Explore a range of note-taking apps

Discover the benefits of journaling and note-taking on Mac and iOS

OneNote - Microsoft’s OneNote has garnered a large following. Each OneNote notebook consists of a series of tabs called sections, and each of those can contain an unlimited number of pages. Pages are what you use to organize your notes, and each one is an endless canvas for your ideas.

On a page, you can enter information in a totally freeform fashion. Click anywhere and start typing, and your notes are automatically contained in a boxed element that can be moved, resized and formatted any way you like.

A page element isn’t limited to text either. It can contain images, links to websites, video, audio and even documents. There’s nothing to stop you dragging PDFs, text files, images and other items from another window onto a page.

OneNote’s ribbon interface will be familiar if you’ve used Microsoft Office, and while it’s not quite as feature-heavy as the latter, Microsoft regularly updates OneNote with more tools.

The Home tab is equipped with various text formatting tools, as well as a list of useful tags to drop into your pages, such as “Remember for later,” “Website to visit,” and “Source for article,” as well as a useful checklist feature.

Switching to Insert, you can add arrows, lines, polygons and other geometric shapes to pages, which can help you relate ideas to each another on a canvas. You can add attachments, include dates and times, create tables for inputting data, and add equations into the mix too, if your project demands it. You can also insert an audio recording into a page. Lastly, the View tab lets you zoom in and out of pages, change their color, and apply password protection to particular notes.

There are two things to bear in mind: OneNote doesn’t let you edit documents embedded in a page, and won’t update said files if you edit them outside of the app – once the file is inserted, the link to the original copy is severed. Also, using

OneNote requires a OneDrive account, since the app stores all your notebooks in the cloud. If you don’t have an account, you can register for free, which gets you 5GB of storage. This also enables you to sync notes to the iOS app.

EverNote - If OneNote sounds a bit too freeform, consider Evernote, which is like a digital filing cabinet. It’s the perfect place to collate structured research, class notes, or any information that’s crying out for better organization.

Each note in this app has a title, an input field for adding tags, a creation date and a location, and, of course, an editing window into which you can drag files from your desktop or simply start typing into. Choose the latter and a style and formatting bar appears above the page, with options to add numbered, bulleted and checklists, insert tables, record audio, share a note, and take snapshots using your Mac’s FaceTime camera. You can also add a reminder to a note.

Naturally, notes live in notebooks, which can be nested into hierarchical stacks in Evernote. The interface’s three-column design makes switching between notes and notebooks quick and easy, thanks to its sidebar shortcuts (think of them as bookmarks) and its list of notes recently visited. If you reduce the Evernote window’s width, the

sidebar vanishes, leaving you room to work with your notes, and in the View menu you can switch between a selection of other layouts that may better suit your preference. One of the best things about Evernote is its powerful search function. Type a word in its search bar and the app not only goes through your notes and tags, but also searches within attached images that contain recognizable written or typed characters. Elsewhere, Evernote’s Atlas view offers a geographical perspective of where notes were recorded (with location services enabled) and plots them on a map, which is a great way to keep track of travel notes and on-location research.

Like OneNote, Evernote continually syncs to the cloud, which is why you need to register for an account to use it. A free Basic account grants you a 60MB per month upload limit. Otherwise, $34.99 per year lets you upload 1GB per month on the Plus plan, and a $69.99 premium account offers 10GB per month, as well as a presentation mode and annotation tools. You can also take notes in Evernote’s free iOS app.

Day One 2 - If your written records take the form of daily journaling and diary entries, and you’re happy to forego the more businesslike features of OneNote and Evernote, Day One 2 could be for you. Click the big + sign in the right pane of the window and an entry is created for you to start typing. Here Day One 2 eschews fancy formatting and instead relies on the simplicity of Markdown for adding links, headers, lists, and bold and italic text to your entries. Images are the sole media option that can be added to entries, which is done by dragging and dropping from either a Finder window or the Photos app. The middle column of the interface is where you choose how you’d like to view entries – by timeline, attached photos, map location, or calendar view.

Day One 2 supports multiple journals, which appear in its left pane. You can divide your entries into journal themes – workouts, work, and home, for example – without having to rely exclusively on tags. That said, you can geotag an entry to record where you created it, and add details about weather conditions. If you’re using Day One 2 for iOS, that version of the app can tap into your device’s motion tracking and activity data.

Provided you don’t need the collaboration features of OneNote or Evernote, with its timeline emphasis, location awareness and calendar smarts, Day One 2 is the perfect solution for keeping travel diaries, ideas, lifestyle habits, flash fiction, and all kinds of other thoughts stowed away in the Day One cloud – which, of course, makes them accessible in the elegant iOS companion app as well.