Evernote vs. OneNote: Two excellent note-takers

The left-hand panel also includes other ways of viewing notes. For example, you can quickly group notes in multiple notebooks by tags (keywords) or location.

OneNote offers a very different look and feel — a typical notebook format with notebooks, sections, and pages. It’s also a look that should, of course, be more familiar to Office users. By default, notebooks are listed in a left-hand column. Different sections of a notebook are listed both under each notebook title and as tabs across the main viewing area. There’s also a list of pages for each section.

When you open the application, it displays the most recently opened notebook and page. Most of a OneNote window is devoted to displaying the currently selected page (see Figure 2). Where Evernote tends to organize information by note, OneNote is page-oriented — with multiple notes per page. That’s a bit more effective for brainstorming sessions.

OneNote’s free-form pages have one drawback: reorganizing notes on a single page can be painfully difficult. For example, I collect lots of notes while writing an article and then delete most of those I’m not going to use. To my dismay, I found no one-click way to remove empty space on a page. Instead, I had to manually drag notes to close up space. That’s because, depending on how you enter data, notes might or might not reside in separate and usually invisible text boxes. Even old DOS-based programs such as Tornado Notes handled the tedious work of closing up empty space better.

After working with both applications for a while, I found I preferred OneNote’s organizational structure and interface — small warts aside. But that’s a personal choice; others will find that Evernote suits their work flow better.

Getting text and images into a notebook

OneNote wins this category, hands down — due mostly to its powerful set of drawing, formatting, and editing tools.

You create a new note by clicking anywhere on a page. You then have access to many of the formatting and editing tools found in Word. As an Office app, OneNote also organizes those tools in the now familiar ribbon UI. That’s great for those who use Office 2010 or 2013; for everyone else, it might require some time to adapt from classic toolbars.

OneNote is also the better choice for anyone taking notes on a mobile touch-screen device. You can use your finger or a stylus to make drawings or to take handwritten notes (see Figure 3). On a small screen, that might be somewhat more discreet and efficient than tapping away on a virtual or physical keyboard (assuming you can read your writing).

I found OneNote’s handwriting recognition remarkably accurate. It converted the note shown in Figure 3′s lower left-hand corner without a single error. Selecting the Ink to text option in the ribbon’s Draw section quickly converts all handwritten notes on a page. (If you want to convert only part of the handwriting, select it first, using the mouse or stylus.)

OneNote also lets you add rule lines or change page colors via the View menu. It also includes the familiar Office tools such as the spellchecker, thesaurus, and translation tool.

Evernote’s note-creation tools are far more basic — there are the expected font- and paragraph-formatting tools, but little else. Also, Evernote uses icons for its new-note insertion and formatting tools. It was a bit irritating that, with the mouse pointer hovering over the icons, the text-based identifiers sometimes appeared — and other times didn’t.

For touchscreens, there’s Evernote Touch. But curiously, this version of the application doesn’t support drawing or writing with fingers or stylus. The only touch support you get is for selecting menus and commands.

You do get handwriting support in the Android edition of Evernote. However, you can’t convert handwriting to computer text.

Evernote excels at importing Web data

What Evernote lacks in note-taking and formatting tools, it makes up for in data-importing options. For example, its tools for clipping Web content are much stronger than OneNote’s.

The Evernote Web Clipper runs as a browser plugin, and it works slightly differently in each browser. The Chrome extension offers the most capabilities, so that’s the version I tested.

To clip information from a website, click the Evernote icon on Chrome’s toolbar. That pops up a dialog box with a surprising number of choices. You can clip just that part of a webpage you want to preserve in Evernote — an entire article, a simplified article (a listing of articles on the page), the full page, a bookmark of the URL, or a screenshot (see Figure 4).

Unfortunately, the option to clip a single article didn’t always work well. If the desired article made up most of a webpage, Evernote easily picked it out. But on sites such as the New York Times, I couldn’t select a single story from a page of several small articles.

I had no difficulties with the other clipping options. Selecting “Simplified article” imports a listing of every article Evernote finds on a webpage. And the list includes links that will summon up the articles themselves.

Web Clipper lets you attach remarks and tags to clipped data, and you can select the notebook you want it sent to. Evernote also analyzes the content and then does a fairly good job of suggesting the most likely notebook.

