is a reviews editor who manages how-tos and various projects. She’s worked as an editor and writer (and occasional sci-fi author) for more years than she cares to admit to. She can be found on Threads as @barbarask.
These days, we are all dealing with huge amounts of information, from meeting notes to social media, to photos and videos, to whatever else we’ve collected — and we are all trying to find some way to store it, organize it, and find it when we need it.
If you want to get really basic, you can use a spreadsheet or create a simple set of word-processing documents. Otherwise, you can try what is somewhat inaccurately described as a note-taking app. These apps, at their simplest, store your notes and other thoughts and, at their more complex, are capable of manipulating any and all content you want to drop into them.
One of the most well-known has been Evernote, which has gone through quite a few changes over the years, both financially and in its feature set. I’ve been using it for my personal notes for years, and while I feel that it’s become way too overblown (and too expensive), I haven’t been able to motivate myself to pull my decade of data out of there. At this point, though, I’m not sure I’d recommend it to a new user — especially now that it’s limiting the features of its free version even more than it used to.
However, there are a lot of others out there now with a wide range of options, from just plain notes to applications that can do almost anything as long as you have the time and an inclination to learn. I’ve looked at a bunch, and these are some that looked most promising, from the most simple to the most complex.
In the end, though, the app you use will largely depend on your personal needs. Here are more details on our top picks in this category.
Keep is a simple but useful note-taking app.
Google Keep started out as a fairly simple note-taking app, and while it has added a few features since it began, it’s still a good, straightforward way to record your thoughts. Because it is so interconnected with other Google apps (for example, you can access it directly from Google Calendar, and you can convert a Keep note to a Google Doc), it works especially well if you’re invested in the Google ecosystem.
Keep isn’t quite as sparse as it used to be: you can create new notes with instant lists, drawings, or images; you can also add collaborators and a variety of backgrounds. In addition, there have been some interesting upgrades recently that have been promised, such as text formatting (although, as of this writing, they were only available for Android). Meanwhile, being Google, the search ain’t bad.
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