I haven't seen too many people mentioning the onslaught of Microsoft One Note in developing a great note-taking tool, that syncs well in the cloud, and integrates with several of their other tools like Word and Outlook.
Personallly, as a early Evernote User, once One Note came out for Mac, I switched. And then getting a job somewhere where we used Windows PCs, just solidified it for me, and I never found the need to go back.
The moment I switched from Evernote to Onenote was the time EN screwed up the formatting of one of my very important ornate lists. To make things worse, through an unlucky combination of keystrokes I deleted everything I had in my note, only to find that version control was a Premium feature of Evernote.
I promptly used the free "Recommend to a friend" 1 month trial to recover my note and used the importer to move everything to OneNote and I haven't looked back since.
If this just worked, if they could just make it so I can copy a bulleted list in Evernote and paste it somewhere else without the formatting going bananas, I would have stuck with it.
Precisely this. I use lists to structure my thoughts, and the fact that Evernote couldn't handle basic continuity for nested ordered lists turned me off of it completely.
I use Onenote because it comes with Office on our work computers, but it's still an annoying mess. The notes are in some kind of weird text box inside the page, which can scroll in weird directions? I don't understand it, maybe it's user error, but it feels clunky. Sometimes I open Onenote after rebooting and it just decides to not find my Notebook? Also, how come if I type a title and then hit the down arrow (and again, because the first time it goes to date), I'm now on the second line of the text area, and have to press up to get to the first line? I have no idea why this bothers me so much, but these little weird behaviors drive me insane.
> The notes are in some kind of weird text box inside the page, which can scroll in weird directions? I don't understand it
It's meant for drawing and rich media, so you can type notes and draw/paint in the same document. And for that particular use case, if you own a Surface Pen or such it is kind of nice to use.
But I suspect the majority of people in OneNote just need to type out notes. I agree with you, and I wish OneNote had some concept of a "typed-only" note, that did away with the weird textboxing-layouting stuff.
For sure. I had an Evernote subscription, but I used OneNote at work - and it's just better. Letting you place snippets and notes on the vertical AND horizontal plane makes sense for quick note taking. Anyway, I switched last year and the fact that OneNote had a convenient note importer for Evernote was icing on the cake.
Evernote never seemed to evolve either. It was the same product 5 years ago, as it was last year and the company employed hundreds of developers - doing what?
The OneNote canvas based model doesn't really work for note taking for me.
Switching between mobile and desktop devices means the content doesn't fit on either because it the form factors are so different.
I think they special case the mobile product to act like a traditional text editor when there is a single text field. But it is a kludge on top of a broken model.
That's fair. I personally never found value in note taking on mobile. I present at conferences, and deal with partners and customers, and in those cases pen with a pocket-size notebook beats fiddling around with a phone. To compare, to take a note on a phone while talking to a partner, I have to 1) take my phone out, 2) unlock it, 3) launch the app and wait for it to load 4) wait until the software keyboard shows up, 5) start taking notes. At any point the phone could start acting up. Maybe it'll be extra slow this time. Maybe the app will crash. Maybe the fingerprint won't take on the first try. The opportunity for delays are always there.
With a notebook, it's so much faster. You take it out, and you start writing. And at the end of the day, I manually add my notes to OneNote.
At work we have Office and I decided to give One Note a try. The note taking itself is awesome, but I kept running into an issue where copying and pasting would copy images of what I had highlighted instead of just the text of the notes... After Googling for 3 days I gave up and I'm back to pen and paper.
Another thing in OneNote’s favor is you know it’s going to stick around because they sell it to businesses. With Evernote it seems like they could run out of money and with Google they could just get bored.
Personallly, as a early Evernote User, once One Note came out for Mac, I switched. And then getting a job somewhere where we used Windows PCs, just solidified it for me, and I never found the need to go back.