Web Clipper extensions for Chrome, Opera, and Safari include tools for marking up screenshots. Use Evernote to take a screenshot, and you’re offered a palette of markup options such as draw, insert arrows, insert type, crop, and pixelate.

Compared to Evernote, OneNote is relatively deficient in Web clipping. In fact, Microsoft offered a clipping tool to OneNote this past March. To install it, navigate to an online OneNote page and drag the “Clip to OneNote” button to your favorites bar. After that, clicking the button takes a picture of the page. That’s it! No other tools are provided.

Moreover, clipped pages go automatically to the QuickNotes section of your default notebook. If you want the clipping somewhere else, you’ll have to move it manually. The one exception to this is in Internet Explorer: the IE OneNote extension pops up a small window that lets you paste the clipping into a selected notebook.

Both applications support image importing — and both have limitations when inserting photos from a device’s camera.

For example, OneNote lets you directly capture video from the Surface Pro’s built-in camera — but not from still photos. Say you’re in a meeting, and the speaker puts some information up on the white screen. You’d think you could simply click a OneNote icon to snap a photo. No such luck! Instead, you must leave OneNote, call up the Camera app, snap a photo, and then import it to your meeting notes.

Oddly, the otherwise less powerful Windows Store version of OneNote does have a handy Share Charm feature that lets you take and insert a photo directly into OneNote.

Evernote has similar imaging limitations. Evernote for OS X and the desktop version of Windows allows only image-file imports. Android, iOS, and Windows Phone editions of Evernote do support direct insertion of photos taken with the device’s camera.

Both programs let you attach files and insert tables, and both let you directly record audio.

Data mining using tagging and searching

Tagging is a useful technique for grouping and searching notes. Both Evernote and OneNote support keyword tagging, but each does so a little differently.

When I created my first note in Evernote, I noticed the Click to add a tag menu option above the formatting bar. That simply opened a blank field for entering a tag — there was no list of existing tags to choose from. I did, however, eventually find a list of previously used tags by clicking on the Note menu and selecting Tags.

To see all Evernote notes with a given tag, simply click the Tags option in the left-hand column and select a tag. It’s really easy.

OneNote offers a broad set of preset tags (see Figure 5) and, of course, allows you to create custom tags. To do so, select text, click the Home tab in the ribbon, and select the Tags drop-down list. (Yes, it would be better if you could right-click selected text and use a “Tags” option.)

In OneNote, to view all notes with a given tag, click the Home tab and select Find Tags. That opens a right-hand panel that lists your tags and their associated notes.

Both programs offer strong text-search tools. In Evernote, clicking the Search field displays a list of recent searches. You can also save searches for future use (see Figure 6). Searches are extremely quick — as you enter search terms, Evernote immediately sorts and displays the list of notes that match the criteria. You can also choose to search all notes or only within the current context.

OneNote has similar search capabilities. You can’t save search terms, but you can specify whether OneNote should search all notes, a specified section, or only within a given note (see Figure 7). As with Evernote, OneNote returns search results in real time as you type search terms.

Updating notes with others in real time

Given Microsoft’s push into the cloud, it’s not surprising that OneNote’s collaboration tools are stronger than Evernote’s. OneNote includes slick, real-time sharing and collaboration. To share a notebook with others, simply click File/Share. You then select a notebook, enter the collaborators’ email addresses, and add an optional message. For added security, you can require users to sign in before they can access documents. You can also control whether a particular user has editing or read-only privileges (see Figure 8).

If you don’t want to share an entire notebook, you can password-protect sections by right-clicking a section tab and selecting Password protect this section. Doing so, however, means that password-protected sections are not included in searches and might not be accessible on some devices.

OneNote also integrates with Outlook via the Share with Meeting feature, available on the Share Notebook page. Using this feature lets meeting participants share a notebook. Moreover, meeting members can make real-time edits to the notes, and a list of attendees plus meeting time and location is appended to the notes. This is a valuable tool if you’re working on projects with a team of people.

Changes by all users with editing privileges are immediately updated via the cloud. But OneNote also stores data locally, so users can work offline.

Evernote offers the same capability to share notebooks with others, though without the ability to password-protect specific data in the notebook. You can, however, specify whether invitees have editing privileges (see Figure 9).