Best Mac App For Taking Notes In College
From the living room to the lecture hall to the conference center, these are the best note taking apps for Mac!
- Free Note Taking App
- Best Mac App For Taking Notes In College Online
- Best Mac App For Taking Notes In College Lectures Effectively
Staying organized means having a good note taking app. Whether you're a student or professional, compulsive or casual, note taking apps can help you gather your thoughts, keep information synced across all your devices, or simply keep your memos handy for when you need them the most, there are a lot of great choices. Apple offers their own, built-in Notes App, but the Mac App Store has amazing alternatives as well. Which one is the best one for you? Here are my favorites!
Jun 15, 2017 The Best Apps for Taking and Reviewing Notes. As a college student, you're going to be taking hundreds of pages of notes. Yes, the paper-and-pencil method is tried and true. But keeping only physical copies of your notes opens you up to the risk of losing or forgetting them in your dorm room, and it limits what you can do with them. Jan 08, 2020 Start Taking Notes With Your iPad Today; Do you love the tactile experience of taking notes on paper but prefer the organization features of digital note-taking apps? And until recently, the best compromise we’d found was taking notes on. The best note-taking apps for the iPad and Apple Pencil With the Apple Pencil, writing by hand feels cool again.
Evernote
Evernote handles not only free form notes like champ, but lets you upload images and make checklists too. It can then sync your data across platforms, including iPhone and iPad. As far as organization goes, Evernote lets you use both tags and separate notebooks. One of my favorite things about the Mac app is that if you click on a note to open it, you can also see related notes underneath it based on tags and keywords. In my experience they're always fairly accurate and make it even easier to find notes on a particular topic or subject.
If you want the best cross-platform support available paired with powerful organizational tools, Evernote fits the bill.
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- Free - Download Now
See also:
- iOS - Free - Download Now
Simplenote
Simplenote, as its name implies, is simple. You're basically given a blank canvas and the ability to create endless amounts of notes. There is support for search and tags though which makes finding things later on a relatively easy task. Simplenote has no frills and absolutely no learning curve. Sign up for an account in order to sync your notes with the Simplenote service and start typing. That's it.
For a barebones note taking app that gets out of the way, there's nothing better than Simplenote.
- Free - Download Now
See also:
- iOS - Free - Download Now
NoteSuite
NoteSuite is a free form note taking app that lets you take notes in rich text format, instead of just plain text. If you choose to let it, NoteSuite can also double as a task manager of sorts and handles alerts and reminders rather well. In my experience it isn't as powerful and flexible in that aspect as dedicated todo apps, but for an all-in-one solution, it'll work for most people. NoteSuite links in with iCloud too so all your notes are synced across iOS and OS X at all times.
If plain text isn't your thing or you want a complete todo and note taking solution, NoteSuite is a perfectly acceptable option.
- $4.99 - Download Now
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- iPad, $4.99 - Download Now
Notational Velocity
Notational Velocity is a simple note taking app for Mac that was created around taking super fast notes without ever having to take your hands off the keyboard. With shortcuts and ways to easily start new notes and link to others, it's one of the quickest options around, once you learn the shortcuts. It's plain, it's basic, and it'll be perfect for a lot of people.
If you want to hammer out notes as fast as humanly possible, no mouse required, get Notational Velocity.
- Free - Download Now
Free Note Taking App
Byword
Even though Byword is technically a text editor more than it is a note taking app, I've used it for both in the past. If you're writing lengthy notes or outlines and know Markdown, Byword is an excellent option. Not to mention it tackles two birds with one stone since you can use it for general purpose writing as well. Byword not only contains iCloud support but integrates with services such as Wordpress and Evernote as well.
If your notes are long form or you want Markdown support without the frills, Byword is where its at.
- $9.99 - Download Now
See also:
- iOS - $4.99 - Download Now
Your picks?
Have you settled on a note taking app for Mac? If so, let me know which one and why you picked it? Also, what's the most important feature to you when it comes to note taking apps? Let me know that too!
