Where do you put your thoughts, your ideas, or the name of a movie someone recommended? If you write them down or otherwise capture them, you get an accurate record that you can always refer to rather than rely on a faulty memory.
The place to put all this information and more is in a note taking app. Note taking apps are the digital equivalent of notebooks, and because they're digital, they can do more for you than paper ever could. For starters, note taking apps can store your notes in the cloud and sync them across multiple devices. As long as you have the internet, you have your notes.
Second, note taking apps have search functionality. In a matter of seconds, you can find whatever notes you need, even if they are years old. Third, the best note taking apps let you snap pictures and save them as notes, upload files, record audio, and clip pages from the web.
Jan 21, 2016 - There simply is no Mac equivalent of the Windows Start button or Start. If you use Notepad in Windows, then you'll be happy to know there is.
I've never seen a paper notebook that lets you dictate notes using your voice, either. Editor's Note: Originally published in October 2015 by author Jimmy Daly and then updated in April 2017, we've updated this post with new selections and app descriptions.
What Makes a Great Note Taking App? To find the best note taking apps, we started with a list of about 35 contenders and whittled our way down to the 10 best based on a few criteria. All the apps chosen for this list met a standard for being easy to set up and use.
We also considered each app's feature set in light of what the app promised to do or deliver. For example, Simplenote made the list of the best note taking apps even though it doesn't have a long list of features. The reason is Simplenote aims to provide a distraction-free note taking environment, and it achieves that promise by not overwhelming its interface with excessive tools. Conversely, both Microsoft OneNote and Evernote earned high marks for having a wealth of excellent features, which is what they advertise. Other factors for consideration included value, particularly because many of the best note taking apps charge a subscription fee for unbridled access to all the features. We also have a strong preference for apps that work across all the major platforms, including web.
One final point for consideration was whether the app offered a unique experience. Some note taking apps are designed to be used with a stylus, letting you sketch, write by hand, annotate images and documents, and so forth on your phone, tablet, or touch-enabled computer. Others let you store your notes locally to give you greater privacy and security. When an app had a unique factor, we compared it to similar apps and selected one to represent that subcategory. For example, in the subcategory of apps for sketching, we chose Paper. As you read, look for the line beginning 'Best for' to see what makes each app among the best.
A word on apps we did not include: Any app labeled a word processor or text editor was not considered. Those apps are excellent for writing, but they don't give you a simple and quick way to make a note when you're on the go, which note taking apps do.
We also did not consider, which typically remind you to write or help you add detail about your day. Read more about to include in articles. Below are summaries of the best note taking apps, including highlights about what makes them different from one another. The Best Note Taking Apps. (iOS, macOS).
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(Android, iOS, macOS, web, Windows) (iOS, macOS) Best note taking app for working in Markup on Apple devices. The Apple-only notes app Bear could easily be mistaken for a distraction-free writing app. It supports formatting in lieu of presenting an excess of menu options (although it does allow you to work with fully viewable inline images).
Bear also offers a focus mode that strips away unnecessary bells and whistles from your view. You can add tags to organize your notes by simply using hashtags within the note body. And Bear stores all your notes as plain text, which keeps the app lightweight. Other features include an info panel for each note showing word count and other metadata, as well as web clipping, or the ability to automatically copy the contents of web pages to one of your notebooks via a browser extension.
There are some showstoppers worth knowing about before you choose Bear. For one, it doesn't have a web app, so you can't simply log into Bear from any internet connected device. The developers who make the app have said that a web app is in the works, but they have yet to pin down a release date. Second, Bear runs on Apple devices only, so it's not a good option for cross-platform folks. Third, storage and syncing go through iCloud, so you're really at the mercy of (read: storage limitations of) Apple, not Bear. Finally, the free account comes with some limitations that make it less than ideal as a note taking app (no syncing, limited export formats), so be prepared to pay for a Pro subscription. At $14.99 per year, it's quite reasonably priced.
Overall, it's a low-cost note taking app best suited for Apple device owners who are looking for a pared-down experience. Price: free with limitations; $1.49/month or $14.99/year for Pro (Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows) Best note taking app for taking notes as a programmer. Boostnote is a free, open source note taking app made for programmers.
What makes it special for programmers? When you create a new note, you choose either Markdown note, used for creating any kind of text document, or snippet note, which simply gives you a text editor for code. When creating and editing Markdown notes, Boostnote puts an extra panel on the right side of your window to preview the formatting of the note as you write.
