Apple Notes vs. Microsoft OneNote: Which is best for business?

3 years ago 386

OneNote enjoys creaseless integration with different Microsoft 365 apps, but Apple Notes provides a cleanable and reliable alternate for Apple users who request to seizure and stock concern notes.

It didn't ever utilized to beryllium this way. Today's workplace is, of course, ever evolving. Analog telephones and mechanical typewriters are nary longer fashionable bureau equipment. Contemporary professionals, instead, necessitate tools susceptible of providing inferior quickly, conscionable arsenic workers indispensable displacement attraction rapidly betwixt tasks portion managing progressively frenetic schedules. Consequently, taking notes has go a captious regular activity.

The sooner discoveries, ideas, strategical thoughts, income data, manufacture statistics, merchandise updates and different quality tin beryllium captured and adjacent shared with colleagues, the quicker the enactment and its representatives tin enactment that accusation to work. Note-taking is among the starring ways professionals cod information, whether the corresponding information is gathered during an in-person league oregon Teams meeting, from a webinar oregon podcast oregon acknowledgment to a presumption oregon vendor's website.

SEE: How to migrate to a caller iPad, iPhone, oregon Mac (TechRepublic Premium)

Just reviewing the sheer fig of note-taking apps should person immoderate skeptics of the popularity and necessity of specified tools. And, arsenic 1 mightiness expect, 2 apps that person risen to the apical are from the starring Goliaths: Apple and Microsoft.

Apple's Notes, shown successful Figure A, is built into macOS, iPadOS and iOS. Buy 1 of those devices and you'll find Notes already loaded. Just unfastened the app and commencement typing, or, if you're utilizing an iPad with an Apple Pencil, statesman penning oregon drawing.

Figure A

Microsoft OneNote, meanwhile, indispensable beryllium downloaded separately to Apple devices. To beryllium fair, OneNote is escaped for users, careless of whether a Microsoft 365 program is successful play, and the programme provides a feature-packed interface, arsenic shown successful Figure B, that encourages writing, diagramming and outlining.

Figure B

If the idiosyncratic oregon enactment does person a 365 subscription, OneNote further benefits from choky integration and the consequent easiness with which Microsoft 365 users tin make notes utilizing text, graphics and different elements from sister products, specified arsenic Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, Microsoft BI and SharePoint. It's a almighty combination, particularly arsenic OneNote permits organizing notes into aggregate categories: notebooks, sections, pages and adjacent conception groups.

While offering broad formatting, editing, collaboration, pagination and cloud-service abilities, OneNote shares different communal trait with its bigger bureau productivity brethren: The app offers truthful galore capabilities it tin beryllium hard to usage efficiently.

Apple Notes emphasizes the basics. While permitting a scope of formatting and collaboration options, arsenic good arsenic matching OneNote's abilities to import elements from different sources and use dictation to input text, you tin besides make tasks oregon reminders from straight wrong Notes, which is easier to operate, particularly for novices. And successful a time and property erstwhile simply capturing thoughts and information is paramount, the quality to rapidly and easy cod that accusation successful a meaningful mode that besides permits speedily sharing that accusation with others oregon exporting it to a document, spreadsheet oregon presentation, well, that's arsenic bully arsenic gold.

SEE: Apple: More must-read coverage (TechRepublic connected Flipboard)

All told, the much easy and efficiently an exertion performs its astir important functions, the much apt you are to usage it, and that's the goal. As 37signals' founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier, the authors of the best-selling concern publication Rework observed, "Small, simple, basal needs are constant. There's an endless proviso of customers who request precisely that."

Make thing excessively analyzable and you tally the hazard of trying to beryllium everything to everyone, which Rework emphasizes cannot beryllium done. That's however 1 ends up with analyzable toolbars and an unconventional information introduction abstraction and containers wrong OneNote that complicate the note-taking interface, sometimes making it much hard to people a enactment oregon usage the app connected a mobile instrumentality oregon tablet with smaller displays. Notes connected an iPhone oregon iPad, arsenic shown successful Figure C, doesn't truly acquisition that problem.

Figure C

Notes excels owed to its simplicity, which belies immoderate of the much precocious functions waiting backstage, should you truly request them. As Rework's authors note, "making a fewer vocal customers blessed isn't worthy it if it ruins the merchandise for everyone else."

Now, that's not to assertion OneNote is simply a ruined product. It's not. OneNote's a fabulous instrumentality for harried professionals joined to the Microsoft 365 platform, particularly users consenting to put the clip and vigor learning the app's unsocial nuances.

But that's wherever Apple Notes shines. The programme stresses capturing accusation rapidly and easy and lets you absorption connected moving intuitively with the worldly important to you. Better yet, precocious collaboration and editing features are readily disposable but stay unobtrusive. Capturing, formatting and sharing accusation is simply easier utilizing Notes, and I judge that's the winning enactment for today's Mac, iPad and iPhone professionals.