#note taking apps

Notion Master Post ✨

I reached a personal goal with this blog so I decided to celebrate with this Master Post ✨

This is going to be a long post so I am putting it all under the cut. Notion is a free to students app that is used primarily for note taking but I can be used for so much more.

Below the cut is some resources I use to make my Notion pages useful and beautiful! I hope you enjoy and feel free to message me if you want any more information.

Felt like posting this because I noticed that a lot of people especially students are going paperless and getting an ipad, which I think is mostly due to the current situation and since classes are now online. This will be a quick post and not an in depth review of each app, but I’ll try to include important parts about them.

So I have both apps on my ipad and have been using both. In terms of note taking these two apps really are top tier and worth purchasing.

I first purchased Notability because upon checking both apps I felt like it suited me more. I didn’t had any problems using it and it was very easy to use. Out of curiosity I eventually downloaded GoodNotes as well. I tried to use it as my main note taking app just because I liked its organization better. But I noticed that writing in GoodNotes isn’t as easy as it was in Notability. Since then I have been using the Notability app as my main note taking app.

As for GoodNotes I have been using it for large PDF files and ebooks because I can easily browse through it in the table of contents feature. I was using PDF Expert before this, but it’s kinda hard to annotate and highlight in it, and I also didn’t like the update they had.

I adore OneNote. 

This is why:

-OneNote is almost like a real life notebook page. You can type a section of text anywhere on the page you want, and it’s fast. Just click and type. You can also drag, or reshape the text box if you want. Very speedy when you’re in the middle of a lecture and you want to put a quick note or to-do to yourself in the “margin”

-Insert photos, links, highlight, bold, underline, draw you have it all!

-One of my favorite features: record audio of a lecture while you take notes and OneNote tracks what notes you’re taking at what point in the lecture recording. Then if you miss something because the lecturer is talking too fast, you easily can go back after class. (There are often “ADD NOTES HERE” in my notes to remind myself haha)

-Organization: I love OneNote’s organization. You can make different notebooks, have different pages within each notebook, and then different sections. The problem with GoogleDrive or Word is that they are still separate files that take time to switch between. You also have to hit save on those, while OneNote saves everything automatically. tl;dr it feels like a real notebook to me. Except nice and lightweight in my computer.

-Synching. Doesn’t matter if my computer crashes, all my notes are backed up in the cloud. They synch across your phone, your iPad, anything you like. I can “log into” OneNote and view my notes from a web browser like Chrome if I’m on a different computer. If you don’t have internet access, that’s ok! It saves locally on your computer, and as soon as you have wifi, automatically syncs.

-Free. Thank goodness. You do need to make a microsoft account log in, but horray, that’s free too! (I promise no one’s paying me to say this. I just really like OneNote!) —

“Best note-taking apps” articles are everywhere because the category is broad and the screenshots look convincing. A list may include simple memo tools, handwriting notebooks, team knowledge bases, markdown editors, voice note tools, and full project workspaces in the same ranking. That does not make the list useless, but it does mean readers need a way to judge whether the recommendations match…