Microsoft OneNote 4+

Having used earlier versions of OneNote and found them wanting, this new version really does impress! From both a personal and professional standpoint, it is a highly functional and utility-laden piece of software, which is rapidly overtaking such other services like Word or Pages as my go-to word processor. The ability to save and sync across a plethora of devices/platforms instantly, share with other software easily, and import a vast variety of data make OneNote the best Microsoft app by far!

Professionally, I use OneNote Class Notebooks with students and other educators, to replace traditional Word documents and class exercise books. Being able to access students’ work anywhere, collaborate with both staff and students, and store such a variety of media makes OneNote perfect for education. From the automatic date/time stamping of pages, to not having to worry about saving due to instant syncing with the cloud, OneNote really has changed the way we do things at work.

Personally, I use OneNote to keep track of home incident reports, plan trips and holidays with family and friends and QuickNotes for extended yet non-essential information. I love being able to transition between laptop, phone, tablet, and desktop whenever I want/need to and knowing that my data will be available in OneNote. Microsoft, you’ve done well here!

In 2014 a colleague showed me how he used Onenote to manages his projects, teams, workflows etc and it quickly became a game changer for me, helping me keep tabs on work and shore up an aging brain.

OneNote operates as your filing cabinet, and from within there you organise your various workbooks and sections, inserting anything from text to graphs to files. The key difference for me was understanding why I would use this instead of just a folder structure with documents - with OneNote you can centralise anything related to what you desire in one area. For me this made it easy to collate anything related to a project, be it emails, screenshots, miscellanous notes, documents/spreadsheets etc. all centralised in one area but with any distinguishing characteristics, timings etc.

Helpful for not only keeping track of a project but also great if you leave a project or need to hand something over to a colleague/new starter - you simply hand them a virtual folder as you might have a paper file.

A very versatile note taking app. It has changed the way I organise my research making the whole experience much easier and more fluid. It allows you to have different notebooks for different topics and then it allows you to divide those topics into as many sub-topics as you want. It doesn’t get a five star because I prefer GoodNotes for marking up PDFs and in an ideal world it would have the ability to create another layer. But this is a really great app. I love it. Far better than lots of word files in folders. Just click on a tab and you can look at and add to the contents. No worrying about opening, saving and closing documents. Also, and this is a big one, I make a note on my Mac and there it is on my iPad (and iPhone, and, incredibly, also on my Apple Watch). I feel a bit mean not giving it five stars which it would get if the text and table formating matched that of Word. OneNote is a little less flexible and capable on that front.