As boring as the title suggests – other than pen and paper and camera, what do people use to digitize their notes? It’d be useful to be able to archive and more easily retrieve written notes from meetings, musings etc but I can only find one or two solutions in the form of stylus-and-tablet or “smartpen”-and-special-paper.

What experience do people have of these or any other methods that I’m not aware of?

I’ve used a Logitech IO previous and while it was decent it was a poor pen and a clunky interface.

(I understand that some people don’t want to digitize everything and are happy with pen and paper. That’s fine, but as I’m asking a specific question on this, a comment of “Why the bloody hell would you need to use anything other than a biro and a scrap of paper” isn’t really what I’m after…)

Type them in the first place if I want an electronic searchable record. All in a single outliner app which syncs from phone/ipad to web page if I want. As a result I have a somewhat useful record of who I met when and what was said going back years. My notes are often less useful than I had expected 😉

Alternative for a regular monthly meeting is just to take a quick scan of a sheet of notes, these are stored together in one multi-page file and easy to look back though on my phone (again synced to laptop etc, this time through dropbox).

Nothing very whizzy but it works for me.

Learn to touch-type?

I used to take handwritten notes in an A5 notebook then type up into MS Note, It takes longer but it helped to clarify what I’d scribbled.

Otherwise, Samsung Note phoes & tablets are pretty effective.

MS OneNote was recommended on here, was good but I didn’t stick with it.

Still just use the Notes on my iPhone.

My NAS has got a Notes app, which is good cos I can use that anywhere and the notes are available on phone/pc/laptop. I’ve installed, but not got around to switching from the simple iphone one yet.

OneNote – have a work notebook with a section per customer/project (then an archive notebook I can push finished stuff into), and a personal one with recipies/DIY plans/bike geometry charts/shopping lists and the like in.

Good pen support if you do want to write/draw but 99% of mine is typed text and screengrabs. Mobile app support is good for quickly looking things up or noting things down, easy to stick a photo from phone camera straight into a note too (and now Office Lens enabled, so things like whiteboards can be flattened even if you take the pic off-axis).

Mostly it’s for getting things out of my head into a searchable format for later. While some people use it for task management (you can use various tags for follow-up, etc), I tend to do that in Trello.

Oxford Black n’ Red notebooks have digitizable (new word!) icons in the corners, which work with a smartphone app (scribzee) and then integrates with Evernote for more functionality. Had a quick look at it, interesting hybrid of handwritten and tech function.

I really need to get better at organising my notes and work process.

Google Keep – i swipe type on google keyboard, add images etc.

All then on phone or on keep.google.com

Notability app on iPad with Apple pencil. Can also type, import and scribble on pdf etc.

What a time to be alive!!

Oh I also forgot I use Google lens which digitises handouts etc straight into google keep also.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.ar.lens&hl=en

https://www.google.com/keep/

Iphone voicememo.

Notability app on iPad with Apple pencil. Can also type, import and scribble on pdf etc.

What a time to be alive!!

Works on my iPad Pro.

Yep, +1 for iPad Pro and Notability.

It’s one of those very rare occasions where you’ve bought tech to do a thing, and then kept using it rather than reverting to what ever you did before. It really is better than pencil and notebook for my purposes at work – scribbling/sketching, writing notes and recording.

And everything is kept, is sortable, searchable, and shareable. Being able to ping out PDFs of a sketch, and also being able to plug the thing in to a big telly to do ‘co-design’ sessions, is all really good.

Is a bit pricey though.

Edit, it’s worth getting the desktop version of the app too, then whatever you have on your ipad is also available on your big screen, for editing, cutting/pasting into other documents etc.

Evernote. Syncs to all my electronic devises, easy to use and search.

Hire a note taker / scribe or learn to touch type. I’ve done it before for engineering meetings, being able to touch type and filter out what was being said so that by the time the discussion was over I’d have a summary up on the projector and everyone could agree it there and then rather than argue with whoever was posting the minutes up weeks later and just posts their version of events.

Never used any text recognition software that actually works with my handwriting, it took as long to edit the garbage that came out as it would just to type the whole thing.

Thanks for the replies.

I suspected there’d be Apple Pencil comments, which I’m sort of interested in, but also in the Wacom offerings, Windows Ink and the limited amount of smartpens (Neo, Livescribe, Equil  are the main ones I’ve seen).

I can and do touch type, but find it distracting in meetings and it’s often inappropriate if there aren’t dozens of you in the room.

Most of my notes are text, and automatically converting handwriting appeals, which I already use with 7Notes on my phone (and it works really well without a stylus), but do sometimes screengrab. I rarely draw or sketch things (for work anyway).

By the sounds of it I’m not fully exploiting my existing use of OneNote.

If you’re using Onenote (and you should be), get Onetastic as well. It adds in the little bits of functionality that Onenote missed, such as rotating printouts. T’was developed by the ON team I believe.

Microsoft OneNote and Office Lens used on a Lenovo Yoga and Samsung S6 is working for me. I’ve managed to go totally paperless at work now, which is an achievement as I was a heathen before 🙂

tthew

…Oxford Black n’ Red notebooks have digitizable (new word!) icons in the corners, which work with a smartphone app (scribzee) and then integrates with Evernote for more functionality….

I got sucked in by that. Saw the notebooks and read the blurb. Bingo! A great way to get rid of all the notebooks etc that hang around.

Nup, for a start it wants to store your stuff on their cloud server. No thanks, I don’t want my notes somewhere where the service can be turned off and everything lost.

Then there’s the problem of actually creating an account. A very flaky process, and it looks like more than a few have lost everything.

Great idea, crap implementation.

(Go to Scribzee app and read ALL the reviews if you are thinking of doing it)