Few things are more intimidating than a large disorganized pile of notes. Fortunately, there is software that helps you keep your notes organized as you take them or lets you arrange and organize them after the fact. Note taking software is also useful for organizing ideas to narrow down or help find a topic. This is especially true of white boards and mind mapping tools. The software you choose depends upon the material in your notes (statistics, images for PowerPoints, just plain text), your personal style, and whether you are working by yourself or in a small group.
Google Drive allows for text notes and Works Citeds. It
has limited choice of text color and font, and you can not push notes around on a screen. It also has spreadsheet and presentation capabilities and
can handle graphics fairly well. Google Drive's main advantages are
that you may all ready have a GMail password. It is also one of the few note taking packages that allows for
selective collaboration. You can share your notes with your friends without having to let the whole world see them.
In addition to documents, Google Drive also offers Jam Boards which let you arrange your notes in mind map like diagrams.
Evernote is more limited than Google.Docs.
It is purpose-built note taking software. It also makes your notes searchable by any word in the text.
For a full-featured alternative to Google Docs or Evernote, try
Zoho Notebook. Zoho Notebook not only lets you create word processor style documents with a variety of fonts and colors and upload spread sheets and graphics, it also lets you create notes that you can push around on the screen to organize into virtual piles. And yes, you can share your Zoho Notes with your friends and collaborators.
A.nnotate takes a different approach. If you like to write in the margins of books or highlight PDF articles, this is your software. A.Anotate let's you upload a PDF file or capture a web page and then leave virtual sticky notes and highlight marks all over it. A.anotate allows you to selectively share your marked up documents. The free version, however, places a fairly generous limit on the number of documents you may mark up per month.
