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iWork or office 08 for class note taking?

B

bluesTank

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 21, 2008
181
0
Which one is more friendly towards class note taking?

I'm in med school and we use tons of powerpoints, which I normally have been using to take notes in the little "notes" part at the bottom. I also use just a normal word document to take notes as well. This has all been in office 2003.

I have heard of the magic of OneNote, and know that unfortunately it is not available on a mac.

Which one (iWork or office 08) is more friendly towards note taking, with nice bullet formats, or just general note taking tools?

Thanks
 
Personally, I would use neither for notes. I'd go with TextEdit. It's fast, the windows can be made really small if needed, and it provides for simple outlines.
 
There is a free solution:

Neo Office

It is a open source Office type Suite, that can open and save in MS style office programs.

Works Great, and is a great alternative.

bluesTank said:
Which one is more friendly towards class note taking?

I'm in med school and we use tons of powerpoints, which I normally have been using to take notes in the little "notes" part at the bottom. I also use just a normal word document to take notes as well. This has all been in office 2003.

I have heard of the magic of OneNote, and know that unfortunately it is not available on a mac.

Which one (iWork or office 08) is more friendly towards note taking, with nice bullet formats, or just general note taking tools?

Thanks
Click to expand...
 
Been in the same situation as you. Used Office 2008 for 7 months or so, and finally got iWork a week ago. Both are good, so whatever you use, you'll get a good experience. Only problem is that neither of the programs is good with text boxes - or being able to place text where ever you want without the rest of the document messing up.

Pages is the fastest though, and maybe with a slight edge over Word.

Bottomline: Both will do fine.

Note: Still looking for a better note taking program, i'd love suggestions.
 
Journaler

This is a great way to stay organized with notes. A student liscence is only 20.00 and it's great because you can search by Title, so you can search notes for just one class, all of them, attach files to notes, videos, audio. Great little program.



Tuca said:
Been in the same situation as you. Used Office 2008 for 7 months or so, and finally got iWork a week ago. Both are good, so whatever you use, you'll get a good experience. Only problem is that neither of the programs is good with text boxes - or being able to place text where ever you want without the rest of the document messing up.

Pages is the fastest though, and maybe with a slight edge over Word.

Bottomline: Both will do fine.

Note: Still looking for a better note taking program, i'd love suggestions.
Click to expand...
 
That looks just like Evernote (www.evernote.com) which is free, but I really didn't like evernote because of the interface, and the fact that the files were never actually stored on your computer. I guess that would be good since its on a database, but it always made me nervous, and I have my computer with me anyways.
 
bluesTank said:
the fact that the files were never actually stored on your computer.
Click to expand...

Yes they are, they are synced if you go online. If you aren't online you can use it as normal an sync when you are back online. This would be handy for accessing your notes even if you don't have your laptop to hand. Also you can tag things. Its a while since I was in college, but for me tagging would be ESSENTIAL for any note taking application.

If you want to go lightweight and free, I would recommend text files and tagging through quicksilver. You can then also tag any digital files you are given.
 
Word 2008 has a mode called Notebook Layout View that is specifically for people taking notes. Here's a blog post from one of our Word guys talking about it and Publishing Layout View: Take Note on Word. It's an in-depth discussion of what we developed it to do.

Regards,
Nadyne.
 
Actually the best tool for doing this sort of thing is Scrivener. It costs about £20 ($30) (education price) for 3 computers and is excellent. It offers separate windows for research and writing drafts, stores web pages, PDFs, and such. I have been using it for over a year now and it is super. A lot of Mac Pros and students have stopped using M$ Word and gone over to Scrivener. Highly Recommended. :apple:

Here is a review of Scrivener in the New York Times.

Both Merlin Mann and Andy Ihnatko are very keen on Scrivener and have chosen to use it instead of Word as their writing tool of choice. Mann refers to Word as the application that everyone is trying to get away from. Agreed. :apple:
 
I'm coming in a little late to the thread, but since things still seemed up in the air...

I can recommend two options to the OP:

1) OmniOutliner. Very fast and intuitive to use. I've been using it for years to outline papers and such. There is no easy way to integrate the outline into your PowerPoint slides per se, but the app itself is the most serviceable notetaker around for the Mac.

2) Print out the slides in a grid layout and write notes in the margins. This won't work if you also have a ton of chalkboard notes to write down as well, but sometimes the lo-fi option works.

For all my Mac geekery, I used pen and paper for in-class notetaking in college. In my particular case, it worked out perfectly. The only way I could envision moving to a computer for grad school notetaking is if I had a tablet Mac with a native port of OneNote (or a reasonable facsimile from a third party). If Nadyne is still reading this thread, I'll add my voice to the many others who clamor for a OneNote port. The free-form notebook category has no clear leader on the Mac platform right now; OneNote is a cool app and MS could easily take the cake if they so desire. Here's hoping, at least.
 
dolphin842 said:
I'm coming in a little late to the thread, but since things still seemed up in the air...

I can recommend two options to the OP:

1) OmniOutliner. Very fast and intuitive to use. I've been using it for years to outline papers and such. There no easy way to integrate the outline into your PowerPoint slides per se, but the app itself is the most serviceable notetaker around for the Mac.

2) Print out the slides in a grid layout and write notes in the margins. This won't work if you also have a ton of chalkboard notes to write down as well, but sometimes the lo-fi option works.

For all my Mac geekery, I used pen and paper for in-class notetaking in college. In my particular case, it worked out perfectly. The only way I could envision moving to a computer for grad school notetaking is if I had a tablet Mac with a native port of OneNote (or a reasonable facsimile from a third party). If Nadyne is still reading this thread, I'll add my voice to the many others who clamor for a OneNote port. The free-form notebook category has no clear leader on the Mac platform right now; OneNote is a cool app and MS could easily take the cake if they so desire. Here's hoping, at least.
Click to expand...

I have to +1 for the OmniOutliner. It is really great for what you need. I tend to do more on papers, economics was not kind to me with graphs and such to take notes rapidly.
 
jessica. said:
I have to +1 for the OmniOutliner. It is really great for what you need. I tend to do more on papers, economics was not kind to me with graphs and such to take notes rapidly.
Click to expand...

Graphs were the main reason I stuck with paper as well. Of the 7 or so econ classes I took, I saw only one student with a tablet PC. My guess is that they had OneNote running. I've always been tempted to get a tablet just to mess with OneNote, but that would be a pretty expensive experiment :eek:.
 
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