Available for all iOS devices, Todoist is a note-taking and organization app that can keep. There are thousands of apps in iTunes Store designed and developed for Mac users to increase their productivity and get things done faster. We make a list of Productivity Apps for Mac which will.
Editor Rating: Good (3.5)
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Pros
Syncs multimedia notes across numerous devices.
Rich with features.
Reliable.
Version history.
Ability to password-protect content.
Collaboration features included.
Free.
Cons
Structure and design could use work.
Tags not customizable.
Notebook access tools slow down productivity.
Bottom Line
Microsoft OneNote is a free note-taking and syncing app that works on a variety of devices, including Macs. It's not the North Star of note-taking apps, but it squarely takes second place.
Microsoft OneNote is a note-taking and syncing program that works across a wide range of devices, for free, with a decent array of features. In terms of its functionality and ease of use, it's the clear number-two choice, second to Evernote. However, recent changes to Evernote, including a stiff price hike, have left many customers bitter and looking for an alternative. Microsoft OneNote is the only other service at the moment that comes close to Evernote, but depending on your needs, close might not be good enough. OneNote is available on mobile devices, Windows and Mac, and the Web. It provides many of the same concepts as Evernote, but in a different structure. It's free, includes heaps of storage space, and carries the familiar interface of other Microsoft apps.
OneNote is pretty good if you've never used any other service before, but if you're switching from Evernote and are used to the Evernote way, the transition is rough. Evernote remains faster, more capable, and quite frankly better, but at a cost that's hard to swallow. Because nothing else can top it, Evernote still holds PCMag's Editors' Choice. Microsoft OneNote is the second best note-taking service available at this time, which will be reason enough for many people to adopt it. Just be aware of its shortcomings before you sink all your notes into it.
This review focuses on the Microsoft OneNote Mac app. For a deeper dive into the service in general, including a more comprehensive price comparison between OneNote and other note-taking services, see PCMag's review of OneNote (Web).
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Price and Plan All the OneNote apps are free to download and install, with no feature restrictions on the free service. It does require a Microsoft account to use, however. A Hotmail, Windows Live, or Outlook.com email address is all you need.
If you have a subscription to Office and use those credentials to sign in, you'll get more storage space. Free users get 5GB of space, whereas Office 365 subscribers get 1TB all told, shared among other Office Online apps.
Office 365 Personal costs $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year. The annual price is the same as Evernote's Premium subscription, and the monthly price is less (Evernote charges $7.99 per month). An Office subscription gives you Office apps plus more storage space, but nothing else in the way of OneNote. An Evernote Premium subscription adds space, note-taking features, live chat support, and more.
A few other note-taking and syncing apps are entirely free, including Google Keep and Zoho Notebook, but they pale in comparison to Evernote and OneNote's capabilities. In terms of storage, Google Keep works similarly to OneNote, using Google Drive the way OneNote uses OneDrive. Google Drive gives everyone 15GB of storage for free. Zoho Notebook offers unlimited storage with a 50MB max file size for any single upload.
Design and Setup OneNote conforms to the general look of other Microsoft Office apps. As mentioned, there are OneNote apps for Windows, Mac, mobile devices (iOS, Android, Windows Phone), as well as a Web app. Here I focus on the Mac app.
The basic structure and terminology used in OneNote is Notebook > Section > Page. For example, I have a notebook called Recipes, with sections for Sweet, Savory, and Cocktail recipes. Within the Cocktails section, I have pages for Negroni, Gin Fizz, and so forth. The nomenclature roughly maps to Evernote's Notebook Stack > Notebook > Note.
The OneNote Web app puts editing tools and other functional buttons at the top of the window, while reserving the right side for previews of pages.
A page is more like a pasteboard than a word processing document. Every piece of content that's added to a page comes in its own field or box. All images that are added are contained in a box pasted to the page, and the same goes for text and other elements. An Evernote note, conversely, is more like a word processing page or email text field, where you can type text freely, but you can also add other page elements or attachments, too. In OneNote, you can resize any box, including boxes with text, or drag and drop boxes to change their position.
