Steve: Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I’m somewhat overwhelmed by the response that we got to our video that we posted just
yesterday on comparing Evernote to One Note, the 5 Key Differences.
There are about 166 comments already on this video.
Now you folks have watched the video, you’re very passionate about both Evernote and One
Note, you’ve pointed out lots of different things that I might have missed and different
ways of looking at the comparison between One Note and Evernote.
So today, I thought we might visit your comments of One Note versus Evernote on Ask DottoTech.
Ask DottoTech is a show where you ask questions and I answer them and my goodness you have
asked a lot of questions and actually made a lot of great points about the comparison
that I created between Evernote and One Note, which we posted just a little bit over a day
ago.
Now in this video, if you don’t have time to watch it, it’s about 30 minutes long
so it’s a little long for the DottoTech channel, but we looked at five key areas or
five key differences between One Note and Evernote – research and retention, composition
and editing, mobility organization, and recall.
And I basically rated the applications and talked about the strengths of the applications
and how they worked in each of these areas.
For example in research and retention, Evernote came out ahead because the Evernote Web Clipper
is far more sophisticated than the One Note Web Clipper.
In composition and editing, on the other hand, One Note came out ahead because it’s a joy
to use as a notebook.
You have far more flexibility as far as formatting, laying out your page, etc. in One Note than
you do in Evernote.
In mobility, the Evernote mobility app is more robust, but it’s really nice taking
notes, especially on tablets and stuff in One Note.
In organization, there’s a philosophical difference between the two.
Evernote is completely based on search whereas One Note is much more of a notebook metaphor
with visual and hierarchical queues being far more important.
And then as far as recall, hands down that’s where Evernote is the strongest because Evernote
search just rocks.
Now I pointed out all of these different aspects in the video and then you’ve come back and
you’ve pointed out places that I made some mistakes but also different ways of looking
at the apps and suggestions of things that the different ways that the apps work.
So I want to share some of those comments with you today on Ask DottoTech.
And let’s get start right here with a comment from Don White who says as many of you pointed
out, “Great video.”
Thanks!
“By the way, One Note does an awesome job at OCR for handwritten notes and graphics,
making them searchable.
Your video seems to imply otherwise.
Again though, thanks for great information.”
Don is right.
Many of you pointed out that when I was talking about one of the strengths of Evernote, one
of the things I appreciate in Evernote is the fact that anytime I take a picture of
anything, it looks through that picture to try and find text that it can convert into
searchable text.
One Note does the same thing.
So if you take a picture of a handwritten note, if you take a picture of a whiteboard,
if you take a picture of a magazine or a newspaper article, it’s going to convert that into
searchable texts so that you can later on search on it as you’re going through your
search.
It doesn’t change the fact that Evernote is still a stronger search tool because of
the way tagging works for context-related search in Evernote, but it is an error that
I’ve made and makes One Note that much more appealing because it does go through all of
your images and make any text within those images searchable.
So thanks to Don and many of the rest of you who pointed out that error or that omission
that I did not mention that One Note also has that feature.
In a related area, both Eetu and Leonardo and many others of you pointed out that I
missed talking about an application called Office Lens, which allows you to take pictures
to use the One Note camera far more effectively.
Now one of the things that I pointed out is the Evernote camera is more robust in the
mobile app than is the One Note camera, and so you all pointed out that you don’t use
the One Note camera when you’re taking images but you use an application from Microsoft
called Office Lens that works as a nice scanner app on your phone, allowing you to scan in
documents, whiteboards, etc. and it syncs and links seamlessly with One Note.
That was again an omission on my part.
But I did not talk about add-on apps.
I will give myself kind a little of a pass there because for example in the Evernote
world I use Scannable even more than I use the Evernote camera itself.
So there are add-on cameras or camera apps, imaging apps for both of the environments,
Office Lens in the Microsoft environment and Scannable in the Evernote environment and
they both make the application that much more robust as far as capturing images and then
using those images.
Of course, as we’re talking about, that can be then converted into searchable content.
So thank you, Leonardo.
Thank you, Eetu.
I appreciate you guys and many others pointing out that Office Lens is an option within the
Evernote or excuse me, within the One Note world.
Now let’s move on this one here, which is from—I love this—Kendawg McAwesome.
What a fantastic moniker!