You can create any kind of notes you want in this note type. Markdown notes even support LaTeX blocks, for those writing hefty mathematical formulas. Snippet notes, however, look like code in an ordinary code editor, with visual cues you'd expect, such as line numbering and color-coding of text.
With Boostnotes, you can work with text snippets, too. Text snippets are lines of text you tend to use repeatedly, whether boilerplate or particular lines of code. Other excellent features include customizable hotkeys, the ability to change the font, and dozens of light and dark visual themes for the interface. Storage is entirely in your hands with Boostnote, so you can keep your notes saved locally and 100 percent offline, or you can pop them into a of your choosing to make them accessible to you everywhere. Price: free; (Android, iOS, macOS, web, Windows) Best note taking app for taking and searching for notes of all kinds. Evernote was an early leader in the digital note taking space.
In many ways, it shaped expectations about what a note taking app should do and how it should look. It's one of the most capable services you'll find, supporting a wide variety of note types (text, images, audio memo, sketches, scanned documents, checklists, clipped web pages) and with excellent tools for organizing and searching your notes as well. It has apps for all the major platforms, and with a Business account, you can even use Evernote for real-time chat and collaboration with colleagues. One of Evernote's most impressive features is its ability to search text found in images. If you snap a photograph of a for rent sign, for example, and save it to your Evernote account, you'll later be able to find the note by simply search for the word 'rent.'
With a Premium or Business account, Evernote searches the text in uploaded PDFs and office documents, too. Evernote also doubles as an excellent scanner, and if you combine those two features, you can use the app for some pretty interesting projects, such as digitizing recipes from books.
Evernote also integrates with other apps and tools you use, such as Google Drive, Slack, and Salesforce. If you can't find the app you need among the natively supported ones, you can create new using Zapier. Evernote handles all the syncing and storage. Basic members (that is, those on the free plan) get 60MB of space per month for storing notes and uploading files. It's also worth noting that the free plan lets you sync only two devices, a limitation that may or may not work for you.
Premium ($7.99/month) and Business ($149.99/year) members get 10GB and 20GB per month, respectively, and the ability to sync across as many devices as they want. Unused space each month doesn't roll forward. Price: free with limitations; from $79.99/year for paid plans Learn to make the most of your notes.
(iOS, Android, macOS, web, Windows) Best free note taking app. Microsoft OneNote is a full featured note taking app that can do more than just about any other, save for Evernote. The two square up rather equally, though they couldn't be more different in their look and feel. While Evernote looks squarely like standard business software, Microsoft OneNote mimics paper.
When you create a new note, you can click anywhere on the page and add content to that spot, just as if you were working with paper, rather than be tied to the linear movement of the cursor. You can choose a background for your notes that looks like textured or lined paper. OneNote also mimics the classic binder, with notebooks, sections, and tabs for organizing your notes.
With OneNote, you can type text, drag and drop images and file attachments into notes, use a digital highlighter, create checklists, record audio, draw sketches, and so forth. And because each note is meant to appear like a piece of paper, you can move elements around the page, placing an audio memo next to a block of text, for example. As much as OneNote fondly embraces some elements of paper, it's also technologically savvy. Scan and upload images of handwriting, such as a picture of a whiteboard with notes, and Microsoft's OCR will make all the writing searchable.
For every note you can open a record of its version history, too. And an ink-to-text feature lets you write by hand and have your text converted to type. OneNote also integrates with other apps, such as OfficeLens and the paperless system NeatConnect.
You can create more using Zapier. OneNote is free to use, with no feature limitations in the free version.
Syncing occurs via Microsoft OneDrive, and non-paying members are capped at 5GB (though you can earn additional space through some promotions and purchases). Microsoft OneNote is perhaps the best free note taking app you can find. It's easy to learn to use, too, although you can rely on Zapier's if you need some pointers. Price: free An honorable mention goes to, another very capable and free note taking app. (web) Best note taking app for designers and visual thinkers.
If you think in images rather than words, your note taking app should still give you tools to express yourself. Milanote caters directly to designers and other visual thinkers but it's not for sketching. It's more of a pasteboard or pinboard, presenting you with a canvas on which you can paste images, arrows, text blocks, checklists, and other elements.
Milanote has a drawer on the right side of the page that holds page elements you intend to use but haven't placed yet. I like that you can see and consider all the pieces you need to add without having to put them on the board before you're ready.
Milanote also has a web clipper tool, so you can easily snap images online and add them to your visual notes. There are no mobile apps or desktop apps at this time, just a web app and a mobile-optimized site. Milanote could use a few more markup tools, such as a highlighter or a marker for drawing freeform lines, as it's light on options. It's important to note that Milanote isn't strong as a general note taking app. It's not good for making text notes or audio memos. It's really only for pasteboard work. It does support collaboration and sharing, however.