Along the top of the window, below the main editing tools, are tabs. These are for sections. Sections help you organize notes within a notebook. I find the visual placement of sections confusing because they are separated from the pages that they comprise. Visually, it looks as if the page or note that you have selected to read or edit at the moment is the entire content of that tab (or section). Evernote's three panel display (which shows left to right a tree-like display of Notebook Stacks and Notebooks, Notes in preview, and the selected note in the main window) makes a whole lot more sense.
To do anything in the OneNote Mac app, you start by choosing a notebook, but only the four most recent notebooks will appear the dropdown list when you go to select one. To find others, you have to hit a plus sign (which makes it seem like you're creating a new notebook, even though you aren't) to find the notebook you want. This structural design absolutely slows down productivity because it takes unnecessarily long to switch between notebooks.
After choosing a notebook, all the pages associated with it appear on the left in a preview list. You can change the view to either show more of a preview, including an image thumbnail, or less.
Features and Performance Microsoft OneNote is well endowed with features, and most of the core ones will be familiar to anyone who has used other Office apps before. Toolbar selections for Home, Insert, View will all seem standard, and you'll easily find all the formatting options and whatnot. Compared with the OneNote Web app, the Mac app is quicker and ever so slightly more refined in its looks.
Into any note, you can insert, images, links, symbols, tables, and more. You can record audio right into a note, too. You can enlarge, shrink, and crop images that appear in notes, although you can't annotate them, as you can with an Evernote Premium account. There's a new Digital Ink feature that lets you draw images and diagrams in OneNote, but it's only available to those who work on a Surface Pro, so Mac users don't get it.
There are some neat things you can do with audio memos. For example, you can place bookmarks throughout any recording. If you type notes while recording audio, the app links them so that later, when you listen to the recording, you can jump to the notes you wrote at different moments. It's a feature that's easy to miss because it requires that you know the feature is hidden in a control-click accessed menu.
If you have a very important or sensitive notes, you can lock the section in which it lives with a password. There's also a button that shows version history, letting you restore an old version of a note. You can share notebooks with collaborators, and you can restrict their access to read-only or edit. But be aware that you can't share a single note with others while restricting the rest of their access to whatever else is in the notebook. Sharing occurs at the notebook level only.
You can drag and drop pages from one section to another, although I wish there were indicators, like icons, to show that the move was in progress and then successful. Other features include the ability to choose the paper you want for your pages, such as blank or grid, as well as a search tool that highlights your keywords when it finds them.
Tags are handled unusually in OneNote. There is a list of pre-made tags that you can add to any note, but you can't change what's in the list or add a custom tag. You can, however, use a hashtag before a word in your note for custom tags, but they're treated differently. Evernote, however, lets you create whatever tags you want, and you can easily sort or filter your notes while including tags in your search criteria.
OneNote has a web clipping tool that I used avidly in testing, and it's decent. The Web clipper is a plugin that copies content from a Web page into your OneNote account with two clicks, rather than doing a cut-and-paste job. Evernote's Web clipper has a few additional options for clipping, and it suggests a notebook intelligently, based on the content, whereas OneNote suggests saving the note to the last used notebook.
OneNote Takes Silver Note-taking and syncing service OneNote isn't short on features, and it gives away a lot for free. It also adds a heck of a lot of space to anyone who has an Office 365 account. It's more advanced than almost all other note-taking and syncing apps on the market, except Evernote.
OneNote is reliable, but still needs work to be great. It has some problems in its structure and design that make it slow to use and inelegant. Tags should be customizable. The Web clipper tool could be more sophisticated. But all in all, considering the other note-taking apps on the market, OneNote is clearly no. 2. Evernote earns gold, and OneNote deserves silver.
If you're dead-set on ditching Evernote, sure, switch to OneNote, although I recommend waiting for transfer tools to improve first. OneNote is the only other app that comes close to Evernote at this time. But it can't beat Evernote yet, and thus Evernote remains PCMag's Editors' Choice for now.
Keynote is a powerful app for building and delivering beautiful presentations. Gorgeous templates and tight integration with other Apple apps make it an Editors' Choice for Mac users.
