What is the Mac equivalent to Microsoft OneNote?

michelleh45 said:

I've tried CircusPonies Notebook and while I see it has many good features, one thing I can never get to work as easily as in OneNote or as consistently is the web clipping feature. In OneNote, it's really easy to clip something from a webpage and paste it right in OneNote. It even pastes the URL from which you are clipping into your note. In CircusPonies, this is much more complicated. First you have to enable a clipping service for the page and then you clip, but it doesn't always work consistently for me. Sometimes it does and sometimes when I go to that webpage to clip it will say "no services available" or something like that. I've even gotten CircusPonies Tech Support involved, but even with their help I can't get it to work consistently or as easily as it should be (I feel).

Anyway, I'm not asking for help with this issue -- I'd just like to know if any of these other programs (MacJournal, Curio, SOHO Notes, Growly Notes) can do this task easily and simply. And please don't suggest Evernote -- I like Evernote and use it a lot, but it does not provide the same organization as OneNote so is for a different use for me.

Thanks if anyone can answer this question.

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I'm going to suggest Evernote, even though you told us not to, because it works great as a place to dump information. It really seems to be the master of web clippings. As you said, though, it is really not so good at organization. For that, I would recommend using another program. In other words, use two apps in order to take advantage of their strong points. Dump everything into Evernote, and copy and paste stuff into whatever program you are using (I prefer VoodooPad myself).

If you are just using OSX, you can "print" web clippings directly to VoodooPad (no need to send them to Evernote). This is pretty cool, because they end up as PDFs inside the app.

I use SOHO Notes and I love it. It offers me nice organization options with folders and subfolders. It allows importing of web pages or clips and you can either have them available offline or only online (depending on the way you import them).
PDF notes, text, rtf are also possible.

It also offers MobileMe sync and it works great. There will also be a companion iPad app in the near future. Notelife HD was submitted to Apple last week and is pending approval. The iPhone version is available and syncs wirelessly with your Mac (unfortunately not with MobileMe).

The only thing I am missing from OneNote is the ability to type anywhere on screen.

crispy12 said:

Sorry to bump this old post, but I just found out this gem and felt compelled to share.

http://www.growlybird.com/GrowlyBird/Notes.html

It works GREAT!! FINALLY, something that works like OneNote.

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I've been using this as well, and it is my new fave app. Easy to use, versatile, free, and the technical support has been awesome. You can record audio and video notes, manipulate text, import drawings or add them using the built-in drawing tools.

I've never used OneNote, myself, but I have a hard time believing it could be better than this.

OneNote Online

If you are always connected to the internet you can access a free skydrive from a browser that has a built in OneNote web app https://skydrive.live.com/. If you have another computer or partition running windows with OneNote it will sync to the skydrive.
James

tkjazzer said:

Hey guys,

My girlfriend really wants and likes Microsoft one note but she only has a mac and hates being frustrated by having to run parallels, etc. She needs a program that works just like Microsoft OneNote but runs natively in the mac.

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Why doesn't she try Scrivener it does this and a lot more and it will work a lot better than anything ever put out by Microsoft.

Growly Notes = free free-form note-taking application.
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/37840/growly-notes

Growly Notes is the most "OneNote" like app I have yet to see on the Mac, and surprisingly it is totally free.

I'm sure many of the options mentioned on this thread are very good but they are mostly Mac only. This prevents me from considering them because my work computer needs to be Windows and I'd like to sync some of my notebooks between work PCs and home Macs.

As far as I can tell, the two exceptions to this that are worthy of consideration are Evernote and Scrivener. However, Evernote is all or nothing sync. You can't choose which notebooks to sync like you can with OneNote. This rules it out for me. Also, I much prefer OneNote anyway. I do use Scrivener for its intended purpose as a writing app, but it's not a general notetaking program. Although Scrivener projects are notebook-like in their structure, it doesn't do audio notes and you don't have the same control for laying out pictures and web clippings as you do in OneNote. That rules it out for me. I cannot consider the notebook view in Word for Mac because this is not present in the Word for Windows nor does it sync with OneNote.

Can anyone suggest any other notetaking apps for cross-platform needs that I should consider? (apart from simple plain-text notetaking apps like Simplenote). Currently I feel the best option is to run OneNote in a virtual machine.

To the OP: If you're still subscribed, I think it would be useful if you updated your original post with a list of all the alternatives that have been suggested in this thread.

ozaz said:

{snip....}

Can anyone suggest any other notetaking apps for cross-platform needs that I should consider? (apart from simple plain-text notetaking apps like Simplenote). Currently I feel the best option is to run OneNote in a virtual machine.

