Free MS OneNote Alternative?

Any free alternative to microsoft office OneNote? I will like to have one with nice colors like MS OneNote, i really like its colors!

 

EverNote
http://www.evernote.com/en

I don't know about the colors though.

 

We have a good deal of discussion on our Tablet site about OneNote and the alternatives.

 

OneNote is pretty cheap... and it's worth every penny.

 

Thanks all. I have OneNote already on my notebook. But I will jsut try EverNote to compare if I need to use it on another PC.

 

Can someone explain to me how these programs are more helpful for taking notes than word processing? Does it draw diagrams/pictures easily?

Because I've been taking notes for a while now simply thru Openoffice / MS Office and I always just write down course#/date. Then save the file accordingly to class into respective folders. The only thing that is somewhat hard to do is drawing quick diagrams in Fireworks. Do these programs do such things easier ?

 

I used to do what you do, iOsiris. OneNote is great because you can quickly reference your notes from another day/class, you can mark things as to-do (hw) or important (prof says "this WILL be on the test"). One thing I never did when I was taking notes in Word was organize my notes by topic, they were always organized by date. Now I will group all my notes on one topic in one tab. For example, in my AI class I have tabs like "A* Pathfinding" "Lookup Tables", etc. I still prefer to use MSPaint for diagrams.

 

onenote is great because it can function like a word processor, post-it note style application (just click on the icon in the systray and it launches a new blank note), brainstorming tool (its easy to drag blocks of text around) and all your notes are in one place sectioned off with tabs.

it's quickly replacing word as my choice of a text editor.

 

OneNote sounds pretty good, I do most of those things manually. It probably takes me a little longer to do, but my way does work pretty good cause what I do is I go through the notes once at the end of the day thus review it and write a brief summary at the top of the file (point form). My file name consists of YEAR-MM-DD-Course#-Class Notes (Meta tags, meta tags).doc . OneNote indeed sounds useful, but the only thing that keeps me from using it, unless someone suggests otherwise. What format does are the notes in? Can the notes be opened/view from a computer that does not have OneNote?

Btw: If you guys run into Fireworks thru an university discounts (doesn't matter if its educational version or not). It seriously is the best program (until someone proves me wrong ) for drawing accurate diagrams on the fly. It is very accurate because of the vector components, and things are listed as objects which can be manuipated anyway you want afterwards.

 

OneNote files can definately only be opened in OneNote. I can't remember the file extension at the moment, but they're saved as "notebook" files.

Hmmm.... I could get Fireworks at a mad discount through work, come to think of it.

 

HELP, i installed office pro 2003 on my toshiba lappy, that works fione, but i cant get onenote to activate using the product key, any luck?