Forum Discussion
OneNote vs. OneNote for Windows 10
Ryan, That was not my experience when I tried it out last week. The "new" OneNote did not recognize my "old" notebook. I'll try it again and take a closer look. I hope you're correct because it will be a real PIA to manually copy all my sections and pages from my "old" notebook.
you should be able to open your old notebook from OneDrive inside OneNote on Windows; File > Open will show a list of your notebooks although you may need to tell it about your Microsoft/OneDrive account if you don't see it there. the file formats are different so don't try to open the local files.
As I wrote, that's not my experience. I only have one Microsoft account and I can 'see' the old notebooks from the new OneNote but, as you wrote, you can't open the old notebooks because the format is no longer used. Please tell me how I can 'import' the contents of my old notebook to a new one.
the file format of the local cache on your PC is different so you can't open that directly in the desktop OneNote. But they both use the same format when they store notebooks in OneDrive in your Microsoft account so you should definitely be able to just open the notebooks in desktop OneNote using File | Open. If you're still using OneNote for Windows 10, it now has a banner that prompts you to back up any notes that aren't synced to OneDrive: Switch Now | Get Started will make a backup that you can open with File | Open Backups but it will only have any notes that didn't sync to the cloud. Those will appear in the notebook list as Open Sections and you can copy notes from there. But again, you don't need to import the contents to a new notebook, you can just open the old one. If that's not working for you, I suggest you make a new post asking for support and including details of how you're doing it and what errors you see - but hopefully you have it all sorted out by now!
Thanks MaryB for your reply, better late than never. 😉 My subsequent invetigations has led me to observe the behaviour you describe. I've already adopted a solution that, although not ideal, suits my needs. I've described this in another post but, briefly, when I discovered that the browser-based OneNote client (and the Android app) are still able to read and edit 'notes', I've simply uninstalled OneNote for Windows 10 in favour of the browser-based client (and continued to use the Android app as before). Although a little clunky, the browser-based version is adequate for my needs.