Online note suggestions?

[u/Far-Description-8797]

Hey everyone! I've always been a traditional paper-and-pen note-taker, but I'm looking to switch to digital notes.

Does anyone have recommendations for an app or website where I can:

-Take notes directly on PowerPoint slides and PDF articles like this picture

-Keep everything organized in one notebook or file (readings, lecture slides, and my personal notes together)

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

[u/OmericanAutlaw]

i prefer GoodNotes on my iPad

[u/hellaHeAther430]

When you make these notes, do you prepare the paper with the slide and notes before or after the lecture?

What I can think of is, taking a screenshot of the slide, uploading it to a google doc, and then doing the notes of the slide next to the uploaded picture?
I am a pen and paper person, but when it comes to digital notes (which I do a lot of those as well), I stick to Google Docs.
In a Google doc form, you can have sub-tabs so that is very helpful. For example, the first few weeks of the semester, we went through an entire book (10 chapters), so in one document I have 10 different tabs.

Don’t know if that helps, but I’m a Google Docs person.

[u/Far-Description-8797 → u/hellaHeAther430]

Thank you for your suggestion, but I don't want to go throgh the hastele of screenshotting evey slide. I can download them in a three-slide note page, but it will have to be a pdf.

But I appreciate your response.

[u/shook-eve]

I have Samsung devices, including my tablet, and I really like using the Samsung Notes app. I think its underrated. Its free and comes with so many great tools. You can download your slides/articles, start a new note, and upload your documents. So you can write on top of them kinda like if your slides/pdf was the background for the note page. If you have a Samsung phone, then you have access to all of your notes in your phone as well. You can have 2 pages open at the same time, so they're side by side. You can customize the tool bar and move the tool bar to different sides of the screen or just leave it floating somewhere on the screen. You can make folders within folders, so its great for organization.

[u/lpgaynor]

Depends on what device you're taking notes on. For an android based tablet, I use orion notes. I think it's called NoteIn on IOS. There is a free version and a very cheap premium version, but I cannot remember what the difference is. You can have multiple note sheets split on your screen, hide parts of your notes with "tape", ect. You can also Download the slides or pdf straight from Canvas into Orion Notes. Samsung notes also works pretty well for android.

[u/AdInformal2490]

I use noteful for my tablet and love it i can transfer powerpoints / slides straight into my note book

[u/Defiant-Anywhere7423]

Microsoft One note!! I just switched from pen and paper to online too and I’m so glad i did, it saves me the trouble of erasing and flipping through pages, plus my back has been really grateful too lol.

It’s completely free and very convenient for taking powerpoint slides and adding them to your notepage- you just download the slides from canvas and insert them into your notebook where you can write on top of them, highlight, annotate, etc. i like it better than Google Docs because it’s more flexible - Google Docs always gives me headaches whenever I’m inserting pictures and it shifts all the text to the side. It also has separate notebooks if you wanna organize them by class and multiple subgroups if you wanna separate by lecture, video notes, hw questions, etc

One note also has a feature where you can convert your notes sheet into a pdf and print it out if your professor lets you bring formula sheets to exams, highly recommend it!

[u/Far-Description-8797 → u/Defiant-Anywhere7423]

Thank you. I am experimenting with it now. It looks promising.

[u/SierraGuyInCA]

Samsung Notes is the standard (common agreement that it blows away even corporate level products) for doing what you're seeking to do. Microsoft OneNote is Notes chief competition. I use Samsung Notes as I use a large Samsung tablet with an S-pen. Totally changed my notetaking experience. There are several other apps that allow you to do the same thing, annotate PDF files but they aren't nearly as good as Samsung Notes. For work I use the Remarkable 2 tablet which was designed specifically for notetaking with their smart pen. It can even transcribe your handwriting into editable text.

In my undergrad, I'd convert the slides, provided in PDF format, into Word documents and type my notes. I'm sure you can easily reverse engineer the pdf files. I haven't had to do this in a while as my grad school professors most often provide us with the actual PowerPoint presentation that we can edit but this is how Google Gemini recommenda converting the "three slides per page" PDF file into an editable PowerPoint file. I'd do this in the first couple of minutes before each class as everyone settles in. Seriously, it's REAL easy.

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Most standard PDF-to-PowerPoint tools like Adobe Acrobat, CloudConvert, or Canva will convert the whole document, but each entire page—including the three slide images and the notes area—becomes one single slide.

​To separate each slide into its own full-screen PowerPoint page, your best option is to use a free tool like PDF24 Creator or PDFgear to crop out the extra margin and notes section first. Once you split or crop the PDF down to just the slide boxes, you can run it through Adobe Acrobat or Canva to generate clean, individual PowerPoint slides.

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