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How do I move Evernote notes with PDFs to OneNote via Zapier and maintain format & file storage?

  • 5 September 2023
  • 3 replies
  • 79 views

Hello everyone!

I am a long time user of Evernote - I have just over 5k notes there. Many of those notes have pdf attachments in them mostly due to my scanner - when I drop papers into my scanner it auto creates a note in Evernote with the scan as a pdf attachment.

I cant use Evernote at work, I have to use Onenote. Im trying to automate the scenario where I’m in a note in my Evernote and I want to pass it over to my Onenote workbook. I've setup a basic zap that watches for a tag (‘Onenote’) and that appears to test successfully.

However, attachments do not come into Onenote correctly. While testing the visual editor says it sees attachments but wont show them in the editor area. If I test the full migration the new note shows up in OneNote, but the attachment area is just a jumble of text. If I change the text type to html the jumble of text is now an html link which points to a zip file that can be downloaded from the zapier landscape.

So some questions:

  1. How can I bring over the pdf attachment (one or many) into the onenote note such that it can still be accessed as a pdf and actually stored within the note?
  2. Where are my files being stored in the zapier landscape and how long will they stay there?

Thanks everyone!

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Best answer by ken.a 5 September 2023, 12:40

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3 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

Hi there @mgrgill,

Welcome to the Community! 🎉

I did some digging into this, and it seems like the OneNote integration doesn’t support an “Attachment” field in the action steps, we need the “Attachment” field for this workflow since Evernote returns the file as a file object. Here’s an example of a file object:

aefb272b75d1bac720ff9de3bdd14a4c.png
(view larger)

You can learn more about sending files in Zaps here: https://help.zapier.com/hc/en-us/articles/8496288813453-Send-files-in-Zaps

Regarding your question about:

Where are my files being stored in the zapier landscape and how long will they stay there?

No, Zapier does not store your files. Zapier acts as a middleman to facilitate the transfer of data between different apps and services. However, Zapier does keep the logs of the Zap runs in the Zap history, which might include metadata about the file (like file name or size) but not the file itself.

That said, we do have an open feature request for the “Attachment” field to be supported in the OneNote “Create Note” action. Please let me know if you’d like to get added to that.

Thanks! 😊

Thank you for the detailed explanation. Yes, please add me to the open feature request - it looks like that is eventually what I will need to rely on for this to work comprehensively.

Thanks again!

Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Hi @mgrgill! 👋

Hope you don’t mind me jumping in for Ken here. I’ve gone ahead and added your vote to the feature request now. This helps to increase it’s priority and allows us to contact you should this feature get added to the OneNote app.

In the meantime, it looks like the OneNote API is able to add attachments to OneNote pages (which I’m guessing are the same thing as notes?) see: Add images, videos, and files to OneNote pages. So you may be able to use OneNote’s API Request (Beta) action to send the attachment that way. It’s a bit more advanced than using the other OneNote actions as you’d need to set up the request to OneNote’s API but you can find out more about how to do that here: Set up an API Request action

Hope that helps. If you run into any further issues just let us know!