I’m one of the many disaffected Evernote users who’ve come back to Microsoft OneNote. While I used it on Windows back in its early days. I got away from it when I went over to the Mac as my primary personal machine.

Here are some of my recent thoughts about Microsoft OneNote for Mac:

OneNote for notetaking

I’m a dyslexic technical writer, which means my handwritten notetaking can be a disaster. Keeping notes electronically makes notetaking and retrieval much easier for me. OneNote for Mac gives me a powerful organizational tool for my notes I had been seeking for years. While I feel I’m changing my attitude about how I use OneNote notebooks.

So far, I’ve had little use for the drawing features the app provides because I’m not much of a doodler. Also, now I use my iPhone camera to take pictures of whiteboard scribblings.

I’ve already migrated my Evernote notes over to OneNote but must confess I don’t access them much at all. It’s because the migration tool I used spread the notes over many OneNote notebooks that the process created.  So I guess I was hoping all the notes would go into one notebook but that wasn’t so.

One disappointment for me with OneNote for Mac is that it lacks Microsoft Word integration like its Windows sibling has with Word. I’ve had luck at work using this integration to track notes and research to take into meetings about the document I’m authoring.

I’m also disappointed with how Microsoft is treating OneNote on Windows as of the Office 2019 launch. It’s only natural that the Mac version will inevitably fall by the wayside.

Microsoft made a lot of the right moves with its iOS apps, and the OneNote app is a testimony to that. The interface is clean. Also, the app’s performance is zippy (at least on my devices). I like to take notes using OneNote on my iPad Pro using a keyboard.

Microsoft OneNote on iOS

Though I’m yet to become a frequent user of OneNote tags (at least yet), I’ll have ready access to them when I’m working on my iPad.

OneNote for iOS has an Apple Watch app. I haven’t gotten a lot of use out of it but it’s there for those of you who want it.

Final thoughts

Microsoft OneNote is perhaps the best productivity application that Microsoft produces. It also seems to be the least known productivity application they produce. I’d like to see more parity between the Windows and Mac versions of OneNote but I just don’t see that happening.