Moving From MS Word Notes to Obsidian

Dear Reader,

Many academics have been taking digital notes for years, even before spectacular tools like Obsidian existed. From various surveys, I know that many of you have dozens of notes stored as Word documents, Apple Notes, or Microsoft's OneNote.

As a subscriber of this newsletter, you might also know that switching from a collection of notes (e.g. MS Word, Apple Notes, OneNote) to a knowledge Network (e.g., Obsidian) unlocks numerous "superpowers".

It gives you better retention, connectivity, recall, and, with the advent of AI and semantic search, countless surprising new ideas through connecting far-away notes. In short, it is like giving you a bicycle instead of walking: Same muscle strength, but 4x the speed.

But how do you move your old Word notes to the new Obsidian system?

Step 1: Migrate your Word Documents to an Obsidian vault

An open-source tool called "Pandoc" acts as a universal translator between text formats. This week's article explains how you can collect all of your word documents and convert them to Obsidian in seconds.

For Google Docs, you can either export individual notes as Markdown and use them directly. However, if you need a bulk export, you can ironically only export to MS Word. Follow the instructions in the article to convert MS Word to Obsidian.

Step 2 (optional): Connect your notes to a network using an AI agent

Your imported notes are initially disconnected, and you miss out on the various advantages of a connected note network. A very cheap and easy solution is to have an AI agent analyse your content and create the first connections.

→ This alone might uncover hidden and forgotten connections.

I have created a skill you can try out: "EA Connected Vault Setup". Given a series of disconnected notes, it will organise them into topic clusters, build a few root notes for you, and add links. Since academic use cases are very different, the skill is rudimentary, but it is very easy to customise to your needs, preferences, and input.

See this tutorial on using skills, if you're unfamiliar with the process of installing and using skills. You can either use Claude Code or install the Claudian plugin to work directly in Obsidian.

Since academic use cases are very different, the skill is very rudimentary, but it is very easy to customise to your needs!

Ps: AI Agents and Obsidian are quickly becoming the new foundation for information management. Obsidian expands how much you can remember, and AI how much you can synthesise.

If you want to learn how this works and get an "unfair advantage". I have a limited-time bundle offer for these two courses: AI agents and Information Management.

Keep using OneNote or switch to Obsidian?

Microsoft's OneNote is typically provided for free for most students, but is it worth using, or should you switch to Obsidian? This is the topic of the second article for this week.

In a nutshell: OneNote's main disadvantage is that it is "stuck" in the folder mindset, which does not allow you to create a network of knowledge (have you seen folders in Wikipedia? No, because folders don't scale). But its main advantage is that the notes can be richly formatted, like real notebooks. So the two tools differ in the metaphor they use for organising knowledge, and Obsidian, of course, is a multi-purpose tool, not limited to note-taking.

Thanks for being part of EA!

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

Ilya Shabanov, The Effortless Academic​

The Effortless Academic is a community, newsletter, and learning place for the modern academic, where you can learn to leverage academic tools, digital note-taking strategies, and AI for a stress-free, successful career.

Over 4 years, I have developed various transformative strategies that helped me complete my PhD in record time and are used by 1000s of academics globally. You can learn these through a series of in-depth digital courses.