Productivity Apps For Mac 2016 Download
If you've ever used Apple's Keynote to create a presentation, you won't need to read a recommendation for it. For years, it's been the gold standard of presentation apps for Mac users, and it still is. Its success is partly attributable to tight integration with the Mac ecosystem, giving easy access to iTunes tracks, iPhoto images, and videos. Keynote isn't the only high-scoring presentation app, however. The latest version of Microsoft PowerPoint (8.25 Per User Per Month with Annual Commitment at Microsoft Office 365 for Business)(8.25 Per User Per Month with Annual Commitment at Microsoft Office 365 for Business) provides strong competition, and if you already have PowerPoint, you needn't suffer from Keynote envy. They're both Editors' Choices. You can't go wrong with either, although Keynote has the edge on the Mac.
Price
Apple Keynote is affordable because, for most Mac users, it comes included with the purchase of a laptop or desktop computer (available to anyone who bought a new Mac on or after October 1, 2013). If it's not installed on your machine, you can get it from the App Store at no cost. Mac users with older devices can buy Keynote for a low one-time fee of $19.99.
Note that there is no longer a single suite of productivity apps called iWork, which is what Apple used to call its Microsoft Office competitor. You can, however, buy all the software for one fee, in the form of what Apple calls Bundle for iWork, which includes Keynote, word processing app Pages(Free at Apple.com) and spreadsheet app Numbers($0.00 at Apple.com), for a total of just $19.99. That's one-third what you'd pay for them separately.
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Additionally, there's a version of Keynote on iCloud.com that's free to use by anyone who has an iCloud account and an Internet connection.
PowerPoint, the biggest name in the presentation space, costs $69.99 per year as one component of a Personal subscription to Microsoft Office . For that price, you get much more than just PowerPoint, though. You also get Word, Excel, Outlook, Publisher, and Access. That's six apps for one price, or a little less than $12 per app per year. If you don't use all those apps, however, and only need PowerPoint, then you're still paying $70 per year just for PowerPoint. If you want to buy the software outright, you can also get PowerPoint 2016 for Mac for a one-time fee of $109.99.
Prezi, which is an Editors' Choice for nontraditional presentation apps, costs more than either Keynote or PowerPoint: $59.04 per year (yes, it's an odd price) for its Enjoy plan, $159 per year for Prezi Pro (which adds unlimited storage, access to presentations on any device, offline access, premium support, and image-editing tools), and $240 per year for Pro Plus (which adds advanced training). Monthly plans run $10, $20, and $30, respectively. Given that Keynote costs either nothing or a one-time fee of $19.99, that $30 monthly fee for Prezi Pro Plus might seem hard to swallow.
Productivity Apps For Macbook
PowToon is another unusual presentation app. It helps you create animations instead of typical slideshow presentations, but it comes at a high price as well. A PowToon Pro account costs $228 per year or a very steep monthly price of $89. A Business plan starts at $708 per year or $197 per month for one user; organizations looking to add multiple seats can contact PowToon for a price quote. There is a free version of PowToon, but any presentations you make are watermarked with a logo and contain an advertisement for PowToon at the end. That's reason enough not to use the free version for anything other than getting a basic feel for it.
If you want a truly free presentation tool that works on both Mac and Windows, Google Slides is your best bet. Its collaboration features are stronger than Keynote's (which are still in beta). Google Slides has an option for presenters to generate on demand a URL at which audience members can submit questions while watching a presentation. The presenter gets the questions in real time. It's one of the more interactive features we've seen in any presentation app.
Keynote's Interface
If you've used Apple Pages or Numbers, Keynote will seem instantly familiar. The app's major convenience is its three-panel interface, with a thumbnail panel at the left, large editing panel in the middle, and formatting options at the right. As in the other former iWorks apps, the formatting panel works like a spacious version of an old-style inspector window. You use a toolbar to switch the panel among controls over layout, animations, and the whole presentation. The panel itself displays a different set of controls depending on the kind of visual element you've selected in the editing window. Easy-to-use orange guidelines appear when you resize or move visual elements, complete with pop-up displays of width and height in pixels.
Apple's transitions include all the dazzling effects you expect and more. For example, popping flashbulbs can type your text, and the genuinely impressive Magic Move gives the illusion of one text element (text or picture) moving between one slide and another as the next slide appears. Keynote makes it easy to create transitions for some or all the rows, columns, and cells in a table, a feat that's difficult in PowerPoint. Fancy transitions inevitably tempt you to use too much of a good thing, however, and Keynote's transitions are more tempting than most.
