


Essentially, OneNote is a different graphical interface for Word, designed to expose more organizational features. You can still include images, graphs and PDFs in your notebooks, but that function isn’t as integrated as Evernote. It’s heavily optimized towards typing notes, rather than collecting information from a wide variety of sources. It features many more formatting options that Evernote, but the design concept is a little different. If you’ve already got Office for Mac, OneNote is included in your subscription. If you don’t love Evernote, OneNote is an absolutely great alternative. If you have a few extra dollars, it’s well worth the fee. You can sync between two devices for free (Mac and iPhone, for example) or pay a few bucks a month to sync to unlimited devices. This feature alone is a godsend when you’re doing a ton of digital research, and it far surpasses the utility of Pocket or another read-it-later service. Using the Web Clipper extension, you can grab content from JSTOR, Wikipedia, Google Scholar and more, then annotate your clips in Evernote. Text styling isn’t as expressive as it could be, but the use case is more about collecting and organizing content from a ton of different places. It offers the most reliable sync, PDF annotation, and support for a wide range of document types. It’s accessible, flexible and versatile, with powerful organizational options and deep third-party support. It should be no surprise that it’s included in this list. There’s a ton of note-taking apps for college students out there, but Evernote is by far the best. Here are the contenders for the best note-taking apps for college students on the Mac.

While Apple’s Notes is okay for quick lists or doodles, if you’ve got a Pencil, it’s not powerful enough to organize lecture notes. Once you’ve settled on taking notes digitally, you’ll need to find the best app. Most of us type faster than we write (or think, in some cases) so you can stay up to speed easily.

If you want to keep up, you can either learn shorthand or keep digital notes. And depending on your professors’ teaching style, you may need to take rapid-fire notes from lectured material. Taking notes effectively is a crucial part of succeeding in college. If you don’t want to succumb to stress, you’ll need some apps to help keep things organized. Despite (or perhaps because of) excessive warnings about how “different” college will be from educators and parents, new college students are often overwhelmed by the new expectations. New places, new friends and new beginnings come with new challenges.
