“Going digital” has many benefits. Once you realize the limits of physical (analog) methods, you’ll find it hard to go back.

What are the benefits? Imagine…

• A whiteboard, but you never run out of space (“infinite whiteboard”).
• Being able to copy-paste anything. You’re not a medieval scribe, so why transcribe the same passage 5 different times?
• Searchability: If your work / school notes are 99% digital, you can easily find all of your notes about it.¹ Studying becomes a lot easier!

Digital Notetaking

(This mainly focuses on personal notes for work/school/etc. If you’re maintaining a large knowledgebase with many users needing constant access, another approach may be necessary. Consult a friend in IT.²)

Here’s the “1.0, 2.0, 3.0″…

0.0: Pen and paper

0.5: Pen and paper, but stored neatly in folders or file cabinets.

• Better than nothing, but requires lots of manual upkeep.

1.0: Any basic text editor, like Microsoft Word, or Notepad.

• Notepad is simple, but has no formatting
• Word is fancy, but sometimes overwhelming with options
• Unless you’ve gone out of your way, saving it to your computer = it’s probably backed up to the cloud (OneNote, iCloud, Google Drive, etc.)

2.0: Microsoft OneNote

• Free (does note require Office 365 subscription!)
• Industry standard
• Type or paste anywhere!
• Collaborative editing
• (Some tech stuff I personally find annoying)³

3.0: Obsidian (website) (Wikipedia)

• FOSS (Free and Open Source Software)
• Extra functionality: hyperlinks/backlinks⁴, graph view, tags (hashtags) for alternate organizational structure
• Custom plugins
• A tad stricter formatting

Note: Obsidian may lack certain collaborative editing tools, a la OneNote. (At least without exploring plug-ins?) I’ll need to research this. ^{[D&& 2025-09-02]}

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Footnotes

1. “Easily” finding your notes does depend on how you store them. Regardless, even an unorganized digital heap can be easier to sift through, than (for example) 7 different file cabinets, stored between 2 offices. ↩︎
2. Products such as Microsoft SharePoint (Communication Site), Microsoft SharePoint (Team Site), may be important (keywords: Intranet site, knowledgebase management).
   ◆ In my personal experience, this tech is still evolving and improving as of early 2020s, so I suspect it’ll get easier and easier to use. (No more clunky HTML, CSS, and JavaScript editing by hand! Though, many high-level applications still let you tinker with it, if you’re into that sort of thing.)
   ◆ The study of “Version Control” gets into the nitty gritty details: for example, professional programmers use “Git” on places like GitHub to stay sane when making hundreds of tiny changes. (As of 2025-09-02, D&& still needs to learn Git and GitHub.) ↩︎
3. Specifically, jumping between different OneNote versions:
   ◆ Circa 2021, I’ve juggled 3-4 versions of the same software: the traditional Desktop app, “OneNote for Windows 10”, the browser-based version, and the mobile app… all of which had their own quirks and differences. Sometimes, one version would lack a feature that another offers. (Or simply have different default settings). This affects things like font, UI & navigation, date/timestamps with initials.
   ◆ Unfortunately, Microsoft (and others) have been known to remove features when releasing new editions of software. Some features are maybe justified to remove for the sake of simplicity. But other features may be removed which you may find very important!
   ◆ If you’re lucky, enough outcry will force big software companies to “put the feature back in” / re-create it. Compared to FOSS software, (anecdotally) I don’t feel like features get removed nearly as often. ↩︎
4. Hyperlinks and backlinks are a game changer! Imagine jumping between your personal notes and topics, as smoothly as jumping between Wikipedia articles.
   ◆ Backlinks (a complete list of links to the current page) prevent headaches: no more maintaining hyperlinks on both the start and end pages. Put a normal link on the starting page, and a backlink will automatically be visible on the end page! Obsidian displays backlinks in a collapsible sidebar. ↩︎