Apparently, my "one time purchase" of Microsoft Office 2021 for Mac credentials have been nuked by MS. It has reached EOL support. My "option" is to get a Microsoft 365 subscription to keep using my files. I suppose I can purchase a copy of Microsoft Office 2024 for Mac but it's kinda pricey. I've been working in the MS eco system for the last 30 years and the only app I use full time now is MS OneNote with occasional Word and Excel.

The question: do I stay on the merry go round? I've been using Excel and OneNote since version 1.0. Maybe it's time. MS uses a proprietary format for its OneNote files. But it appears that Outline by Gorillized can import these files with little issue. I need to try it and find out. I will really miss Excel but maybe now is the time to move on.

Heh, well, Numbers is pretty cool, too. And if you really want a direct Excel replacement, OpenOffice is a good place to start.

This is really my own fault for not paying attention. The ball is ALWAYS in Microsoft's court!

I think that LibreOffice would be a better replacement.

OneNote has frustrated me for years. My employer encourages its use. Unfortunately, searching is pretty much broken. I don't know if it's because SharePoint is involved or just the size of the data.

It's common to search for something in a notebook and not find it, then jump into the section and search only that section, finding the document.

It would be a great (sort of) to-do manager, except searching for unchecked tags usually skips a bunch of them.

Even in my small personal OneNote file I see these problems.

OneNote would be great if Microsoft had just stopped messing with it after about 2010.

Since you’re on Mac, i would suggest Zengobi’s Curio as a replacement for OneNote. Curio is really like if OneNote was going to the gym everyday and abusing steroids..
As for Excel, as others have suggested, Numbers or LibreOffice are fine replacements, unless you’re a really heavy-duty user who needs the VisualBasic/Statistics/etc packages.

Agreed ... I use lots of Tags but it still gets hairy sometimes!

Amontillado wrote:

OneNote has frustrated me for years. My employer encourages its use. Unfortunately, searching is pretty much broken. I don't know if it's because SharePoint is involved or just the size of the data.

It's common to search for something in a notebook and not find it, then jump into the section and search only that section, finding the document.

It would be a great (sort of) to-do manager, except searching for unchecked tags usually skips a bunch of them.

Even in my small personal OneNote file I see these problems.

Thanks for the suggestions: I was comtemplating DEVONthink for a while but Curio does look interesting!

Skywatcher wrote:

Since you’re on Mac, i would suggest Zengobi’s Curio as a replacement for OneNote. Curio is really like if OneNote was going to the gym everyday and abusing steroids..
As for Excel, as others have suggested, Numbers or LibreOffice are fine replacements, unless you’re a really heavy-duty user who needs the VisualBasic/Statistics/etc packages.

Curio is a great tool and in my use it's been completely reliable. It's recently sprouted a command line interface to support AI, which I suspect is great.

AI is completely unwelcome on my system. The Curio CLI may be just the thing for scripting. I haven't experimented yet.

The latest Curio release includes smart kanban boards, another feature I've been a little lax in experimenting with. The new features list is impressive - https://www.zengobi.com/curio/

For a blast from the past, nvAlt has apparently been resurrected - https://brettterpstra.com/2026/10/24/nvalt-back-from-the-dead/

I think I may pass on that one, even though I have appreciation for simple tools. Based on a quick and perhaps flawed glance, The Archive looks like a better tool - https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/

I saw somewhere the beta for nvUltra is now open to the public, so that's getting closer to. Maybe. The nvUltra website still says it's in private beta - https://nvultra.com

Curio, though, is definitely a winner. It would take threats of violence to legions of puppies to pry me away from Devonthink, but Curio is massively nicer than OneNote. Just an opinion, of course.

There's also the wonderful Growly Notes, which is totally free, looks strikingly like OneNote (the developer worked for MS back in the day), is extremely compact (tiny, tiny footprint) but does many of the things OneNote does, albeit faster and more consistently (I particularly like its PDF import facility, which, as it happens, is not dissimilar to Curio's).

The very amiable developer launched an iOS version some years back, but it didn't do very well (he's not a natural marketer), so he withdrew it again. But Growly Notes is still regularly updated and remains one of the best Mac-only note-takers around.

Just to complete the list of all the possible "notebook" metaphor apps, there is also Notetaker 5, which dates from the 2000s. It is still sort of kept current by the developer, Aquaminds. It along with CircusPonies Notebook were kind of exciting apps back in the day. The developer of CircusPonies went off the deep end and killed his app in a snit. But Aquaminds has hung in there. The app looks dated, but works pretty well. Mostly you create notebooks of outlines. You can learn more, if you care to, here:

https://www.aquaminds.com

It is a lovely app (Notetaker, that is), but I confess that it's been sitting unused on my Mac for the last few years. I can't bring myself to delete it, but I've moved over to an almost entirely markdown-based workflow, so essentially, it's just not relevant.

I want to thank everyone for the great suggestions!! This is a great community for support and feedback! I've kept a list of PKM tools over the years. Somehow I missed NoteTaker. I will add it to my list. Also, believe it our not, MacJournal is still hanging in there!!! Kudos to Dan Schimpf!!! https://danschimpf.com/

Bartb - Thanks for reminding me of MacJournal. For a while, that was my favorite writing app for Mac, but I thought it was dead in the water. It's nice to know it is still going.

It's fairly moribund, in fact, and the latest version is 7.4, not 7.3.1 (which is the version you'll find on the website). But it is a great piece of software which, again, I've been unable to bring myself to delete, although I don't really use it (there's a whole treasure trove of undeleted golden oldies on my machine! I keep clearing parts of it out, or agonising over other parts of it which I can't bear to get rid of. Ridiculous, really).

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Bartb - Thanks for reminding me of MacJournal. For a while, that was my favorite writing app for Mac, but I thought it was dead in the water. It's nice to know it is still going.