Milanote handles syncing, storage, and backup rather than handing off those responsibilities to a third party. Free Milanote members have some tight limitations on what they can upload: 100 notes, images or links, and only 10 files. Free members also can't search their boards and content. Pro members get unlimited storage (unlimited notes, images, links, and files), plus a search bar for all their content.
Milanote Pro costs much more than other options, including Evernote Premium, however. It's $119.88/year per person, or $12.50/month if you don't want to commit to the annual plan. Price: free with limitations; $119.88/year per person for Pro (iOS) Best note taking app for sketching notes on iPhone and iPad. Paper by FiftyThree is a drawing and note taking app for iPad and iPhone.
You can use it to create all kinds of notes with your fingertips or a stylus, whether a sketch, annotated image, or handwritten text. Beautifully designed with a minimalist bent, Paper incorporates animations that make it inviting and fun to use. It has some tools for organizing your notes, too, such as the ability to group them into notebooks and share them.
The Paper app also lets you choose different pen types and colors. Paper cleans up your drawing as you go, so even if you're not particularly artistic, it's still a joy to use. Draw simple loops, for example, and Paper knows to turn them into neat circles. Choose the pen tool, and your writing will magically look like calligraphy. If you prefer to type on a keyboard, you can do that as well, writing text notes, checklists, and so forth. Paper also gives you a few special tools for creating business diagrams. You'll have the best experience with Paper if you use it with a stylus.
FiftyThree sells one called for $59. It's made to look like a graphite pencil. The tip lets you create pressure-sensitive drawings, while the reverse side acts as an eraser. The app used to backup your notes for you, but the company no longer does as of March 2018, so be sure you have adequate space in an iCloud account before committing to Paper. Price: free (Android, iOS, macOS, web, Windows) Best note taking app for collaborating on documents and spreadsheets.
Quip isn't a typical note taking app. Rather, it's more like a word processing and spreadsheet application with collaboration, though once you get rolling with Quip, you'll likely find it's the place you want to store more general notes, too. This online app lets you work with others on notes, documents, and spreadsheets while discussing the work in the same place. Quip shines brightest when you used it to collaborate with others.
In many ways, it's similar to Google Docs, in the sense that you can see your collaborators' remarks, questions, and suggested changes in real time. Quip is thorough in how it saves, documents, and displays every single suggested edit, question, and comment in your notes. It provides complete visibility into how the collaboration process works.
You can connect your Quip account to other tools, such as Dropbox and Google Drive, and you create other by using Zapier. With Quip, you and your teammates can create folders and subfolders to organize your notes. You can create private folders for notes that you don't want to share with others as well. The search function is reliable, but not especially fast, given Quip accounts often have a lot of data beyond plain text in them.
Quip takes the matter of storage and syncing into its own hands, so you don't have to bring your own. With a paid plan you get unlimited storage, too. While I wouldn't necessarily recommend Quip as the right note taking app for an individual, it's wonderful for business teams. Price: free with limitations; from $30/month for paid plans (Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, web, Windows) Best note taking app for distraction-free note taking. If you're in the market for a distraction-free app for taking notes, Simplenote is the first one you should consider. True to its name, Simplenote gives you a clutter-free space for creating and editing notes. It's a no-frills experience.
You get little more than an unlimited number of blank white pages for making plain text notes. There's no rich text formatting, no image uploads, and no file attachments. Don't expect to draw or record audio memos either. Simplenote is a pure minimalist in the note taking app category. Seeing as you can save nothing but typed text, the search functionality is fast.
Syncing and storage comes included. You get a version history for all your notes and the ability to restore any prior version. You also get tags for sorting and organizing your notes, plus options for sharing and collaborating with others. Simplenote can run in any browser, and there are apps for all the major platforms as well.
It's completely free with no upsells or subscription plans. If you want a truly distraction-free environment and don't need many features beyond the ability to make plain text notes, then you can't do better than Simplenote for your note-taking needs.
Price: free (Android and compatible Chromebooks) Best note taking app for handwriting on Android and Chromebook. Squid (also known as Squidnotes and formerly called Papyrus) is a note taking app that supports handwriting and sketching for Android tablets and some Chromebooks. The app was designed to have low latency, meaning as soon as your stylus or finger drags across the screen, the mark in the app should show up immediately, with little to no delay. In the app, your options for paper include blank white pages, lined pages, staff paper for music, and gridded graph paper in a variety of styles. You can write or draw freeform, as well as import images and PDFs to annotate them.
