Back in the day many years ago I used Evernote for my note-taking needs. But I outgrew the free version; OneNote was already installed and cost nothing more than I’d already paid (in the pre-subscription days) for Office, so I started using that. I appreciated the ability to have multiple notebooks, nested folders and rich content. On the downside I found its search functionality so dreadful it might as well not have been there at all.
Then the Office suite changed to (eventually) Microsoft 365 and the migration was a mess. I had up to 3 copies of some notebooks residing in different versions of OneNote; trying to find a particular note was frustrating and time-consuming. I could copy & paste notes from one version’s data store to the other, but it wouldn’t let me delete some empty folders. Who knows why? And to cap it all off I was becoming distinctly anti-Microsoft with all the Windows 11 crap and CoPilot being forced down our throats at extra cost when I never asked for nor wanted it.
So I hunted around and found Joplin. An open-source, multi-platform note app with syncing just like the others, with rich text & all the functionality I wanted, Using the standard .md markdown format for content I was guaranteed of being able to migrate to other similar platforms in the future if I wanted. There’s also a good range of plugins that can add functionality. Since importing my existing notes from OneDrive, and cutting & pasting those that OneNote wouldn’t let go of, I’m a happy chappie!
Sep 202026