Note taking for school

I'm considering getting a Macbook or a Macbook Pro (I use Windows on my desktop computer), and I'm thinking about how note taking could be done.

Most I'm thinking would use Microsoft Word/Pages, but OneNote seems to be loved a lot of people, especially for education purposes, and it's mandatory for use for people in Years 9 and 10 in my school thanks to the NSW Digital Education Revolution.

But OneNote isn't in Office 2008, nor is it in Office 2011. So what I'm asking is that if I take the plunge, will there be any alternatives, apart from the obvious of virtualisation, Wine or CrossOver? I'm fine with using Wine/CrossOver, it's just that I would be expecting a native experience to be better.

According to a friend of mine, Word has a notebook feature, although I can't find anything about it through Google.

Solution 1:

Check out Evernote. There are Windows, Mac, iPhone, and web versions, and all your notes are synchronized to all your devices. You can even take pictures, include them in notes, and then search any text that was in the pictures.

Solution 2:

Yes, Word 2008/Mac has a notebook view, which I think would work fine for you. The #1 thing I like about it is that it can record audio simultaneously with your note-taking, so you can go back and listen to just that snippet of whatever the professor said, based on the notes you took that moment.

Word 2011/Mac is coming out next month, btw, and I don't know for sure what will/won't be included/changed/updated.

If you need to synchronize documents among multiple machines, I highly recommend Dropbox.

Solution 3:

It's not OneNote, but all my Mac friends seem to use OmniOutliner. If native experience is important to you, OmniOutliner is hard to beat.

Also, depending on what Mac you buy and when, Apple sometimes includes one or more of Omni's programs for free.

Solution 4:

Without turning this into a “let’s list all the applications we can”, I’d venture and recommend you a couple of note taking applications with a radically different approach:

Voodoo Pad (and it’s Lite counterpart) have a very interesting concept of how your notes end up being some sort of “wiki” where certain words link to other ‘pages’ of your notes. It’s a very popular Mac application and even the Lite (free) version can be all you want. I suggest you take a look at its list of features.

A different approach is given by an application like Notebook, which also offers an interesting concept that mimics a “real” notebook but with the advantages of a Computer interface.

Finally there are two applications I like to keep around at all times for fast note taking that are “plain text” but insanely fast to launch/use:

One is Hog Bay Software’s TaskPaper and the other is Notational Velocity. Extremely simple but more efficient than a bunch of “TextEdit” files spread across the drive.

As already suggested, using Dropbox is always a good idea.

It has already been suggested but Evernote is a nice application (which I really never use), but has a lot of fans because of its features.