Have you Evernote ?
Over the past months I have tried to take more notes electronically not only to reduce my paper consumption but also to organize them centrally. For the past 3 years, I have been a devoted user of Microsoft Office OneNote and I am really happy with the way it helps me organizing my notes (private and professional) in different notebooks using different categories. But even if OneNote 2007 is still the best Notetaking system I have come across, the fact that I am limited to one computer to take notes is really not convenient.
How many times was I with my tablet PC (without OneNote) and wanted to take note of an important quote or sentence found on a web site, my workaround was then to send an email to myself with the notes and then going back to my laptop where Onenote was installed in order to copy paste the notes in question.
Then comes my iPhone (my best buy in 2008) where I can take voice notes and written notes anytime anywhere but the problem that occurred to me was again that I could not centralise and tag all this information in one unique application.
After some research and recommendations, I have finally selected Evernote for my private notes. Evernote enables you to capture information on different platforms and makes it available at any time anywhere. It actually means that I can start a list (or a note) during my breakfast from the Evernote client application, complete this list with a voice note through my iPhone (Evernote for iPhone) in the car and review it during my lunch time at work (Evernote Web site).
If this list is for example a shopping list, all the modifications you have made (offline or online) are synchronised to your iPhone or to your Mobile Phone (they also have a version for mobile phones). Just remember how many times you have been in a shop and all you could remember was that your shopping list was lying on the kitchen table :).
Of course, I do not only use Evernote for my shopping list but my main usage is to centralise my ideas and the notes I take during my researches. Since I have a broad scope of research, the tagging system enables me to categorise my notes (already divided in different notebooks). The Evernote bookmarklet directly clips info from a web site into one of your notebooks. I hope that one day, they will enable me to share my notes in a collaborative way but this was not part of my selection criteria ( I have other tools for that purpose).
For my professional notes (limited to one computer), Microsoft Office OneNote remains my favorite tool but I took the step to Evernote for my private researches and notes and I invite you to discover Evernote and its benefits on the following Web site : http://www.evernote.com/
Be Xin Fu 
2 Responses to “Have you Evernote ?”
Dont forget you can also take a photo using your iPhone of a note, a white board, a yellow sticky or business card sync it and evernote will read the words and make them searchable for you. great article
I have discovered OneNote about a year ago, when I was working on a new web developing project.
The project was demanding for research and collecting information from many resources.
OneNote was the perfect solution for us.
Today we use only OneNote for our web developing projects and research.
Thank you for the interesting post.
Happy to learn new things every day.
Amit