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College is a heady time. New places, new friends and new beginnings come with new challenges. Despite (or perhaps because of) excessive warnings about how “different” college will be from educators and parents, new college students are often overwhelmed by the new expectations. If you don’t want to succumb to stress, you’ll need some apps to help keep things organized. Taking notes effectively is a crucial part of succeeding in college. And depending on your professors’ teaching style, you may need to take rapid-fire notes from lectured material. If you want to keep up, you can either learn shorthand or keep digital notes. Most of us type faster than we write (or think, in some cases) so you can stay up to speed easily. Once you’ve settled on taking notes digitally, you’ll need to find the best app. While Apple’s Notes is okay for quick lists or doodles, if you’ve got a Pencil, it’s not powerful enough to organize lecture notes. Here are the contenders for the best note-taking apps for college students on the Mac.
Evernote
There’s a ton of note-taking apps for college students out there, but Evernote is by far the best. It should be no surprise that it’s included in this list. It’s accessible, flexible and versatile, with powerful organizational options and deep third-party support. It offers the most reliable sync, PDF annotation, and support for a wide range of document types. Text styling isn’t as expressive as it could be, but the use case is more about collecting and organizing content from a ton of different places. Using the Web Clipper extension, you can grab content from JSTOR, Wikipedia, Google Scholar and more, then annotate your clips in Evernote. This feature alone is a godsend when you’re doing a ton of digital research, and it far surpasses the utility of Pocket or another read-it-later service. You can sync between two devices for free (Mac and iPhone, for example) or pay a few bucks a month to sync to unlimited devices. If you have a few extra dollars, it’s well worth the fee.
OneNote
Best Mac App For Taking Notes In College Online
If you don’t love Evernote, OneNote is an absolutely great alternative. If you’ve already got Office for Mac, OneNote is included in your subscription. It features many more formatting options that Evernote, but the design concept is a little different. It’s heavily optimized towards typing notes, rather than collecting information from a wide variety of sources. You can still include images, graphs and PDFs in your notebooks, but that function isn’t as integrated as Evernote. Essentially, OneNote is a different graphical interface for Word, designed to expose more organizational features. If you like Word, you’ll love OneNote. Users that want to recreate the flexibility of a spiral notebook will be pleased with the expanding formatting options, but we’ve never found typing in Word to be that delightful. If you already have an Office subscription, give it a try: you’ll probably find something you like about it!
Bear
Bear is designed to make note-taking beautiful. It relies on plain text MarkDown formatting, applying roughly the same range of formatting options that Evernote allows. Notes are organized into collections based on hashtags, so there are no notebooks to be created and organized. It’s more like a flexible tagging structure. The app is definitely built for simple note-taking, and doesn’t have as many organizational features as Evernote or OneNote. Depending on how you feel about those apps, that might be a turnoff, or it might be appealing. There’s limited support for adding pictures and files to Bear, but you won’t have the in-place annotation tools you get from Evernote.
Simplenote
Simplenote is a cross platform, plain text note taking app that’s much beloved by minimalists. If you want to keep your note taking really simple, then Simplenote will be perfect for you. The simple, clean layout is a joy to use, and it’s free of distracting formatting features. However, it lacks a lot of the secondary features that make Evernote and OneNote so powerful. Of course, if you’re dedicated, you can take create text-only formatting to organize your notes. Multi-platform sync is great for folks with a ton of devices. And if you need to take notes on the fly, you’ll find the fast mobile app useful for quickly capturing inspiration. But if you need something that can collect input from a wide variety of sources, you’re better off looking at Evernote.
Best Mac App For Taking Notes In College Lectures Effectively
nvALT
nvALT is built for Notational Velocity, a note-taking platform designed for lightning fast, keyboard-only operation. Its perfect use case is during a phone call. When you want to write something down quickly, you tap the key command, which reveals nvALT from the menu bar. Then, you start typing, and the note is saved immediately. You don’t need to title it, tag it or do anything else. While it’s amazing for that use, it doesn’t provide the broad use that other apps offer, so it might be a little limiting as a note-taking app for college students.
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