Graphics
Keynote's built-in graphic tools include Instant Alpha (which lets you click a color to make it transparent) easily drawn masks, and sliders that let you choose a Poster Frame thumbnail for a video. You can optimize inserted videos for iOS (in 720p format) or leave them in their original form for macOS, and you can set a preference that automatically optimizes all inserted videos for iOS.
PowerPoint, on the other hand, offers Mac users the ability to adjust brightness and contrast in videos inside PowerPoint itself, while Keynote users will have to open iMovie or another video editor to make the same adjustments. PowerPoint also includes a unique and innovative interface for moving slide elements backward or forward by displaying them in a three-dimensional side view in which it's easy to select and manipulate individual elements.
Everything that you can create in Numbers or Pages can also go into a Keynote presentation. You can even insert the same unique interactive charts available in Numbers, which let you drag a slider along one axis while the changing data is displayed in animated form in the chart. The only difference is that Keynote displays an interactive chart as an animation—showing how the chart changes when you drag the slider along its axis—rather than letting you actually drag the slider.
Sharing and Collaboration
Not long ago, you typically showed your presentations in a conference room with a projector. Today, you may need to show them on the Web. Both Keynote and PowerPoint can export presentations as video files: QuickTime for Keynote, but the more versatile MP4 for PowerPoint. Keynote can also automatically upload movie versions of its presentations to Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo, and YouTube, or it can upload your presentation to iCloud and instantly create a link that anyone can use to view it.
Keynote has some collaboration capabilities, though they are currently in beta. You can share your presentation with others via Messages, Mail, AirDrop, and other services. You can also simply copy and paste a link to the presentation using whatever app you choose. All the collaborators need iCloud accounts to see and edit the presentation. You can control whether the collaborators can view or edit the presentation, although it's not person-by-person control. Either everyone can edit your presentation or no one can. We're interested to see how these beta features develop.
If you need a tool with fully baked support for collaboration, Google Slides and Prezi are your best choices. In Google Slides, collaborating works the same way it does for any other Google Docs or G Suite app that supports it. When you share a file with others, everyone can see and edit the same file simultaneously. A color-coded cursor appears on screen, showing you exactly who is making the changes as they occur. Slides also offers commenting tools and a chat box to support discussion. The ease of collaborating in Google Slides is one of the service's biggest perks. You don't have to worry about recipients owning a copy of the software or anything other than whether they have a Google account and an Internet connection.
Prezi works similarly. As with Google Slides, you can see who else is in the file and edit the material together in real time. Up to 10 people can collaborate at once, and all you need are their email addresses to invite them.
PowerPoint has some collaboration features, but they're clunkier to use. When you want to collaborate on a file, you first have to save the slideshow to the cloud (such as into your OneDrive or SharePoint space) and then invite people. Your collaborators have to be using PowerPoint 2010 or later, or the latest release of PowerPoint Online for it to work.
PowToon has very limited collaboration capabilities compared with other presentation apps, and what it does offer is only in beta at the moment. Both you and a single collaborator need Business-grade accounts to use it, and collaboration here simply means the ability to make a copy of your presentation and send it to another user so that it shows up in his or her list of videos upon logging into the app. The other person can then work on the file and send it back to you, again by making a copy of the file that will show up in your list of presentations when you log into PowToon. It's a far cry from the real-time collaboration and saved history of changes you get with Prezi and Google Slides.
A Key Tool for Mac Users
Keynote doesn't do everything PowerPoint can, but it does more of what you need to create elegant and eye-catching presentations, thanks to top-notch transitions, effects, and animations. It's tightly integrated with macOS and its associated apps and has an excellent, highly usable interface. It won't fundamentally change the way you think about presenting data—for that, try Prezi. Nor is it a killer collaboration tool like Google Slides, though its beta features look promising. PowerPoint is the other clear frontrunner for presentation software, and if you're accustomed to it, you'll probably want to stick with it whether you use a Windows or Mac computer. But Keynote is the clear first choice for Mac users, and the fact that it comes free with every new Mac makes it an even more obvious Editors' Choice for presentation apps on the Mac.