Software Recommendation (Onenote vs. Others)

Posted by PIMUsee
Oct 11, 2012 at 06:44 PM

Sorry if I take long to respond, I’ll be busy till Friday afternoon when I’m finally free from the curse of midterms!

Dr. A

Wow how did I not find that thread? Thank you so much, it’s proving to be an educational read. Your system is actually very similar to yours. I also use PDF Expert and export the notes into an email and then make little corrections (expand upon thoughts, paraphrasing, organizing into sections like methods, result, etc.) after pasting into Onenote. The only difference is that I have a to read folder in my Dropbox that I move PDFs into when I want to read them later and move them back into Mendeley (my current PDF manager of choice) when I’m done. The Dragon dictation thing is very interesting though and I’ll have to try that sometimes and hope my accent doesn’t hinder me. As for the iPad workaround, the unfortunate thing is that it requires internet. The reason this concerns me is that if I ever do something like Doctors without Border or work in rural areas (something I am considering), then I’ll lack internet access the majority of the time (why I rejected Dokuwiki and ConnectedText). So I wanted something that has a native client on the iPad (I’m using Outline+ right now for Onenote usage on iPad).

Quant

Yeah, the majority of my info are in PDF (for web articles/ blogs I use Joliprint to convert them into PDFs, only other file format is MP3/ MP4 for podcast and TED talks I take notes from). I use Nitro PDF instead because I was already use to it and it provides me with most things I need (basic annotation, and can print things to PDF, though web pages are iffy for selectable text, see Joliprint instead for that). Color coding is something I’m considering, I might use the system suggested here for color coding (http://drosophiliac.com/an-academic-notetaking-workflow.html). I haven’t tried Ultra Recall yet, can you give me a run down vs. Onenote?

MadaboutDana
I do use tagging in Onenote, though more for exam studying purpose (tag summary of maybe everything I tagged in my bio notes with the vocab tag). The problem is that unlike tagging in Evernote, you can’t search two tags at once (as far as I know), which is kind of the purpose of tagging in the first place (having things under different categories without having to make a separate “folder” for each of them). The tag summaries does exactly that, which is helpful for exam review, but not for finding things that are related to say prefrontal cortext and perception at the same time.

I’m not sure I would ever need to export my Onenote into PDF (unless I wanted to share just one page instead of a whole notebook through Skydrive). I can do all the things in a PDF editor that I can do in Onenote except for drawing (I just draw on the iPad and then put it into Dropbox and copy and paste it into Onenote). I could export all my stuff into PDF if I ever just wanted to get my data out of Onenote immediately and then copy and paste from PDF into another program. But the reason I wanted to export to txt or rtf was that if I ever move from Onenote to another program later on, it would be easier if I had it in a common file extension that could be imported widely (like txt or rtf). But yes, PDF is a very future-proof option right now and might be what I do if I ever wanted to get my data out of Onenote fast. Since I could still edit the text in my file and just index my files. Though my Wiki-links wouldn’t work which would make me slightly sad (part of the reason why I like ConnectedText so much).

Silvernote seems really interesting. Though to me it just seems like a free version of Onenote which I don’t need since I already have Microsoft Office for free through my school. The drawing part seems interesting (instead of me drawing a concept map outside of Onenote on LucidChart or using Dia and then copying the image in) but the search is what I really like. I’m still not sure why Onenote doesn’t have searching as good as Silvernote. Though I’m not sure if I’ll ever really need the searching since my notes are pretty organized in notebooks (wiki-links help too) and stuff so I can find things rather easy. It’s just the tag summary that doesn’t allow two tags that annoys me.

Everybody,

Thank you for all the suggestion and insight so far, they have been incredibly helpful and gave me some things to check out.