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OneNote

What to hand Canonry

Use File > Export in the OneNote desktop app: pick Section and save it as OneNote Section (.one), or pick Notebook and save it as OneNote Package (.onepkg). Hand Canonry the file, on its own or zipped. This is the format OneNote itself reads back, and it is the only export that records where each page sits in your notebook, so a subpage is proposed as a subpage rather than as one more page.

Which OneNote you have decides whether that menu exists. File > Export is in the desktop app, the one sold with Microsoft 365 and known as OneNote 2016, and that is where .one and .onepkg come from. The newer OneNote app that ships with Windows, the one that replaced OneNote for Windows 10, exports to PDF and nothing else. If that is the OneNote you have, none of the options in this paragraph are in your menus and the section-at-a-time route below is the one to take. OneNote on the web can also export a notebook as .onepkg, but only for a personal Microsoft or OneDrive account, not a work, school or SharePoint one.

Failing that, export one section at a time as Single File Web Page (.mht) from the desktop app, and hand Canonry each file, on its own or zipped. It is OneNote's own export, it needs no other tool, and every page in it becomes its own entry rather than one long document. What it does not carry is the hierarchy.

Export a whole notebook in one go as .mht, PDF or DOCX and OneNote leaves pages out of the file it writes. The file is well formed, it imports without a complaint, and the pages that did not make it are simply not there to import. Nothing in the file says which ones they were, so Canonry cannot put them back or tell you what is absent. Exporting a section at a time does not lose them, which is why that is the instruction above. A section is also the unit that fits an import: it comes back with an estimate you can read before you spend anything. The .onepkg export is the exception and does not behave that way, which is why it is the first thing on this page.

A folder tree of individually exported pages, one file per page, carries the same hierarchy .one and .onepkg do and is read the same way. It exists because it used to be the only way to get that, and OneNote has no menu item for it: producing it means running a script against the GetHierarchy and Publish automation calls the desktop app exposes, for example meichthys/onenote-html-export, a free, open-source tool built for exactly this. Zip the folder it produces and upload that, since the upload box takes one file rather than a folder. If File > Export is available to you, it is less work for the same result.

Failing all of those, print one section at a time to PDF, or export it to DOCX, and hand Canonry that. It is read through the PDF or DOCX guide, the same as any other PDF or DOCX, and it loses the notebook's own structure: every page becomes one long document and a subpage becomes just another heading. Whole-notebook scope drops pages here as well. Canonry can tell that a PDF came out of OneNote’s own printer, and it can tell from the page footers when a print covers more than one section, so it says both on the confirmation screen rather than letting you think everything came across.

One thing the export menu offers is refused, and refused before an import starts rather than partway through it, so nothing is spent on it: XPS (.xps). It is the same printed notebook a PDF would be, and the PDF is already read. Canonry reads what a file is from its bytes, not from its name, so renaming one does not get it through.

What it recognises

Two things, either of which is enough. A page OneNote exported says so in its own head, and Canonry reads that, so a .mht or a page tree is recognised whatever else is in it. And a tree of HTML pages where at least one page has its own sibling folder of embedded attachments, named after the page with _files appended, is the shape only an exported page tree produces. Either way Canonry shows you how many pages it counted before asking you to confirm the OneNote playbook; say no and it falls back to a short list of other playbooks.

What it reads

Every page becomes its own entry, with the page's own title as its name and only that page’s prose as its content. Every link to another page in the same export becomes a candidate relation, and every embedded image travels across as an attachment on the page's own entity.

The page tree carries one thing more: a page sitting in a folder named after another page is proposed as a subpage of it, with the folder tree itself standing as the evidence, since OneNote’s own export produced it rather than anything written in the page.

Limits worth knowing

A .mht export carries no hierarchy at all, and Canonry does not invent one. A notebook exported that way is its sections' pages one after another with nothing between them: no section name, no boundary, and nothing saying which page a subpage used to sit under. So every page comes across as its own entry with none proposed as a subpage. If your notebook’s structure carries meaning you want kept, .one or .onepkg is the export that keeps it.
A .mht also says nothing about what it covers, so Canonry cannot tell one section from a whole notebook by looking at the file, and the confirmation screen says as much rather than picking one. That is why the instruction is a section at a time: it is the one scope you can be sure kept everything, and you are the only one who knows which you chose. A .one or .onepkg names its own sections, so that question does not arise for them.
The newer OneNote app that ships with Windows has no File > Export at all: PDF is its only export, and it is a print, so it carries no hierarchy. The classic desktop app can be installed alongside it and opens the same notebooks, which is the shortest route to a .one or a .onepkg if the app you have cannot make one.
OneNote on a Mac has no File > Export either, and its own export only covers the page you are currently viewing, not the whole notebook. If your world lives in OneNote on a Mac, exporting page by page to PDF is the only option that app gives you, and syncing the notebook and exporting it from a Windows machine or from OneNote on the web is the way to get anything better.