My dad runs a small business and has problems organising his files – Word documents, PDFs, photos – alongside his emails. He wants to be able to easily save the emails and files in folders in date order in a single place. He also wants the folders to be accessible from anywhere on his phone/iPad.

I’ve tried simply saving the emails and documents into a single folder on his Mac, but this is a huge pain for the amount of emails he receives. Matt

One of the advantages of the digitisation of information is that we can now store many different kinds of data together. Videos and sound recordings now sit happily alongside letters, photos, paper receipts and invoices instead of in separate ledgers or folders, or on different physical media such as cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs etc.

Whether it’s worth adding emails is another matter, and I don’t think many people bother. You can, of course, save emails as text files or PDFs and add them to project folders. This works for a small number of emails, but – as you have found – it’s too much work to handle all emails that way. In any case, you can usually find the same emails by looking in a mail folder, or by searching for an email address or a job number. (Always include a job number in emails if a project involves working with different people in different companies.)

OneNote and Evernote

If your dad wants to access his files from anywhere with a smartphone or a tablet, then he will probably need to put copies online. The simplest way to do this is to upload project folders to an online storage service such as Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive or whatever. However, he’d still have to use different programs to access some different types of data.

An interesting alternative is to store everything in a sort of portmanteau program that will also help organise it. The leading examples are Evernote and Microsoft’s OneNote. These are about as close as you can get to a “paperless office”, at least for a sufficiently small office.

Outlook.com even had a “save to OneNote” feature that made it easier to file emails with other data, but it has gone missing – temporarily, I hope – from the latest version. Otherwise, both programs allow you add emails to your notebooks by almost identical means. First, you can forward them to an email address, so you could set up mail rules to forward selected emails to OneNote or Evernote. Second, you can “print” them to a OneNote or Evernote notebook instead of to a physical printer. It’s very tedious to do more than a few.

Still, you can also add things like receipts and business cards by, in effect, using your smartphone as a scanner. Example apps include Microsoft’s Office Lens with OneNote and Scannable or Scantastic with Evernote.

Which is best?

The OneNote v Evernote debate has been long and sometimes heated, but they are different products, and each does some things better than the other. If you want to clip web pages and share notes then Evernote is the clear winner.

However, I think OneNote might be the better choice for your dad, because its hierarchical structure is logical and almost infinitely expandable. It works like an old-school ring binder or filing cabinet. (It’s very popular in schools.)

You can open as many notebooks as you like, and give them all names. Inside a notebook, you can create as many tabs as you like, for different projects. Inside each tab, you can have as many pages as you like.

It’s probably easier to get going with Evernote because you can treat it like a slop-bucket and find whatever you need by searching for it. (Yes, Evernote does have notebooks, and you can create stacks of them, but the point stands.) OneNote requires more setting up to work well, but its structured approach may be a better match for your dad’s business purposes.

Try both?

Both OneNote and Evernote are available as free web applications and as apps, so you can try them to see which you like. Just open an email account at Outlook.com – you don’t have to give your real name or any personal details – and you can use OneNote until you fill up your 5GB of free OneDrive space. If you find it does the job, you can increase the storage to 50GB for £1.99 per month.

There are also free OneNote apps for the Mac, iOS, Windows and Android.

In the same way, you can try Evernote, and its associated apps. The drawback is that the free Basic version does not have all the features of the Premium version, and is limited to 60MB of uploads per month. To make a proper comparison, you would need to pay £44.99 per year for the Premium version, which allows 10GB of uploads. (The Plus version has been discontinued.)

Alternatively, you could sign up for a free trial of Evernote Business, which costs £10.99 per user per month. This is aimed at teams, but it includes Evernote Premium as well. You can compare the features online.

OneNote and Office 365

OneNote’s other advantage is that it’s integrated into Microsoft Office, and gets third party support from sites like Onetastic. Not everyone cares about Office integration, but most large organisations run on it, and your mention of Word suggests that your dad already uses it.

If your dad has Office 2016, then he already has a copy of the desktop version of OneNote. This version can create and store files locally, while also working online.

People who already have Office 2016 can subscribe to Office 365 Business Essentials for £3.80 plus VAT per month. That doesn’t include support, but it does include the standard 1TB of online storage, which is enough for most people’s work files.

The Office 365 Business version (£7.90 plus VAT per month) adds downloads of the full Office programs plus 24/7 phone and web support. The Premium version (£9.40 plus VAT per month) adds a custom domain email address plus extra features such as Microsoft Invoicing, Microsoft Bookings, Microsoft Planner and Outlook Customer Manager.

The Mac and app gaps

Evernote has dominated this category of software on the Mac for two main reasons. First, Microsoft took more than a decade to add OneNote to the Mac version of Office: it appeared on Windows in 2003 – five years before Evernote – and on Mac in 2014. Second, the Mac version has never had the full capabilities of the Windows version. This is annoying even if you don’t really need the missing features.

Unfortunately, the Mac version will never catch up. In fact, OneNote 2016 will be the last desktop version for either platform, and Microsoft has already stopped updating it. Worse, it has made the free versions of OneNote 2016 impossible to find, and I did try. (Like all the free versions, these can only store notebooks in OneDrive.)

Instead, Microsoft is pushing users towards the app version, which is provided as standard in Windows 10. This sacrifices features such as Outlook integration, Onetastic compatibility, and the ability to create OneNote notebooks on local devices (though notebooks are cached locally).

Last month, William Devereux from Microsoft’s OneNote team claimed that the app would be better than the desktop version – it has many new features – and that it would be consistent across the various platforms (web, Mac, iOS, and Android). A scan through the comments shows how well that claim went down.

You may find the app does what you need. If not, bear in mind that OneNote 2016 will only be supported until 14 October, 2025.

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