Just as printed books seem to be giving way to e-books in many ways, the standard notebook and pen system for taking notes is facing competition from various computer-based note-taking programs. This semester I used Evernote for the first time. However, while I’d never used Evernote before, I have been using Microsoft OneNote for a few years already, and I must admit that my love for OneNote prejudiced me against Evernote from the start. For the sake of fairness, though, I will try to explain why I like OneNote so much and why, despite its benefits, Evernote does not measure up in my estimation.
My favorite feature about OneNote is its organizational system. The interface is designed to mirror the appearance of a physical notebook or binder, which is the traditional note-taking system that I have known all my life. OneNote is comprised of notebooks which can then be divided into sections for different subjects or topics. You can then create multiple pages or subpages in each section, so you can keep your ideas or your lecture notes well organized. On each page, you can manipulate the layout in whatever way you’d like: you can start typing in the middle of the page and a text box will automatically pop up around your text. The text can be dragged across the page, or you can create multiple text boxes all over the page. I find this extremely useful when I’m brainstorming for a paper or a project and I want to get all of my ideas down in one place.
By contrast, I found Evernote extremely difficult to organize. Evernote is also made up of notebooks, but these notebooks are comprised of individual notes that cannot (to my knowledge) be sorted into sections or groupings. Each note page is also more stagnant than its OneNote counterpart, and cannot be manipulated at all. Text can be typed from the top of the note to the bottom, and even moving words around the page to reorganize them can be difficult. I found that Evernote felt more like a stack of post-it notes than a group of pages in a notebook. The closest approximation I found to the notebook/section/page OneNote system in Evernote was something called “Notebook Stacks.” With this system it’s possible to group a number of related notebooks together in a “stack,” while keeping them as separate entities. I did this with a few of my notebooks and then treated the stack as my overall notebook and each individual notebook as a kind of section with pages inside of it. This helped a little, but still left me feeling that my notes were disorganized.
The other issue that I had with Evernote was its lack of intuitiveness. In OneNote, it’s very simple to start a bulleted list or to create a table in the middle of your notes. OneNote uses a simple keyboard shortcuts to allow you to make the changes you need while typing. For example, hitting ctrl + . will start a bulleted list, while hitting tab in the middle of a line will create a new table around the text you’ve been typing. It’s simple and quick, which is great when you’re trying to keep your notes neat while listening to a lecturer speak at an impossibly fast rate. However, to create the same note organizers in Evernote, you have to locate the correct button or choose the correct menu option from a variety of drop-down menus. While this isn’t the most terrible disadvantage in the world, I found that it was something that consistently annoyed me while using Evernote.
Nonetheless, to be perfectly fair, there are a couple of other factors that need to be taken into account in this assessment. Firstly, there was one component of Evernote that I did find to be truly outstanding and very useful: the Evernote Web Clipper. The Web Clipper allows you to clip articles, PDFs, bookmarks or other formats from the internet directly to Evernote. This comes in handy when I’m researching articles and resources for papers and projects and don’t want to have to read a whole bunch of long articles at one time, but I want to keep them in reserve for later. OneNote does have a screen clipper, but it’s not as comprehensive or easy to use as Evernote’s Web Clipper. Evernote’s other advantage is its ability to be synced between devices, so that you can access your notes from a computer and a phone. I found this really useful when I needed to check something I had researched, but didn’t have easy access to a computer- I could just pull out my phone and double check my facts. OneNote doesn’t have a really good syncing capability, which is probably its biggest shortcoming. OneNote’s other major disadvantage is that it’s only available on PCs. I have a PC, so I can enjoy all its helpful features, but Mac users may end up disregarding most of this review. That leads me to a question: does anyone know of a Mac note-taking program that is more similar to OneNote than Evernote? I’d love to take a look at that if you do!
Thnaks for compring Evernote and OneNote. I agree the Webclipper is a significant point of differentiation. If you are finding Evernote a challenge to setup, perhaps take a look at this blog for some tips: http://bit.ly/10leWwh
Rina,
I found that I agreed completely with a lot of what you said about Evernote. I had a lot of the same aesthetic issues that you wrote about in your post: mainly that with all of Evernote’s features, it is difficult to manipulate the way things look to cater to individual’s specific needs and/or desires. And I find that in note-taking software, it is very important that things are able to be changed for the user’s comfort.
I myself, as a Mac user, have never seen/used OneNote before, but I like the interface and most importantly, as stated above, appreciate its ability to accommodate users. My version of Microsoft Word has a Notebook layout that a user can switch to, which looks similar to your system and may just be a simplified version of it. I have used that before, but the only disadvantage is that you can only access your notes from whichever particular computer you are using Microsoft Word on. In any case, I think you also found that your pre-existing love for another note-taking application prevented your full acceptance of Evernote.
Thanks for the review,
Emily
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I’m not following you on the lack of device syncing of OneNote across devices. I have iOS, Android, PC/Mac, Windows RT and Windows Phone 8 and OneNote syncs across all of them. Am I missing something here?
I’ve found that OneNote’s apps and services for devices other than PCs don’t work as smoothly as EverNote. The EverNote app for Android is much easier to use and sync than the OneNote app.