How to view OneNote content on a mac?

April 3, 2008 11:26 PM

How to access information and files embedded in Microsoft Onenote on a Mac?

I finally got a mac and the only thing that I am in need of is a way to view previously made Onenote notebooks and their contents. I won't need to add to or edit the files - just view them and open the word, powerpoint, and pdf files that have been embedded in the Onenote database (not printed into the notebook pages).

For my 1st 2 years of medical school I used Onenote to store all of the syllabi (aka our textbooks), lecture information, lecture powerpoints, practice tests, and study sheets. My entire notebook is on the order of 7gb. Most of the information I would come back to is in the embedded files, not the Onenote pages, but they provide the structure. All is typed text (never used a tablet).

Because of the volume of the noteboook, it is not feasible to reorganize everything again. Not too sure how the emulator stuff works to open something under leopard, but this site says Office 2007 wouldn't work with Wine . I tried this program which seemed so perfect, but besides oddly having to execute it through command prompt to get it to work, it would not let me access the embedded files. I'd really like to avoid only being able to access it through booting into windows.

Any ideas?

posted by chrisalbon to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Unfortunately, that's the price for using a proprietary system. Use Fusion or Parallels to run Windows in "coherence" mode. You can then run Windows applications (like OneNote/Office) side by side with Mac OS X applications.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:30 PM on April 3, 2008

I will say that windows XP in vmware fusion running office on a modern mac with a decent amount of memory runs very very well. BP is correct, it's probably the shortest path. You could possibly try and export the data to PDF and then access it natively ?

Good luck!
posted by iamabot at 11:55 PM on April 3, 2008

What they said...

But then do this, get windows running (or find a friend who can help you who has a windows computer) and then export the onenote files. I believe you can export to .doc and if all else fails, print to pdf using either the windows tool for that (it is downloadable, I believe) or something like CutePDF.

Then you should have some files you can use on your Mac.

Only thing I miss about Windows is OneNote - best program I ever used.
posted by Gideon at 1:34 AM on April 4, 2008

so now you can import onenote into evernote (in windows) then sync across the cloud or export as evernote xml files which you can then import into evernote (on your mac) ... very cool
posted by steve3001 at 1:39 AM on December 4, 2008