Today is my two year anniversary switching from a corporate Dell to the Macbook Pro, and my wrists are still very much enjoying their luxury aluminum resting places.
But you know what I do still miss?
Microsoft OneNote.
Sure, I know there are Mac apps designed to catch those notes and links and information clutter that pile up. I regularly have my Mac friends point me towards Evernote or trendier or even nerdier options. And of course there’s the Mac Notes app itself—now with less faux torn paper than ever (thanks Mavericks!)
But for me, keeping organized in a Notes app is more than the essentials of a instant-save, searchable and sync-able notebook (though all of those are musts). It’s about the tiniest keyboard shortcuts or convenience options that make recording that note just a little bit more friction-free.
OneNote still has these features that I haven’t found elsewhere:
Quickest Tables Ever
To create a table in OneNote, you press TAB. That’s it. You type a word, hit TAB, and you’re already in column two. No need to define how many rows you want in advance, shading preferences, or spacing details. Tables aren’t a special graphical feature in OneNote, they’re part of the normal thought flow: as easy as typing a sentence.
Quick Math
Once you get used to the idea that you can type 3218+340= and the answer automagically appears… you start getting frustrated with every other text editor on the planet that isn’t as smart. OneNote had become my quick shopping notebook: I was constantly pricing out tech equipment or software apps (okay, I need 3 users for our team, at $35 a month, plus a fee…), and quick addition plus quick tables makes cost comparison charts faster than Bruce Lee in an ice factory. Now I have a calculator app open all the time too. Ugh.
Smarter Bullet Points
- Bullets and quick notes go together like tabasco ‘n eggs
- In OneNote, you type an asterisk (*) and then just hit space.
- In Evernote it’s Shift-Command-U.
- Maybe it’s just me, but the first one is way more intuitive
The more keyboard friendly, the more likely my mile-a-minute brain will actually jot it down in my notes system, which keeps me more focused on working than trying to remember. So while I love my Mac, I sorta wish I had a PC back for a perfectly integrated OneNote for faster, intuitive note-taking that just works.
PS — Yep, I know I can run OneNote in Parallels (and did for a long while!), but the constantly running a heavy virtual machine for only a note-taking app has made it not worth it. Efficiency was the point after all.
What are you using for notes app on your Mac?
(maybe you can convince me something else is better!)
Jake says
Have you tried maestro for keyboard shortcuts across all apps?
http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/
I have not tried it out but I ran across this app some time ago.
ThatGuyKC says
As a former PC guy and 4-year Mac convert I must confess… OneNote is the only Microsoft app I miss.
Even though I’m a big Evernote fan, the versatility and integration features of OneNote are top notch.
You’re not alone. 🙂
Andrew Terry says
I still have a PC. I used to use OneNote all the time. But I soon learned it did not play well with my iPhone or iPad. I switched to Evernote. But it still was not a good alternative.
Now I use Pages on the iPad to write in. For quick notes I use the note feature on my phone. The iCloud allows me to access these on my PC. I also use Evernote for web clipping. When I get a Mac I plan to use Scrivenor for my writing. But, I’ll have to save up to buy a Mac.
Chris Ridgeway says
Glad you said that about Evernote. I think it’s cool, but lots of people have pointed me to it, and I really don’t find it to be as good. Not for serious note-taking, at least.
Jeff says
Hi, I too was in the same position for one note and recently came across an app called outline – an app that on the mac and on the iPad that read and write one note files.
I am not sure on the performance parts, but they claim full compatibility. I have them both and use them, but probably not to much like a powerhouse app. You can sync with skydrive and Dropbox etc. it’s a little pricey at US$40 just to try, but I found it worth it in the end.
Chris Ridgeway says
Jeff – I was wondering if someone might bring up Outline! They actually started with their iOS app first: and I downloaded it for iPad and loved it. The syncing was via dropbox, but the interface was beautiful.
And then the $15 app corrupted nearly all my Outlook files.
The problem had to do with the Dropbox sync: the company realized it too late and while they admitted that many people were reporting file corruption (with unrecoverable data that sent Outlook itself into a crash loop!), they never provided a good solution (I think they didn’t know what was going on). I eventually contacted them for a refund, and they didn’t give me one, unfortunately.
So that’s my sob story on the Outline folks. I saw recently that they realized the Mac client version, and immediately jumped to the app story to see many 2-star reviews that said the interface was beautiful, but the functionality was really buggy, which was their MO in my experience. Too bad.
All that to say, Jeff: I’m glad you found it worth it! With their track record for me, I wasn’t willing to take the risk. 🙁
Jeff says
Agreed, it is very pricey, luckily I was blessed with some iTunes credit for my birthday so I used that as an opportunity – however I am thinking about my next Mac to have at least 16GB that way I will run windows apps through windows but in crystal mode so that it looks like it is on the mac. I know it is a power hungry solution, but it is the best way to get best of both worlds.
Eric Dye says
Maybe they’ll port it over with the next release of Office for Mac — here’s to hoping!
Steve says
What about Drafts?
Chris Ridgeway says
Drafts? are you talking about a specific app? I see on search an iOS app that I’m not familiar with. While mobile sync is important, for me I primarily have liked OneNote as a quality desktop app/
Kelly says
This has prompted me to give OneNote another try. I just opened it up and see that the last time I used it was July 2012 🙂
Mark Prazoff says
I feel your pain. Whenever I had to use a PC (at work, since before Windows 3.0) I was generally frustrated by the world of Microsoft, with the clear exception of OneNote, which was a joy to use, and hard to match on the Mac. Hopefully the broad hints dropped by the OneNote team during their AMA, last year, will mean that OneNote will come to the Mac someday soon. Until then, there are at least three Mac programs that are somewhat OneNote-like.
