What Apple Notes is for the Mac platform, OneNote is for the Windows world. In recent years, OneNote has experienced a veritable innovation boost. Since Microsoft actively entered the convertible and tablet market, feature after feature has been added.
Classic Filing Structure
OneNote has a classic filing structure. You distribute your notes across different notebooks. Many have a notebook for personal things, one for business matters, and perhaps another for creative projects. Notebooks can, of course, be shared with other people.
Within a notebook, all individual pages are stored. To maintain some order, you can organize pages into separate sections – like tabs in a classic ring binder.
The individual page is then more or less a blank piece of paper that you can fill with content as you like. The special thing is that you can distribute content on the paper as you please. Simply click somewhere with the cursor and write, draw, insert, or place something.
The All-Collector
You can store almost anything in OneNote. Simple text, which can also be (semantically) structured with formatting styles similar to Word if needed. A heading looks like a heading and also allows you to create a table of contents for longer text.
In addition to texts, other objects can be added: images, videos, audio, formulas, tables, stickers, emojis, freehand drawings, bookmarks, documents … The list of possibilities is extensive and grows with almost every update.
This is impressive, but it may also lead to putting too much stuff on one page.
Quick Notes
OneNote is truly luxurious on a convertible or a tablet with a pencil. As on an iPad, you have the option to create a QuickNote when you press the button on the pencil or tap the screen with the pencil. Then you just start writing and convert the handwriting to text.
Or you can embed a PDF in OneNote, open it, and then mark certain text passages with the pencil.
Or you can quickly sign a contract or an invoice.
Or you start the next painting and use the entire brush and color palette.
Part of the Office Suite
OneNote, of course, integrates seamlessly into the Office package. OneNote notes become Word documents at the push of a button. Excel tables in OneNote? No problem. Conduct a survey with Microsoft Forms and collect the results in OneNote? Works. Use a notebook in Teams in a chat channel? It only takes a few clicks.
The integration is also special when working with the Education version of Office. Then you can create shared class notebooks in OneNote, through which you can organize and document entire learning groups.
That’s quite impressive. Add to that the quite useful web clipper, which is almost as good as the one from Evernote. And a few extra features like the read-aloud function and text validation. OneNote is truly a jack-of-all-trades!
What I Don’t like so Much
For me, however, OneNote is not the tool of choice despite several attempts.
First of all, it’s just a fact that most of my work devices come from the Apple world. So for me, using OneNote is rather voluntary. The Mac and iOS versions of OneNote are totally solid apps, there’s little to complain about. But the selection of alternatives is just large for me.
I do use OneNote occasionally, and then I get annoyed by the very sluggish synchronization. If you don’t use the app constantly, you first wait an eternity until everything is synchronized and you can continue your work with the latest state of the notes.
I also struggle with the rigid filing hierarchy. I don’t think in multiple notebooks. So I’m left with sections and individual pages that I have to organize. I have no keywords or tags available and thus can’t quickly create new collections. This hinders me and takes up too much of my time.
Thirdly, the concept of starting anywhere on a page and inserting something doesn’t suit me. I like flowing text and flow content. Individual boxes and frames don’t match my sense of order. Moreover, I have a problem at the latest when exporting, because then I have to bring the individual bits back into a logical structure.
Overall, the export options in OneNote offer too few possibilities. Once the content is in OneNote, it’s difficult to get it out again. For someone who fully relies on OneNote, this isn’t a problem. For someone like me who likes to have options, it’s rather suboptimal.
