneNote. While it’s slow and tedious, you can right-click on a tab and select Copy, which gets everything on the tab. This can be Pasted into Notebooks which saves it as a .TXT file which everything and anything can read and edit.

Once all the files are copied over and organized into folders within Notebooks, they will be imported into the same folder structure in Scrivener.

So why use Scrivener? I saw an article refer to Scrivener as the IDE of documents and that seems pretty accurate. I will create folders so I can store and sort my writing like I did in OneNote. Now I can start a project pretty much anywhere and it will all end up in the same place.

Scrivener will also help break down large projects into smaller, more manageable chunks. It main goal is to have you write down small scenes or narratives then compiles them all into the final product. This will be very beneficial for a couple of projects I have planned for the year.

Now the big task, getting 5 years worth of text out of OneNote.