Add handwritten text to notes. From any opened note in edit mode, tap the pen button or tap the paperclip, then select Handwriting. Handwriting tools appear at the top of the screen. Tap the pen to start sketching notes with your finger or stylus. Tap the checkmark to save.
- The best way to ensure that handwriting, specifically, is found and indexed is to follow these guidelines: Images containing handwriting should be added to Evernote as JPG images, not PDFs. PDF files are the preferred format for typewritten documents or scanned pages containing typewritten text. Handwriting is not indexed in PDF files.
- Evernote does a great job at recognizing handwriting, but only if you have your notes in the right format. This video shows you.
In previous post, we compare Notion to Evernote and the web clipper and document scanner features make Evernote standout. Then, how about making a comparison between Evernote and OneNote? In this Evernote vs OneNote post, we compare these two popular note-taking apps in note taking, web clipping, team work, storage and pricing to see which one of them will improve your productivity.
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Contents
Evernote vs OneNote: Overview
Evernote vs OneNote: Popularity Comparison
Evernote vs OneNote: Note Taking
The whole point of a note-taking app is simplicity and organization. Without it, you’re better off handwriting all your notes in a book!
OneNote and Evernote are available for all the major desktop and mobile OSes, they can each sync your notes to all of your devices and the web, and both promise to be the only note-taking app you need.
Microsoft OneNote features the traditional Microsoft Office Ribbon that provides you with many features to create, edit, view, and organize notes. While creating notes, you can add text, images, tables, videos, audio files, spreadsheets, links, and more to your notes. This helps you create content-rich notes and keep all media associated with them in one place.
Evernote includes most of the same note-creation features, like drawing and editing tools, but doesn’t provide some OneNote features like reviewing other users’ edits. Also, unless you tag your notes, they will keep piling up in an unorganized manner, and it will be difficult to search for them later.
Winner: OneNote
Evernote vs OneNote: Web Clipping
Different from Notion, both Evernote and OneNote have a web clipper.
OneNote offers a browser add-on called the OneNote Web Clipper for Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox. Note that you need to sign in to the extension with a Microsoft account to use it. Using this clipper, you can grab a screenshot of a webpage or other content.
Evernote’s web-clipping tool is exemplary. The tool runs as a browser add-on for Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Safari, and Opera.
Winner: Evernote
Evernote vs OneNote: OCR
Evernote and OneNote have optical character recognition, meaning they can read text contained in images or other static documents, such as PDFs. When it comes down to leveraging OCR, you can do more with OneNote than with Evernote.
OneNote makes all the text in images searchable, and it lets you extract the text from images and other supported files so that you can paste it elsewhere and edit it.
Evernote doesn’t have the ability to extract text from images, but it does search the text found in uploaded images, PDFs, and Office documents.
Winner: OneNote
Evernote vs OneNote: Team Work
Do you have a team to delegate with on a project? we’ll take a look at sharing notes with others and co-editing options.
Evernote has a handful of features that support collaboration. Among them, you can share any notebook by right-clicking on it and selecting “share notebook.” Input the email addresses of those with whom you want to share your notebook and select the type of access permissions you want to grant them: view, edit or edit and invite. Plus, you can generate note links, which will let anybody view a note in a browser. Or if you prefer, you can just email a note to someone straight from within the app. Finally, Evernote has a handy chat feature that can be used to discuss notes.
Handwriting In Evernote
Like Evernote, you can share any notebook in OneNote by clicking the share icon near the top-right side of the app, then inputting the email addresses of those with whom you want to share. View or edit permissions can be granted. However, there’s no chat option like you get with Evernote and no option to comment on notes within the app.
Winner: Evernote
Evernote vs OneNote: Storage and Pricing
Last but not least, is the pricing difference between them.
The free version of OneNote offers up to 5 GB of cloud storage, which is across all the software of each OneDrive account. This 5gb will be shared across the online Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and every other software solution including OneNote of course. After that, you will have to subscribe to the pro plan. Microsoft’s basic plan, which offers 50GB of OneDrive storage, costs just $1.99 per month or $23.88 annually. For $6.99 per month, or $69.99 per year, you get 1,000GB of storage and access to Office 365 Personal edition.
The basic version of Evernote is free, but it limits you to adding 60MB of new notes a month, lets you sync between only two devices, and doesn’t include advanced features. Evernote has three paid plans, Basic, Premium ($7.99), and Business ($14.99). Advanced features that help you convert your notes to presentations, search for content in inserted attachments or PDF files in notes, and more are available in the Evernote Premium and Evernote Business versions. Premium accounts get 10GB per month. Business accounts get 20GB per month plus an additional 2GB per person per month.
Winner: OneNote
Evernote vs OneNote: Which Improves Your Productivity Better
Clearly, it is not easy to choose one in Evernote Vs OneNote. They are very good and have benefits of their own that the other one does not provide.
If you’re primarily looking for a tool that lets you easily capture, organize and find content from the web, you’ll want Evernote, because its tools for doing that are exemplary. If you instead want to create notes from scratch and have them in well-organized notebooks, or if you’re a heavy Office 365 user, OneNote is the way to go.
So many of you are harnessing the organizing and storage power of Evernote for family history research (and probably everything else you know!). Every time I teach on Evernote, a round of excited follow-up questions follows. Here are two great questions from Karen:
Q: The handwriting app on my phone is way cool, yet Evernote doesn’t seem to recognize any of the words. I thought it would apply OCR to the handwriting. Is that just a premium feature?
Evernote Handwriting Recognition
A: The key to handwriting OCR is to print clearly. OCR can not read cursive. Also, if you created your handwritten note and then immediately tried to search for a keyword, (and the note was printed clearly) it may not have found it because you searched before it had a chance to sync through the cloud and apply OCR. If you’re in a hurry, click the SYNC button in Evernote. Also, Premium accounts sync and apply OCR faster than free ones.
Q: My husband has a single note file that he has been putting all his daily notes in for years – currently about 14mb. Once he has uploaded that file, then when he makes additional notes to it each day, will he be “charged” for the entire file being saved again or just the incremental portion?
A: No he won’t be using 14 mb of upload each time he saves it. The key here is “upload.” You are charged uploading for the first time you upload the item to Evernote. I believe that if he adds a paragraph that is 1kb of text to the note the next day, he will only have 1kb deducted from his monthly upload.
One word of caution, if he has a desire to some day publish a book or some other project with his daily notes, I wouldn’t recommend Evernote. As you saw, the export file types are limited, and it does not export directly to Word or .txt. However, if he just wants it for his one record keeping, I think Evernote is a great solution.
Resources
Evernote for Genealogists quick reference guide (for both Mac and Windows users: purchase the one that goes with your computer’s operating system, not your mobile device
Genealogy Gems Premium members can also access exclusive full-length videos on how to use Evernote for family history, like:
Evernote Handwriting Windows
- How the Genealogist can Remember Everything with Evernote (Beginner);
- How to Organize Your Research with Evernote(Intermediate);
- Making Evernote Effortless(Intermediate)
- Collaborative Genealogy with Evernote (Intermediate);
- Using Evernote to Create a Research Plan (Advanced).