Squid supports digital signatures, too, so you can import a document that you need to sign, scribble your name on it, export it as a PDF, and send it to the recipient. Squid includes other tools for capturing, organizing, and editing notes. While the app is free to download, Squid sells a Premium subscription that unlocks all the paper backgrounds, tools, and a few capabilities you might actually need. Some of the features restricted to Premium are a highlighter; a few shape tools; the ability to import PDFs for markup; and the option to backup, restore, and bulk export options using Box or Dropbox. Squid is one of the best apps for Android and Chromebook that supports handwriting, image and PDF markup, and other ways to take notes. Price: free; $10/year for Premium (Android, iOS, macOS, web, Windows) Best free and uncluttered note taking app. Zoho Notebook is one of the best free note taking apps you can find.
It has a healthy array of features and is available on all major platforms (although as of this writing, the Windows version isn't freely downloadable; and you have to request a copy from Zoho). When you first create an account, the app encourages you to create a few notebooks, which appear on screen as notebooks with different images for their covers.
You can name them however you like. As you create notes, whether by typing them, uploading images, or clipping them from web pages, you can add rich text formatting. Your notes then appear as cards with preview images when applicable. You can also lock notes, add time and date reminders to them, view their full version history, and revert back to an earlier version. Zoho Notebooks doesn't offer tags as of this writing, so it's a bit harder to classify your notes and make them sortable beyond putting them into notebooks.
Zoho directly manages saving and syncing, and the company gives you as much storage space as you need, with no limit. There is a maximum file upload size of 50MB, however. While Zoho Notebooks doesn't have every feature under the sun, it does give you apps for all major platforms, unlimited storage, and reliable syncing. Considering it's free, Zoho Notebooks is an excellent note taking app to choose. Price: free An honorable mention goes to, another excellent note taking app that's free (with Apple devices) and uncluttered. Note taking apps come in many shapes and sizes to meet different needs. Some people may need a fully loaded app with a lot of functionality, such as OneNote or Evernote, while others prefer less clutter and fewer features, which is what you get from an app such as Simplenote.
Not all note taking apps are free, but most of them offer at least a free trial, if not a free version with limitations, so that you can try out a few before settling on the one that works best for you. For more advice, see these tips for. Note-taking photo via.
Advertisement Copying and pasting are probably some of the most common functions you perform on your computer. We’ve shown how a When you think about it, copy paste is kind of weird.
You copy stuff, but there's no way to see it. And if you copy over what you had, it's gone – forever., but copy-pasting brings another common annoyance: special formatting. You’ve surely experienced this: you’ll copy some text (perhaps a heading from a website) and want to paste it into a Word document, but it keeps its color, size, and other features when you do. We’re going to take a look at ways to alleviate this issue. They range from bare-bones to automated; go for whichever works for you!
Let Notepad Intervene Windows are about as basic as a computer program can get. Because of this, they don’t carry the capacity for special formatting like dedicated word processors (such as Microsoft Word or the ) do.
Our simplest solution is to paste any text that you want to strip of formatting into Notepad first, then copy it again. Once you grab Notepad’s version, you’ll have only the text and won’t have to worry about any colors or alternative fonts sticking around. Try or pinning Notepad to your taskbar to be sure you can access it whenever you need to paste something. Use Office’s Special Paste A lot of pasting occurs into If you're considering an upgrade to Office 2013, or you've just paid for the package and want to make the best of it, this Microsoft Office 2013 Guide is for you., and if you’re typing a paper, Microsoft PowerPoint can do much more than boring presentations.
It’s PowerPoint 2013’s time now and the search for creative and uncommon uses of PowerPoint continues. Here are five., or preparing a graphic in Publisher, the extras are probably unwanted. Thankfully, with an extra click, you can skip the formatting when you paste in Office.
You have a few ways of clearing text formatting. First, once you paste, a small pop-up will appear and give you three options:. Keep Source Formatting will preserve the text as you copied it. (Shortcut: Press CTRL + K, to select this after pasting). Merge Formatting will force the text you’re pasting to match the text around it. (Shortcut: Press CTRL + M, to choose this after pasting).
Keep Text Only will only take the text and give it no other formatting. (Shortcut: Press CTRL+ T, to do this quickly after pasting). When this bubble appears, you can even choose which option to set as default. If you’d like, you can also accomplish this using the Paste Special option under Paste on the left side of the Home ribbon. It’s effectively the same option, though it gains more functionality if you’re pasting more than just text. Try a Dedicated Program The above two solutions require you to manually ensure your text is stripped of its formatting, but, for Windows is a free tool that essentially does the copy-paste-copy in Notepad for you. Grab either the or the download and Were you ever faced with a.rar file and wondered how to open it?
