I’m looking for a decent piece of Windows software for note taking. My main criteria (beyond the obvious like ease of use) are:
I’ve been using Gmail for this purpose so far, but it falls down on 3, obviously. Any suggestions?
Try google docs with the offline thing.
Alternately, look into something like puttiing PortableApps on a good flash drive and use one of the word processing applications. (I’ve messed around just a little with q10, and it seems fine.) That way, you can just pop the flash drive from machine to machine.
I needed something faster to watch video on the Internet, but a four gig Sandisk Cruzer is stupid cheap these days and was fine for me for everything else.
I’ve just spent ten minutes playing with EverNote and it looks great so far. Combines a client app with browser extensions and a web service to give a completely synchronized experience across mulitple machines.
Does Evernote export to CSV yet? And can it export more than one CSV document at once?
I tried it out a few months ago, but didn’t see the feature. I then put this question to the Evernote team a while back and got nothing but automated sales brochure responses, even after a few tries. Great looking product, though.
What exactly is note taking software and what does it do beyond what a basic word processor would do? I use OneNote for meeting notes myself, but I have a tablet PC so I like that it lets me doodle and will automatically link to Outlook items. If I didn’t have a tablet PC or Outlook I’d be happy with notepad.exe probably.
I use EverNote as I do a lot of hand writing of notes at work. With EverNote I just take a picture of my notes with my iPhone and I can do searches for words in the pictures or for the dates listed on the notes. Note that it helps to have a gimmicky iPhone case like the Griffin Clarifi for something like this.
Notepad and Windows Live Sync?
Or Google Docs with Gears for offline access.
OneNote, OneNote, OneNote! It is exactly what you want, but awesomer.
It supports regular typing, inking if you have a tablet, and voice recording. It’ll sync up the voice recording with your typing/inking, so that you can hear what was being said when you took a too-terse note.
It syncs up via a shared drive such that you can share it between multiple computers, and both can have it open and editing at the same time with no locking issues. (It can also use Sharepoint transparently, if you have that, which you probably don’t.)
You can copy and paste anything into it – documents, pictures, screen clippings – and it’ll OCR pictures for search indexing purposes.
It allows for freeform notes, drawings, or whatever. It makes it easy to make tables (just hit tab to create a new cell while typing), lists (put in numbers or * and it’ll do the Word-style thing), and you can create tasks that sync up to Outlook. You can encrypt pages, if you want to store passwords or sensitive information. You can rearrange your notes into new pages/tabs/workbooks easily. You can do simple calculations by just typing them and hitting space after the equals sign.
I think it’s the single best program Microsoft makes.
I do too, mk, but I don’t know how to make it sync with my Ipod Touch. So I was looking at Evernote too.
Man, EverNote is awesome. They’ve thought of pretty much everything - clipping from the browser, Mac and Windows client, web interface, indexing. Very impressed with it.
Good God, how did I miss this? I’ve been looking for something like Q10 for years – thanks for the early Christmas present!
Someday there will be a working and stable version of Tomboyfor windows … someday.
Please, Santa? ;_;
Probably a bit late for Santa, but the next version will have a Windows branch. You can compile it now if you have a VS.NET version (since Tomboy is a C# app).
Hey, my pleasure. Like I said, I haven’t used it much (haven’t come up with quite the right project for it), but I really like it.
Another vote for OneNote (Microsoft Office based product.)
You can paste literally anything in it. Pics, email, entire web pages, or any Office based file clip (and it displays correctly.) You can record audio or video directly into a note. You can even use it to send tasks to you in Outlook, and to set up an ad-hock meeting sharing session with others running it for a group idea session or virtual whiteboard.
If you use Office you really should look in to it. A video demo of it here if you want to see it.
Darn it, I just checked out EverNote again and it still lacks CSV. Kind of surprising, considering how well-rounded they made it in other respects. May switch from Palm to iPhone in a few months, and have been on the lookout for something that can seamlessly integrate with The Journal so I can automatically file the entries by date.
I’m confused about OneNote 2007’s Save As capabilities. Can it export to CSV or can’t it?
The online demonstration (12.0.4518.1014, MSO 12.0.4518.1014) suggests that it can (screenshot), but the capability isn’t actually there as far as I can tell.
The local trial (12.0.4518.1014 MSO 12.0.6320.5000) doesn’t give any indication that it can (screenshot), and indeed it can’t.
Furthermore, the online demo’s Help file mentions the Office Ribbon, but the ribbon isn’t actually present in either version, suggesting to me that the Help was somehow just totally wrong in 4518.1014 and was fixed in the later version.
I imagine it’s still theoretically possible if someone creates an add-in for it. Excel 2007 has one that will save multiple worksheets to separate CSV files, but I don’t believe that has happened yet for OneNote.
My full version will not barstein. Not even information saved as a table. That being said, you can save it to either the new or old Microsoft Word format. You can also paste it (assuming it’s a table you are working with) into Excel, THEN convert to csv.
And yes I agree, someone should write a plug in to do this. Then again, most of the time I just drop the info into an excel sheet if I need it for calculations of some sort.
What’s the drive for CSV? I’m assuming some sort of transfer for contacts to your Palm?
Thanks, Skipper. My CSV importing requirement is for a pretty specific “very-nice-to-have” scenario. Currently, I’m able to easily import daily electronic journal entries into The Journal by saving individual entries to text and/or RTF files containing date stamps in the file names. This solves my daily journal issue and works pretty well for me, but I also want to be able to automate where text files go within other areas within my journal database (such as writing projects). The only way I can accomplish that at the moment is by saving the work in a CSV format where I can add field names and other things. (Unless I switch writing management programs, of course, which I don’t want to do – OneNote and Evernote are great, but they’re not as feature rich in that way yet). Edit: Just to be clear, TJ is the mothership and these other candidate apps are for basic input.
