Comments on: OneNote vs Evernote, Round Two

By: Russ

Russ — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 06:10:52 +0000

I finished my dissertation using Evernote, Word, and lots of paper. I ditched Evernote’s endless stream of updates awhile ago for Zotero, but as you mentioned it’s just not good for notes. Onenote vs. Endnote was a tough decision, but what tipped me toward Onenote is that it’s better managing and searching pdf files. Evernote only shows pdfs one page at a time, and while it lets you search, it doesn’t highlight the search terms like Onenote does. But, I actually prefer the setup (tags/notebooks) of Evernote.

By: Cris

Cris — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:04:01 +0000

I used Evernote for too long, and though it’s excellent in so many ways, I found 3 problems serious enough that I moved away from it:
(1) Its organisational facilities are feeble. Flat tags, with no hierarchies. For me, it rapidly became a mess if used for anything organisationally complex
(2) It is a monolithic container without an exit strategy. That means you’re entirely at its mercy, with even your organisational structure embedded in it. (Yes, it has export facilities, and an API; but as things stands, you cannot produce an export usable in anything other than Evernote).
Onenote is somewhat better in that notebooks are individual files you can organise within your own filesystem hiearchy (though it still lacks a comprehensive export)
(3) Its editor is extrememely limited. (though they’re promising a webkit-based replacement)

I still think Evernote is a great capture tool. But for creating and maintaining a stock of information, Onenote works better for me.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:32:54 +0000

Evernote wins for me because of the multi-platform support. I constantly use it for notes made on my iPhone and notes I access from my iPhone, as well as emailing notes to myself that I can access via the phone or browser.

Strangely, I can count the number of times I’ve used their desktop app on two hands.

By: Brum

Brum — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 08:09:31 +0000

As my dissertation project grown, I have drowned in OneNote. It is not a good tool to organize a huge mess of information. I wrote one chapter in it, but as I worked on sorting out all kind of info for all 5 chapters I had to switch to Evernote.

Are you still playing with the tablet? You may want to look at PDF Annotator, which lets you to make notes directly to any PDF as you would do on paper (withou the need to ‘print’ PDFs to OneNote, which only a supercomputer could handle for a dissertation project).