I’m a university student and having spent a few weeks attempting to organise my notes with MS Word (Trial Edition) I was quite excited to discover this great note taking application. OneNote really is useful, but I just couldn’t help feel as though it was a little overkill for me and how I would use it.

OneNote is targeted more at people working in business of course, which is shame because Microsoft is really losing out on the student market. In fact there are two main reasons I couldn’t effectively use OneNote:

• Organisation: Like many students I’m very unorganised. In fact considering most students are, designing a note taking program with this in mind would be a good decision.
• Too much for too little: What other reason aside from lectures and tutorials would I use OneNote? Sure I tried using it for some other things as well, but really it just feels like too big an application for what I need it for.

Enter EverNote.

I had a beta invitation to EverNote months ago, however based on reports of bugginess and performance issues I waited till the service has improved a little.

After the latest version 3.0 update yesterday I have begun to use EverNote for all my notetaking needs. I quickly discovered it’s a fantastic application for what I need it for. Here is why:

• Synchronisation: EverNote is running a ‘freemium’ model for their service. What? Pay?! I’m quite glad of this as it means EverNote is very likely to stick around as they have an actual business model! You will get 40mb free data synchronisation each month between different computers and mobile devices.
• Organisation: Is far easier and simpler, Use notebooks, tags and attributes to organise all your content. It is much quicker to just get in and start working and easier later to locate what you wrote through the search focused toolbar.
• Search in Images: It could still do with a lot of improvements but the Image searching feature of EverNote is pretty impressive. It will locate any text within any image you paste into your notes. You can also take screen clippings like OneNote which is handy.

In essence EverNote is a killer note taking product I couldn’t recommend more.

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If you miss a class you still can take a look at the notes online without having to rely on friends who bring them to your house. Even better is that everyone in the group may edit or add content to those notes making it fairly easy to create a comprehensive summary of what happened during a course.

Once completed notes can be printed or exported in pdf and doc format for further editing or archiving those notes.

The editor can probably compared to Notepad with just a few needed formatting options added such as bold or underlined text and headlines. I was not able to find a way to upload images though which would be a real nice feature if you consider that many courses nowadays use graphics in their presentation.

Notesake converts mathematical equations into images and seems to support Latex although I was not really able to find any information on their site about the latter.

If they add private image hosting, offer a good online help explaining all the hidden functions and probably an import function they would really rock the note taking web. As of now this is an interesting online service that could to better.

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