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Sure, there's:

NoteCase by Virtual-Sky, now with plug-ins available....very good support by responsive developer and community mailing list

NoteCase:

http://virtual-sky.com/

http://www.hermocom.com/en/products/notecase

Plug-ins: http://www.hermocom.com/products/notecase/plugins

And KeepNote, has extensions and mailing list too:

http://rasm.ods.org/keepnote/

To the OP: If you're still subscribed, I think it would be useful if you updated your original post with a list of all the alternatives that have been suggested in this thread.

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+1

It seems that OneNote is free on Skydrive.

I'd been staring at that lavendar icon for OneNote for months after Office 2010 was installed on my work PC and never even tried to open it.

Yesterday, I needed a less clumsy way to keep track of some notes so I fired it up. Connected to my (free) Skydrive and finished by downloading the iPhone App. All good, it's a solid program.

Then I went looking for the Mac version to link to my Office and files at home and was surprised to discover that Microsoft left us Mac users out in the cold. Or did they?

Going back to SkyDrive, I noticed that along with being able to create & edit Word L& Excel, you can also work with OneNote. Right in the browser. It's actually more capable than the iPhone app. So, do we need a Mac version? Do we even need a Windows version? The web app is very good. And an application like OneNote is really at it's best when everything is in the cloud. You want access to your notes wherever you are.

http://explore.live.com/skydrive

thomaus said:

I'd been staring at that lavendar icon for OneNote for months after Office 2010 was installed on my work PC and never even tried to open it.

Yesterday, I needed a less clumsy way to keep track of some notes so I fired it up. Connected to my (free) Skydrive and finished by downloading the iPhone App. All good, it's a solid program.

Then I went looking for the Mac version to link to my Office and files at home and was surprised to discover that Microsoft left us Mac users out in the cold. Or did they?

Going back to SkyDrive, I noticed that along with being able to create & edit Word L& Excel, you can also work with OneNote. Right in the browser. It's actually more capable than the iPhone app. So, do we need a Mac version? Do we even need a Windows version? The web app is very good. And an application like OneNote is really at it's best when everything is in the cloud. You want access to your notes wherever you are.

http://explore.live.com/skydrive

Click to expand...

My complaint with the Skydrive stuff is it's yet ANOTHER email address/account. It's crazy; gmail for Google Docs, then if you just want the OneNote stuff, it's a hotmail or live account. If you like iCloud, and it's features, it's a me account. Then you have the regular work account.

I've gone the Evernote route, and it's nice. One account, uses existing email addresses, and it's easy to use. Maybe not as fancy, but definitely gets the task at hand completed...IMO.

Growly Notes?

Have you tried Growly Notes?

thomaus said:

So, do we need a Mac version? Do we even need a Windows version?

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Yes. Yes.

thomaus said:

The web app is very good. And an application like OneNote is really at it's best when everything is in the cloud. You want access to your notes wherever you are.

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Including when you don't have internet connection!
The web app is significantly slower than the desktop app and doesn't have all the features

ozaz said:

As far as I can tell, the two exceptions to this that are worthy of consideration are Evernote and Scrivener.

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Evernote is good for gathering materials and Scrivener is good for creating them. Although they have overlapping functions, I think they are quite different. I am an avid fan of both.

However, Evernote is all or nothing sync.

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Incorrect. You can create local files that do not sync.

Also, I much prefer OneNote anyway.

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Evernote does some things really well, and one of these is the syncing. If you use multiple devices (in my case an iPad anywhere I go outside the house), then it is brilliant. If you are only using one computer, I suppose I could see OneNote being somewhat useful. Personally, I found it to be a rather frustrating program that caters to our inner organizer more than our inner doer.

Can anyone suggest any other notetaking apps for cross-platform needs that I should consider? (apart from simple plain-text notetaking apps like Simplenote). Currently I feel the best option is to run OneNote in a virtual machine.

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I recommend you give Evernote another try. It is superior to anything I have tried out there, especially if you are a premium user.
[/QUOTE]

palpatine said:

Incorrect. You can create local files that do not sync.

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But that only helps if you want an offline only notebook. If you want to have access to a particular notebook on two devices and the web, but not on a third (precisely my scenario), you can't do that with Evernote. So in other words, you choose to sync a file to all or none. With OneNote you decide what gets synced to each device.

palpatine said:

Evernote does some things really well, and one of these is the syncing. If you use multiple devices (in my case an iPad anywhere I go outside the house), then it is brilliant. If you are only using one computer, I suppose I could see OneNote being somewhat useful.