Fortunately, managing ZIP files and other compressed archives is simple with the right tools. Here is what you need to know.
(PureText doesn’t need to be installed). You won’t know it’s working other than a small PT icon Every Windows user has seen the Windows system tray (also known as the notification area) become cluttered over time. We’ve covered disabling distracting desktop notifications in the past, but what if the icons themselves are. Right-clicking the icon will let you open the few program options. By default, the shortcut is Windows + V, which is probably fine if you haven’t on that combination. If you need something different, PureText lets you set it to pretty much anything you want.
The only other options let you automatically paste the text that the program converts (which you obviously want enabled to streamline the process), play a sound upon pasting (this is annoying and you’ll want to shut it off), and run the program at startup. If you’ll be using PureText regularly, this is a good idea; just remember that So your computer has been booting slowly lately?
You probably have too many programs and services trying to start up all at once. Are you wondering how they got there and how to remove them? Utilize Browser Extensions In addition to PureText, which works across Windows, you can install a A list of only the best extensions for Google Chrome, including suggestions from our readers. In either Chrome or Firefox, if you prefer. For Firefox, will do the trick. After installing it, you’ll have a new Copy As Plain Text The context menu that pops up whenever you perform a right-click can help you become more productive.
With the right tool, customizing the shortcuts within it is a breeze. That lets you grab anything in your browser without the formatting. If you prefer keyboard shortcuts, the extension also makes CTRL + Shift + U perform the copy.
A few tweaks can be made, including removing extra space and changing special characters to regular text (such as ® to r). If you want to go all-in, Copy Plain Text 2 can also override the standard copy command completely. Be careful with this, though! Chrome users will want to take advantage of, a counterpart to the Firefox extension. It’s slim and only allows you to copy plain text by right-clicking and choosing the new option; you won’t find any keyboard shorcuts with this one, which may be a deal-breaker. Remember Keyboard Shortcuts Frankly, We all love our browsers, and we all love the extensions that you can install with them. We love browser extensions because they allow us to do what we want our browser to do that.
For this problem, as Chrome and Firefox already include shortcuts for pasting regular text out of the box. In both browsers, simply press CTRL + Shift + V to paste text without the extras, no matter where you copied it from! Elsewhere in Windows, the shortcut CTRL + Space will clear formatting from selected text. It’s not a universal shortcut (it isn’t working in, the program I use for writing), but it will work in Office. What About Mac and Linux?
You can still easily strip the formatting using a different OS. In:.
You can use Shift + Option + Command + V to paste without formatting (or with whatever format the pasted text is placed into). The Chrome shortcut from Windows is the same: Command + Shift + Option + V, and you can install the extensions if you want. Using TextEdit, you can copy and paste text as in the first method outlined above.
You may need to choose Format Make Plain Text ( Command + Shift + T); to keep formatting out by default, go to Preferences and under Format, choose Plain Text. Install a clipboard manager, such as the free, which allows you to paste unstyled text. If you’d like to force pasted text to be unstyled system-wide, head to System Preferences Keyboard Keyboard Shortcuts Application Shortcuts and click the plus sign below to add a shortcut. For the Application box, select All Applications, and in the Menu Title box, type Paste and Match Style. Finally, in the Keyboard Shortcut box, type Command + V and you’ll see the key combination in the box. Click Add, and you’re all set! For:.
In recent versions of Linux, you can use CTRL + Shift + V to paste text without formatting. Like Windows, you can paste into a text editor (try if you need one) to strip the formatting before pasting elsewhere. The above browser extensions will work in Linux as well.
You’re a Pasting Wizard As we’ve seen, it doesn’t really matter whether you copy the text without the formatting or if you wait until pasting it to strip it. Whichever methods work best for you (there’s a lot of them!) will do just fine, and you’ll save time instead of having to manually format everything. If you’re on Windows, the best combo is probably to install PureText and use that universal shortcut whenever you need a plain paste. Barring that, Chrome and Firefox’s shortcut and special pasting in Office on special occasions should mean you’re taken care of. Want to take your copy-pasting even further? Check out Copy and paste is one of the best features we have at our fingertips, especially when combined with keyboard shortcuts. You can’t argue that copying and pasting is one of the most common things we.
For increased functionality. What’s your favorite way to strip out text formatting? Are any of these methods new to you? Paste a comment below and let me know! Image Credit: Explore more about:,.