The most feature rich is Curio by Zengobi. In some ways, it is a much more versatile program, useful for brainstorming, project management and note taking. I made some very OneNote like templates and this option perhaps comes closest – indexing PDF’s and allowing them to be annotated, making web clips etc. It is expensive at $99.00, but has a 25 day trial.
Growly Notes was until recently free. It has been much improved in version 2, but is no longer free. However $4.95 via the Mac App Store makes it a real bargain. It looks the most like OneNote (if OneNote swallowed a parrot), but version II allows the colors to be muted. It handle PDF’s well. One has to set up a Harvard outline style, and the web clipping is weak, but in other ways this is very close to OneNote for Mac.
Circus Ponies NoteBook bills itself as a Onenote replacement. It is more capable as an Outliner, but not really able to mix outlines and other text anywhere on a page. It is a bit quirky, and the iOS version is even more quirky. Its pace of development is a bit slow. But once mastered, it does great outlining. It is $49.95 from the developer and oddly, $10 more from the Mac App store. It was once a program for the Next computer; when it transitioned to Mac the two developers went separate ways. As a result, it’s other half has evolved to be NoteTaker by Aquaminds, only $25.00 on the App Store. It has a different feature set, but many overlaps. It diverged towards more cross platform and multi-user abilities, if that part of OneNote is key for you.
Outline has been promising as a program that actually open and changes OneNote files, but reverse engineering SkyDrive support and even the OneNote file format has so far been daunting.
Hope this helps. As a fellow seeker, let me know if I can answer any other questions about OneNote-like programs on the Mac.
Regards.
Chris Ridgeway says
Mark –
Comprehensive! Curio is the only one you mention that I have not tried, and as your top recommendation, I’ll have to give it a go.
As ipad sync was near-requirement for me in my search, Growly Notes was out. I also did find it klunky in some areas, but never tried v2. Circus Ponies I agree has some compelling things, but also enough missing functionality that I didn’t see the $60 price point. As I’ve mentioned above, Outline’s marketing grabs my heart, but they seem to still be releasing fundamentally buggy software, and the corruption of nearly all my onenote core files at one point, and their refusal to consider a refund for me made me sour on them. 🙁
But your list is great: I’ll be referring to it again, and hope others can find helpful stuff there as well!
Hong says
Oh God! I’m really disapointed, as well.
Why isn’t OneNote available for mac? Evernote and the rest of the wanna-be-OneNote-apps are not comparable.
Studying is hard, and without OneNote it’s even harder.
My friends and I, have been using OneNote for three years, during high school (in Norway), now that we’ve started at the university, we’ve replaced our laptops with Macbooks.
We were all disapointed when we figured out that OneNote wasn’t available for Mac..! Are we supposed to buy an iPad just so we can use OneNote again? And even then it won’t be possible to use the same features like PDF and clipping out pieces from different web browsers.
Please do something about that!
We really do love OneNote!
Alex says
Today is your lucky day. OneNote for Mac is out 🙂
Nicole_fromOneNote says
OneNote for Mac is finally here. You can get it for free in the Mac App store or at http://www.onenote.com
Eric Dye says
WOOT! Excited to give this a try!
Chris Ridgeway says
YES!! I’ve been tracking this since last week, and I’m so excited.
New post just went up: https://churchm.ag/onenote-for-mac-release/
And I’ll try to do a review soon too.
Mark Prazoff says
well it is here which is great, but on first glance, a tad underwhelming. Clearly this the 1.0 release and it will grow in features over time. It is also the free version, and on the Windows side the full Office 365 version has more features. Let’s start with he good. A very pretty environment, which augers well for the appearance of the next Mac version. Good note taking environment, with the ability to collapse outline levels. Very complete table creation and editing tools. New web based tools like Evernote -clip an entire page (from Safari Mac, but not from Safari iOS), use IFTTT clips, email to your notebook etc. This opens the possibility of more and more web services clipping to OneNote. Note that OneNote works with OS X 10.9 only.
On the other hand, there is no drag and drop of text, images or files. You can copy and paste images or url’s, but not links to files. The overview video on the website shows embedded files, suggesting that this ability may come soon. There is no ability yet to work with PDF’s or get one into OneNote – drag and drop, file open, print to PDF, mail attached PDF all fail. The web clips are images with the original url attached. Therefore, links and annotation don’t work. While you can find a word within the page, for some reason you can’t find the same word while searching the entire notebook. Odd. Like the free Windows version, there is no link to other Office programs, including spreadsheets or with to-do items. You can’t customize labels in the Mac version yet, either.
So we have come along way towards having OneNote for Mac, but there is still some distance to be travelled.
Chris Ridgeway says
Mark – nicely done. Looks like you’ve been in it all day. I hadn’t got to the missing PDF feature yet and that is definitely significant. This was one of the strengths of OneNote.
Another thing missing is any audio recording features, including the clever ability for OneNote to know where in the recording you are taking notes.
At first glance I agree with you that they got the editing environment and keyboard shortcuts right: (eg. tab to create a table; super smart/fast outlining), and I’m grateful they concentrated on this because the editor details was really what I’d missed the most so far (and for me, Evernote struggled to compete)
brad says
Running OneNote in parallels 10 is super fast on windows 8. I specially took back my Surface the other day because I like the speed and usability (and the fact it’s paid for) of my mac but I really want onenote and it’s integration with office. I have to say, evernote sucks. It’s great for a file storage cabinet and that;s really about it. They seemed to totally miss the point of what Onenote has captured, and I’m a convert from here out. I will use evernote for a file digital bucket, only, moving forward.
Eric Dye says
Have you tried OneNote for Mac?
Boydston says
Does OneNote for Mac work for you?