Hi everybody!

I've been looking for an alternative to OneNote 2007 for a couple of years now, but somehow I never found my way to this excellent forum.

The main reason why I want to switch is that I'd prefer to have my notes in a future-proof, non-proprietary, OS-independent format. I don't require many bells & whistles, but there are some very basic things I need which none of the apps I tested was able to do:

I organise most of my notes in very large tables spread across the OneNote canvas. I want to be able to continue to work this way and I want to be able to import my old notes from the (relatively faithful) mht/html exports. I think this entails that the software uses a canvas-like rich text editor with true html (not markdown) as its file standard. Ideally saving those files individually in a folder system on my PC, reproducing the tree structure of the notebook 1 to 1.

I have loads of "nice to haves" on my wishlist beyond that, but since this one requirement is already enough to eliminate all of the popular candidates, I'll shut up right here. If you know of any piece of software that can do this elementary thing, or if you have another idea altogether on how to approach my problem, I'd very much appreciate your advice.

(Incidently, I just learned about MyInfo here. Would that maybe be a good candidate?)

Thank you!

Depends on your platform(s): a couple of clues suggest you're working in Windows, but perhaps you could clarify?

And welcome to the forum! We're all Very Proud of the host, Chris, who's just enhanced and upgraded the whole experience!

Thank you kindly! It really looks great, but still feels like a golden age internet forum. Less activity than places like reddit, but so much more expertise and a real sense of community. Kudos to everyone involved!

I'm on Windows 10, sorry for not clarifying earlier. But since Microsoft appears hell-bent on agentic Ai, I'm very much flirting with the idea of switching to Linux after the final security updates. The only thing holding me back is incompatible music making software, but if push comes to shove, I might just go the dual boot route.

So I'd be interested in locally-installed software that can bridge those two operating systems, but also in Linux-only applications, since this is likely where I'm headed.

Hi pedter, welcome to our community!

Notes in tables makes me think of TreeSheets https://strlen.com/treesheets/

It has versions for Windows and Linux, but I don't know if it will import the OneNote data. The quickest way to find out is to test it.

It doesn't do all you ask for, but you still might want to take a look at xTiles, if you haven't. It's notebook-like, and does tables, among many other things.

https://xtiles.app/en/

Thank you, Cyganet2! What a beautiful piece of software. If I started today, I'd definitely consider it as a candidate, because it does the outliner/spreadsheet mashup I'm looking for on a very small footprint, but apparently there's no way to get my old notebooks transferred without considerable data loss.

And thank you, Stephen Zeoli! It's a bit different from what I have in mind, but it's cool to see other applications embracing the horizontal organisation.

And as a little update of my own research, I did find some discussions of people getting OneNote 2007 to run on Linux, but I wonder if I'd still have to worry about whether or not I can activate my old license someday. And I found this personal project, which is very close to what I'm looking for, but little more than a beta-version and not in active development: https://mitchellaugustin.com/spiral/

The only app I can think of that more or less directly mirrors OneNote on Linux is BasketNotes (https://basket-notepads.github.io but I don't think it imports OneNote files.

The best OneNote equivalent on Mac is GrowlyNotes (https://growlybird.com/notes/ which is still free, has a mind-blowingly small footprint, and offers the same kind of PDF handling as Curio. Sadly, although the developer produced an iOS app, nobody was interested, so he cancelled it.

But I'm musing here. For your requirements, you might want to look at various TiddlyWiki solutions? There are a few of them listed on the main TiddlyWiki website (https://tiddlywiki.com but there are many variants, some of which may be riffs on OneNote...

Thank you again, MadaboutDana!

I've heard about TiddlyWiki, but I'm surprised to learn how potent it is and how active the community around it. Basket looks like a cool project as well, similar to the Spiral I've mentioned but further developed. Unfortunately, both don't seem to allow for my workflow or a practical way to transfer my old notes, so it looks like I'm still out of luck in my search for an alternative.

But in the meantime I learned that OneNote 2007 appears to work well on recent Linux distros and I also found a way to possibly "perpetualize" my license, so I might just go this route for now. Maybe in a few years there will be a more advanced rich text editor available and then I can vibecode my own solution. Or maybe another crank will.

In the meantime, thanks to the community for all the ideas. I will check back into the forum occasionally, not so much to find a solution for my problem, but because I find it really inspiring to see all the different ways you all work with outliner applications.