I never had any experience with using Microsoft OneNote before getting the Microsoft Office 2007 Home Edition.
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:
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:
In essence EverNote is a killer note taking product I couldn’t recommend more.
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I’ve used EverNote on a USB stick for some time. However, another online product that isn’t bad — especially if you are using the whole suite — is Zoho Notebook: http://notebook.zoho.com
For business purposes I find OneNote much better than EverNote. I’ve tested both at the same time and found OneNote much more intuitive and capable and it supports better organization. Evernote appeared to me much like just a better data collecting tool. Normally I’m not a user of MS products at all, use OpenOffice and we just have MS Office to open documents that clients send us. But surprisingly OneNote became invaluable in no time.
I guess it all depends on the users needs or “taste” ;-)
I agree with Steve on this one. I love OneNote and use it for school, work, planning (yep planning), and my website:
— On the left-hand side of the screen (Notebooks) are “Website”, “Grad Plan”, “Fall 07”, “Winter 08” etc.
— Across the top (Sections) is class names (school) or months (website.)
— On the right-hand side (pages) is individual classes (school) or individual posts (website.)
OneNote helps me so much; however, this suits my personality, and I know it’s not for everyone.
How about a link to the Evernote page?
Oh yea, I think OneNote is a great product! It just isn’t suitable for me and how I use it… as a business user I would definetly go for OneNote. Actually not even business, for any multiple purpose notetaking like Steve mentioned.
@Jayson, there is a link.
I use both –
Evernote for all those page snippets of interest, like tech, or passwords (encrypted), or all my hobby stuff. Easy to put in one or several categories. Also synchronize to a stick so that I have info at clients’ computers.
For writing articles I use Onenote, as I can click in different areas of a page just to make a note of a thought (or sub pages for sub thoughts). After organizing the thoughts I can copy to a word processor.
Does OneNote have a pretty accurate handwriting recognition setup? Say you have sloppy handwriting; is it a pain to get it converted from handwriting to text?
OneNote 2007 is far better than Evernote