I’ve recently been pondering and/or reconsidering my decision to switch from OneNote to Evernote a year ago. It seemed like an easy choice at the time, but I’m not entirely convinced I’ve truly gained in a way that has made me feel more productive. Subjective, yes I know. Bear with me as I think out loud.
I’ll start with the mobile experience. One of the main reasons I decided to go with Evernote was the promise and potential of the Windows Mobile client. The WinMo OneNote client is… to be polite… pretty useless (did it improve with ON 2007 by chance?). At first glance the Evernote client seemed a huge improvement – and, early on, received frequent updates.
However, after a year it turns out I never use Evernote on my Windows Mobile phone. Why? Well for starters my dream of managing task lists and checkboxes remains unfulfilled. Can’t even see checkboxes from the WinMo client. Want to fake checkboxes? Well, you can’t edit an existing note from the mobile client either.
Long story short, no gain.
What do I miss the most from OneNote? The free-form aspects of the pages. Everything doesn’t have to be trapped into a single “column” on the page. That capability worked very well for me and how I manage my own tasks and projects – side notes!
How about creating outlines? With OneNote you can hit tab and be in outline mode. Tab and shift-tab to indent and, for me, all very intuitive and easy to use. Evernote? (I had to revisit the Help for this next bit) Ctrl-Shift-B for a bullet list. Shift-M and Shift-Ctrl-M to indent and outdent. After a year I still hardly ever use outlines because I can’t seem to remember the hotkeys!
Want multiple columns of bullet lists in Evernote? Not gonna happen. Painless in OneNote.
Now, I use multiple computers and the free aspect of Evernote is very enticing. Setup a new machine, dump on Evernote, let it sync and “hey presto!” I’m good to go.
Conversely, I only own one license of OneNote so I have to make deliberate and thought-out choices about where I install it…. Now, I suppose I could get a little sketchy with my MSDN subscription and “liberate” an extra OneNote license for “development purposes”… then I’d have two. Otherwise I’m shelling out some serious coin to have ON on more than one machine. Not enticing and definitely a motivator to stick with Evernote.
(Thought: Dropbox would make syncing OneNote files a lot easier than it used to be, right?)
Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not bashing Evernote at all. It is a great product with tons of features. The built-in syncing alone is just about priceless and you get it with the free version! The OCR’ing of images is pretty interesting as well. Great for taking whiteboard pictures that are searchable.
Cutting to the chase:
I think the genesis of this post is the fact that after a year I find myself still missing OneNote… Now I just need to decide if that’s a strong enough motivation to switch back. Thoughts?
Possibly Related posts:
How strange the timing… lifehacker just ran a hive-five call and evernote beat onenote narrowly as user favorite for note capture. My guess is that most, like me, never used one note. I didn’t even consider multiple columns until you talked about it because I’d never seen them before so it didn’t occur to me. Sort of like the born one-armed man never thinks of clapping.
I think its a matter of priorities. For myself, I would rather use the ubiquitous Evernote that runs on all of my Windows and Mac’s boxen, via the web from any old computer, and from my iTouch or 3G’d netbook when I’m traveling. That is more important to me than the additional features of OneNote. But I understand the temptation of OneNote, its an amazing app.
I keep wondering about sticking with EN. Sorry En now. The thing that keeps me there is that it does work across multiple machines, and I find I’m trying to use it from at least two machines (plus a third through the web page) more and more often now.
It’s great at collecting. It’s great at searching out that one note you’re looking for, e.g., mac addresses of whatever machine, or that recipe you loved for mushroom pie. It just sucks at organizing. Unfortunately.
@Rich — yeah, OneNote definitely has to be experienced… I missed the lifehacker thing (not subscribed there at the moment). I’ll have to go have a look and look at comments.
@Bob — The ubiquitous bit is definitely a huge factor for Evernote, isn’t it? I just wish the WinMo experience was more useful for me.
@GTD W –I tend to agree about the organizing comment. I have lots of notebooks, lots of tags and a bunch of canned queries to dig out what I need… yet it doesn’t quite always work for me the way I’d want.
And hey, I forgot one of my biggest beefs: No Templates! EN 2 had ‘em. ON has ‘em. We need them in Evernote too.
You can edit notes from the WinMo client. You just can’t have any checkboxes on the note you want to edit. If there are checkboxes, it locks it for some reason. Have you played with the One Note integration with WinMo 6.1? I thought there was some integration, but I haven’t ever played with it.
Yeah, the no checkboxes thing is the killer for mobile. I live and die by checkboxes!
I haven’t tried the mobile ON lately… I’ll do that soon though.
One other thing, have you guys tried the new Windows 3.5 alpha client? I’ve been using it for about a week and have switched over to it as its very similar to the Mac client. Much improved, and I’ve found it fairly stable. You can find it on their forum site at http://forum.evernote.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=10326
Agree the OneNote client for Windows mobile is pretty useless (even with 2007 version)
Just thought i’d pass on a tip though
I use Microsoft Live Mesh to sync my OneNote notebooks across multiple computers
I always know that if i’m on my Work PC, Home PC, Laptop or Netbook my notes are always available and up to date
> The built-in syncing alone is just about priceless and you get it with the free version!
For syncing across my machines I use Live Mesh. Just add your “OneNote Notebooks” to your mesh, and it takes care of the rest. Doesn’t work for your phone though
> The OCR’ing of images is pretty interesting as well. Great for taking whiteboard pictures that are searchable.
OneNote has an optional handwriting recognition module that does the same.
I’ve been going back and forth between these for a while, and I prefer OneNote despite not having an app that works on my phone (Android).
I’ve bounced back and forth between Dropbox and Live Mesh in the past. The last time, I settled on Dropbox as it offered a Linux client.
Right now, however, all my machines are Windows so perhaps I should have another look at Live Mesh. I did like that remote control was built-in…
[...] Here is another person’s look at the OneNote vs Evernote debate, and here is another one. [...]
One thing that I really like about Evernote is the full tagging capability. I find that tags can be more useful than keyword searching because the results are never diluted. On the other hand, Evernote has horrible keyword search capabilities. For example, it can’t parse Word documents.
Hey Doug – Actually, there’s quite a bit of tagging potential with OneNote as well. Customize the assorted checkboxes, for instance. I rely on it for the GTD’ish system I use with OneNote — you can find a link to the basis of my system here.
Ah, I stand corrected after reading your article. There’s not that level of tagging in OneNote (but the search works quite well!)
[...] took me a couple months of indecision (first pondered in July) but this week I took the [...]
Have a look at 2010 with onenote in the cloud via Windows Live. All that is left is a mobile client for OneNote
The ability to now sync onenote folders to the web [via MS SkyDrive, allows you to work off of any computer with net access-even if it doesn’t have onenote installed. Evernote is a good program, but if it doesn’t sync with onenote, it is a duplication of effort.
Our team is bringing OneNote to other platforms by developing our own note taking application, which is compatible with OneNote. It’s called MobileNoter, versions for iPhone and iPad are already available and Android version is now in development. We are also going to release an Evernote-2-OneNote file converter soon.
If you need any additional information or want to participate in Android version beta-testing, please let me know.