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If you are referring to the breadth of devices that it can sync to, then yes Evernote is clearly the best in this regard. However I doubt OneNote is inferior in the reliability or speed of the syncing. I've always been very impressed with OneNote in this respect.

palpatine said:

I recommend you give Evernote another try. It is superior to anything I have tried out there, especially if you are a premium user.

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Although I prefer OneNote's design, I would use Evernote. But, as mentioned above, only if it had better control over what content gets synced to each device.

I have been searching the web for weeks now to find a perfect replacement for OneNote. I tried every program that was suggested in this forum but I didnt like any.
So I said to my self what the heck, why not use OneNote on the Mac. So after some research, were OneNote would have been very helpful by the way, I got Parallels Desktop 7. Installed Windows 7 and OneNote and there I had OneNote on my Mac. Parellels Desktop has this great feature called Coherence. So using OneNote is like running a native Mac App.
I know that some of you didn't like using some kind of VM but with the Coherence feature on, there is nothing not to like. You have the benefits of both worlds, Mac and Microsoft.

At first I was disappointed because the one feature that didn't work was the clipping feature, for me the most important OneNote feature! But I found a great workaround. Mac has several native options to make a screenshot. One of these is to select a part of the screen and it is saved to the clipboard. So I use this feature and paste the screenshot into OneNote with cmd + v. Only feature still missing is the automatic saving of the link. But this is one feature I can live without.

The native command for the screenshot feature described above is shift+command+control+4. A seriously annoying, finger twisting and time consuming "shortcut". Since I have the Magic Mouse and a third party Programm called MagicPref, which lets you control which kind of gesture triggers which action, I made a little apple script and linked it to a four finger click.

So if a see something interesting I just click with four fingers, select the part I want to clip and paste it to OneNote.

Works great and once in place it doesn't feel like a workaround at all.

It's expensive, but I've tried (and bought) lots of outliner-type apps, and I'm now using Curio. I got the education discount. If it really makes you more productive, it's worth dropping some dough on it.

travelling said:

I got Parallels Desktop 7. Installed Windows 7 and OneNote and there I had OneNote on my Mac........

Works great and once in place it doesn't feel like a workaround at all.

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Virtualization to run OneNote (instead of the Mac alternatives) is what I do as well (but I use Fusion rather than Parallels). However, it does feel like a workaround to me because a notebook program should be open all day and running visualization software to enable that adds significant overhead to the system and on a laptop this leads to significantly lower battery life.

nefan65 said:

My complaint with the Skydrive stuff is it's yet ANOTHER email address/account. It's crazy; gmail for Google Docs, then if you just want the OneNote stuff, it's a hotmail or live account. If you like iCloud, and it's features, it's a me account. Then you have the regular work account.

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You can register a gmail account as a Live account. I did it back in the days when it was called a Microsoft passport. I use my gmail account with skydrive/OneNote/Mac.

EverNote does need to up its game with respect to the functionality of its editor - it's kludgy at best. If it did that, I would forget about OneNote.

J

Growly Notes ...

I've been an avid fan of OneNote. But, the Growly Note from Growly Bird Software seems to match the functionality very closely.

http://growlybird.com/GrowlyBird/Notes.html

Krishna

Outline for Mac

One to keep an eye on:
http://outline.ws/mac

Will initially just read onenote files. But presumably will be able to edit in the future (since I think their iPad app can).

The new Evernote 5 is a game-changer for me. It now has the kind of functionality I missed in OneNote. When I switched from Windows I started running OneNote in virtual Windows on my iMac, but keeping Windows open is a pain. The new Evernote interface is much slicker and more compact than it has been. I'm using it daily now. Stays open on all of my virtual Mountain Lion desktops.

I'm a OneNote to Evernote switcher as I work on multiple devices and in different offices and classrooms (Win/OSX and iOS). Evernote is a doddle to use, the functionality is improving all the time and I'm slowly getting colleagues hooked into the shared notebook facility.

Need to edit one note files..alternatives not acceptable

I have the need to specifically use one note files. Due to business restrictions I cannot use other Cloud based alternatives including sky drive. We store one note files on share point and I need to be able to access those and update those for team collaboration.
Currently I use parallels with windows and one note. But it is resource intensive as noted in a previous post.

I'm looking forward to the editing function on outline for Mac.

misterV said:

I have the need to specifically use one note files. Due to business restrictions I cannot use other Cloud based alternatives including sky drive. We store one note files on share point and I need to be able to access those and update those for team collaboration.
Currently I use parallels with windows and one note. But it is resource intensive as noted in a previous post.

I'm looking forward to the editing function on outline for Mac.

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I am looking for this too.
All of my onenote usage is through sharepoint and the webapp they offer blows. I have contacted outline about this and they said that sharepoint sync will be available in the future enterprise version.