Software Recommendation (Onenote vs. Others)

Posted by MadaboutDana
Oct 11, 2012 at 12:12 PM

In fact, tags do still exist in OneNote, although they appear to have been deprecated. I use them myself (you can customise the ribbon and insert various tag-related commands into any tab you like; you’ll have to create a “custom group” first - oh, and it’s worth mentioning I’m using OneNote 2010: earlier versions can’t be customised as easily). This adds some flexibility to OneNote, although you won’t necessarily find it carries over to any mobile versions you use (I also use iOS and Android versions of OneNote, both Microsoft’s and other clients such as MobileNoter and Outline+).

But you may be amused to hear that you can copy and paste OneNote pages into MyInfo very easily - tables are copied over in usable form, a few less significant things (e.g. checkboxes) are lost. MyInfo is a whole lot more useful for search operations than OneNote is! Mind you, you might then quite reasonably ask: why not simply use MyInfo instead?

I like Quant’s suggestion of using a powerful PDF editor (like PDF Xchange Viewer, which is amazingly good). This would also allow you to manage your OneNote data on a mobile device: the number of high-quality PDF editors/viewers available on iOS, for example, is really quite spectacular, and many of them (e.g. iAnnotate, PDF Expert Pro) allow you to insert/delete pages, write notes into the file, highlight/draw etc. and even change text (depending on permissions etc.). So you can export a whole bunch of OneNote material into PDF format, then play around with it in a suitable editor. Again, the search options in various PDF viewers (not least Acrobat Reader) are generally superior to OneNote itself.

PDF is a very useful format for gathering/analysing info, even if it’s generally regarded as less flexible. It’s very robust, comments/annotations can be exported, you can read it on more or less any platform. You can copy text out of it. Really not to be underestimated, even though most of us instinctively prefer “low-end” alternatives such as raw text!