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OneNote
I’m a Mac user but work in a very Windows-centric world and am pretty much ingrained in the Microsoft ecosystem and used OneNote in its infancy and was pretty impressed. I needed something that was cross-platform so a gravitated towards Evernote and have been using it ever since. But now Microsoft seem to be getting the idea and are releasing their services across the board. We now have Office for iPad but more importantly for me OneNote now integrates right across your Apple experience from Mac to iPad to iPhone and I’m loving it.
In both my personal and professional life I take a lot of notes. I was using Evernote for both but was finding it difficult to separate things out so I have decided to move my work life to OneNote. Like I say its been a while since I’ve used it but it’s good to see it is just as functional as I remember. On my Mac it doesn’t have all the functionality that I have in my Office 2013 version for PC but it’s good enough. I’m never really going to do anything complicated with it and I generally don’t use all of the features so the subset of what is available is good enough for me. There are a number of elements which you insert into your notes such as tables and images as well as being able to add a horde of featurettes such as todo lists, questions, contact info as well as loads more.
The iPad version pretty much mirrors its big brother on the Mac and is a pretty smooth experience although it is still a bit weird having Microsoft's app design on your tablet. There is a bit of a disappointment when it comes to the iPhone just in that they haven’t updated it for iOS 7. It’s still got the iOS 6 keyboard and still even refers to SkyDrive instead of OneDrive so a bit of a miss.
The other problem I found is that there is a a bit of an issue with using multiple Microsoft accounts. As I already had OneDrive installed on my iPad OneNote assumed that I wanted to use the same account but I actually have a separate one for work and it wasn't immediately obvious how to use both but you get around it in the end.
Syncing is pretty seamless and no better or worse than any other service out there but you'd expect that from a company who's CEO is a cloud specialist.
So if like me you’re trapped in a Windows world at work but an Apple lover at home then this is well worth a look. Also OneNote is free for Windows users as you'd expect and there is a version for Android so would love to hear from anyone about their experiences with that.
This is the start of something good.
Author
Paul Wright