Given their mobility, most of us have probably tried to take notes in meetings/lectures/lessons with a notebook. The trouble is that Word is not particularly good at recording anything else than a stream of consciousness in these situations. Here’s some of the variations I’ve tried.

Word
As above, Word/Open Office Writer/insert word processor here, are good at recording notes. It can be hard to quickly insert headings or move around the document quickly. Outline mode is helpful for keeping notes organised.

Microsoft OneNote

I’ve been enthusiastic about this program and it gave good service the last time I took notes with it. There’s still the problem of needing to rearrange text boxes with the mouse, but this didn’t seem to be as much of a problem as I was expecting. OneNote also has the excellent idea of being able to record audio and remember when notes were taken on the track. So I was very disappointed that my notebook didn’t have a built in microphone.

Mind mapping

Not everybody’s cup of tea but once you’ve learnt the keyboard shortcuts mind mapping software like Mindmanager or Freemind (the latter is open source and free) can be very effective at taking notes. I also found that the visual method of laying out the notes helped me to remember what had been said.

Notalon

I just found this app last week, and it does very well. And has the bargain price of nothing. It’s based on the Cornell note taking system. Section headings are listed on the left and the larger right hand side of the screen is used to write the bulk of the notes. Sadly it will only export the notes as a PDF rather than an editable format like RTF, DOC or HTML, but you can at least copy and paste out of the software if you went to.