Software Recommendation (Onenote vs. Others)

Posted by PIMUsee
Oct 10, 2012 at 06:55 PM

Disclosure: Below is a long read due to me having given a lot of thought to how I want my system to work.

A little background to my problem. I’m currently an undergrad student who’s in their sophomore years. I have begun to recently dive deeper into scientific literature (mainly to do with neuroscience and behavior) and am taking notes. I have a system I use to gather info and then read and analyze what I have gathered and I consider this system to suit my need. But when it comes to the note-taking part I have yet to find something that does work. The needs I have are for some rudimentary formatting (bullet and number list with multi-indent capabilities), images are a must (I include figures from papers in my notes, or make concept maps or diagrams to further my understanding). I also really want the ability to export my notes easily in case the software I ever work with is shut down for some reason and I need to move my data into another one. The last needed capability is the “anytime, anywhere” functionality where I can access it form any computer or device (like my iPad) and edit the info. Extra capabilities that would be appreciated is the ability to make tables or include mathematical functions, or inking.

I tried Dokuwiki which I enjoy due to the wiki linking concept. But my problem is that maintenance of this wiki is troublesome and any markup besides text formatting is incredibly complex. Considering that I encounter things where I might make tables or include mathematical functions, I struggle to do the same in Dokuwiki. Also, even just getting images into Dokuwiki can be a chore as there’s no drag and drop or copy and paste and I have to use the media manager. I also need to be able to access the internet if I want to access my notes (I have it running as a website instead of a local right now since I want to be able to access it on my desktop, iPad, and school computers). Though this does have the bonus of being open-source and having a strong community and text file storage system so I know that my data would be safe in there for a while.

So the temporary solution I have come up with is Onenote. It allows me to do everything I mention in the first paragraph except for one of the most important thing….exporting features. While I could get my info out in multiple formats right now, I am concerned about how most of these formats require proprietary software to edit (like Onenote or Microsoft word) or isn’t really editable (like pdf and mht output). These formats also make it harder to import into other software unlike txt. (which Dokuwiki can do) or rtf files. Searching is also a little weak compare to others I have tired (Evernote allows tag and full text at the same time, ConnectedText has Boolean).

I have also tested Evernote (same export problems), ConnectedText (I can’t really use it on my iPad), Resophnotes/ Simplenote (no images).

So my main concern is does anybody know how to get data out of noenote into another thing easily (or at least not make it torture) or an alternate software I haven’t tried yet that does fulfill my needs. Also, if you use Onenote, I would appreciate a case study example just for reference on how I can improve my system.