Microsoft has just made it easier for Mac owners to move all their saved items from Evernote to its rival note-taking app, OneNote. This isn’t the first time Microsoft has attempted to entice users away from Evernote. In March, the company introduced a OneNote Importer Tool for Windows users.

Evernote’s Premium and Plus plans recently saw a price increase for its annual subscriptions, increasing to $69.99 per year for the Premium product and $34.99 per year for the Plus product. While the company does offer a free Basic package it does lack some of the features of the free OneNote subscription. The ability to sync to more than two devices, offline access, the ability to save emails to notes, and the ability to digitize business cards all require an upgrade to a Plus or Premium Evernote package. While OneNote also offers unlimited monthly uploads and free-form canvas, allowing you to mix text, images, documents, handwriting, audio, and video.

If you are keen to make the move over to OneNote with all your Evernote notes we look at the step-by-step process for Mac users.

How to import notes from Evernote to OneNote

Note: The OneNote Importer Tool requires that you have OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) or later installed on your Mac.

Before you get started with the import process it is advisable that you have Evernote for Mac installed on your machine to speed up the process. Sign into your Evernote for Mac account and ensure your notes are synced before importing.

Step 1: Download the OneNote Importer Tool on your Mac with Evernote installed.

Tip: If you receive an alert that the OneNote Importer is from an unidentified developer, go to System Preferences on your Mac > Security and Privacy > open the OneNote Importer.

Step 2: When the download is complete, double-click the installer file on your Mac, and accept the End User License Agreement. The OneNote Importer Tool will automatically discover your Evernote notebooks and you can select the ones that you want to import to OneNote from the list displayed.  

Note: For OneNote Importer to automatically locate your notes you will need to install Evernote for Mac directly from the Evernote website, it won’t work automatically if you installed Evernote from the Mac App Store.

It is possible to still complete the import process if you do not have Evernote for Mac installed on your machine by using an exported Evernote (.enex) file.

If you don’t have Evernote on the Mac you are using for the import, you can import notes from an Evernote export (.enex) file from another computer (Mac or Windows) where you do have Evernote installed. To create an Evernote export file, launch Evernote on your Mac or PC > select the notes to export > click File > Export to save them to a .enex file. Now, transfer this file to the Mac you want to run the OneNote Importer Tool on.

To import notes from an exported file, click Import a file instead and select the .enex file you moved to your Mac earlier.

Step 3: Sign into the Microsoft Account (Hotmail, Live or Outlook.com) that you want to use with OneNote.

Tip: You cannot have your notes stored locally on your Mac and will need to sign up for a free personal Microsoft Account or if your prefer a professional or school account.

Step 4: Click Import. While you don’t have to have OneNote installed on your Mac for the import process to take place, Microsoft does this through the cloud, you can download OneNote for Mac at any time.

Note: Depending on the amount of content you are importing and the speed of your internet connection, the import process can take a few minutes to several hours, which will be shown in the progress indicator bar.

Step 5: After the import process, open OneNote and your most recent Evernote notebooks will be displayed.

Note: A new OneNote notebook will be created for each Evernote notebook, while each Evernote page will be a OneNote page. If you use Evernote tags to organize your notes, each tag will become a section in OneNote.

If you have OneNote installed on all your devices, you will be able to access your imported notes on the Web, as well as Mac, iOS, Windows, and Android.

To find your imported notebooks in OneNote, follow these steps:

OneNote 2016 for Mac: Click File > open the Notebook or press Command-O.

OneNote Online: Click the Notebooks button, top of the left pane, to see all your notebooks.

Source: Microsoft Office Support

Image credit: Chung Ho Leung; Flickr