Well Kendawg points out that he spends a fair bit of time talking about how he uses One
Note, but he says at the end, “I was disappointed you didn’t mention One Note’s ability
to parse audio and video with speech-to-text and make the text searchable.”
And I went holy cow, that is awesome!
How did I miss that?
Well how I missed that it turns out, and it is an awesome feature, how it missed that
is it’s not a universal feature that’s built into One Note.
It is a Windows-only feature that you get in Windows 8 or Windows 10 where you have
to integrate it with the Windows operating system in its own text-to-speech converter.
Here I found a little document here which we will include in the notes beneath here
where if you are in the Windows environment, how you can incorporate the ability to record
something in One Note and have that recording then converted into a text document.
And there’s a little process that you have to go through.
It does indeed seem awesome but it is a Windows-only feature, not available across platforms so
not available in the mobility space or in the iOS or Mac space at this point.
So thank you very much for that, Kendawg McAwesome.
I did miss it but that’s not quite as disappointing when you realize that it is not for the entire
world.
The next comment that we have is from Scott Rixon who said, “Unless I’m missing something,
sharing is not the same” because I basically said that sharing is pretty much equal between
the two applications.
Says Scott, “You can only share One Note at the notebook level.
Evernote is great at sharing at just a single note level.
I’m using both apps for different things.”
But at any rate, Scott points out that One Notes sharing is only at notebook level and
not at the more granular section nor note, individual note level whereas at Evernote
we can take any individual note and we can share it, which is the way that I use it to
deliver my courses, for example.
A little bit of research and Scott is 100% correct.
The One Note community has been asking Microsoft for a long time to rectify this situation
where you can only share notes in One Note at the notebook level.
You have to share an entire notebook.
So if you want to share a single page note, you have to make that a notebook of its own
in the One Note world.
So not quite as flexible as far as sharing, not quite as full-featured as sharing as Evernote.
Thank you to Scott for pointing that out.
Now Jaroslaw says that I definitely missed a handwriting feature implemented in Evernote.
Evernote implemented the Penultimate on the whole, which is an app that they have had.
You just tap on the new text and note button and then down between the gallery and voice
memos you find hand notes.
Go ahead and do it.
Let’s do it.
Okay, Jaroslaw.
I am going to do it right now.
So let’s go into Evernote on my iOS device, create a new text note and lookie, lookie,
lookie.
Right there is the pen tool where if I tap on it, I do have the ability, as he says,
to be able to mark-up and to be able to draw and to be able to work with my finger with
a pen, which is actually pretty darn slick.
I’m still not going to give Evernote the edge over OneNote in this area because this
graphic that I created is in-line.
I can’t position it anywhere on the page as I can in One Note.
But still, I do have the ability to either use my finger or a stylus at this point, and
be able to take notes, and be able to jot down notes in a very similar to the way that
we do it within One Note.
So thank you for pointing that out.
I was not aware of that feature.
I never used it before and I’m glad that you shared it with me.
And finally from Dale Holden, we have a wonderful note that he is a heavy duty user of One Note
and he points out that there are some great add-ons that I did not talk about.
He said there’s a site called Onetastic that has macros and this got me a little bit
intrigued.
Now because One Note is part of the Microsoft ecosystem, a lot of the Office-related tools
are going to be able to be applied within One Note.
It’s got a very nice—we never did talk about the integration it has with Office 365
and the strength of that integration.
That’s balanced out by the kind of universal acceptance that Evernote has within that productivity
community of hooks into Evernote from other applications.
But if you do live in the Microsoft ecosystem, One Note is a joy because of how it integrates
with the rest of the Office ecosystem.
And a part of that is these different macros and these different capabilities that we find
at Onetastic that allow you to add all sorts of calendar links and other sorts of additional
functionality where they’ve pre-written all of these macros that you can apply within
One Note.
So if you become a One Note power user, gaining access to these macros can really give you
some nice additional work flow and features that we haven’t even really touched on as
we reviewed the different applications.
So there’s a quick kind of overview of the response that you’ve been giving us as far
as One Note versus Evernote.
I encourage you to keep on commenting.
Keep letting us know exactly how you use it.
If you have time, read through the comments in YouTube because there are lots of great
narratives that people have shared of different ways that they approach different challenges
using the two applications.
Everybody from authors to teachers, they all talk about how they use the different tools
and how they work for them.
It’s turned into quite an eye-opening experience.
Now there are three ways for you to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
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Till next time, I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!