Note Taking Software

For students already at uni who use laptops to take and organise notes in lectures and while studying what software do you use? Does anybody know of an free or premium software ideal for this use?

Reply 1

Qari

Original post by arbelos

For students already at uni who use laptops to take and organise notes in lectures and while studying what software do you use? Does anybody know of an free or premium software ideal for this use?

Are you on about software like Microsoft Office? If yh then try open office

Reply 2

arbelos

Original post by Qari

Are you on about software like Microsoft Office? If yh then try open office

Yeah any software, expensive or otherwise that can be used for taking and reliably organising a years worth of notes. I don't want to reach Christmas and realise that my notes are absolutely everywhere the week before exams!!

Reply 3

Qari

Original post by arbelos

Ah right well just create documents and organise them by lecture/date

Reply 4

gutenberg

I'm in the middle of my PhD, and use Evernote to take & organise all my notes. I just use the free version. I like it, as I can organise things into notebooks, which can then be organised into subject-specific stacks of notebooks; you can also free word search across all your notes, and if you have a smartphone or tablet you can sync everything across all devices, and so access things while out & about.

Reply 5

PsychLeprechaun

Microsoft OneNote 2013 is free to use, and is my favourite as it supports password-protected notebooks (Edit: only applicable to paid for version apparently), has a really nice UI and is generally as good as you come to expect from Microsoft Office products. If you need to also do general writing etc, look at either getting the full Office package (there are student discounted versions at places like software4students) or Open Office/LibreOffice if you don't want to pay a rather large amount for it.

Here is a good comparison of EverNote and OneNote: http://lifehacker.com/lifehacker-faceoff-onenote-vs-evernote-1550697885

(edited 9 years ago)

Reply 6

GoingToBurst

You might want to double check that you're allowed to take notes on a laptop before downloading software for it. I had planned to take all of my notes on my laptop before I started uni, only to find out that only one of my lecturers in first year allowed us to take notes on laptops. Kind of gutting to find that out once you've already planned a great organisation system.