How to move Microsoft OneNote 2016 (& later?) notes from one PC to another

Note: this guide applies only to OneNote 20XX notes stored locally on the PC and not synced anywhere. It cannot be guaranteed to work for synced notes and will not work for OneNote for Windows 10 notes (which are synced to OneDrive using the OneDrive client)

The whole thing is easier than you think. It should also work for OneNote versions later than 2016.

1. Open your \Documents folder
2. Open the OneNote Notebooks folder. Every subfolder in that folder is a OneNote notebook
3. Copy the desired notebook subfolder to the target PC, preferably to the default \Documents\OneNote Notebooks folder
4. On the target PC, open OneNote 2016 -> File -> Open -> Browse
5. Browse to the location of the notebook subfolder
6. Inside the notebook subfolder, select the Open Notebook.onetoc2 file
7. Click Open

This will open the copied notebook in OneNote 2016. You'll have to click on each tab to populate and color them, but everything should be there.