Which apps / accesories for efficient meeting notes taking with an iPad [closed]

Question

I'm evaluating the use of iPad for meeting minutes.

PS : I've read this question : How effective will be an iPad to take Meeting Minutes?

My question is here HOW to use an iPad effectively (which app, etc...) and not IF an iPad is a suitable tool to do this

Current tooling and process :

• As presenter : I use my laptop to present the powerpoint, and I take notes on a notepad (pen&paper). I then do retranscriptions of the minutes on MS OneNote and I send the minutes in a mail. I also publish the notes on MS Word 2007 format for storage on network drive / sharepoint to allow access to third parties.

• As an attendee : I use my laptop with MS OneNote directly, and follow the same publishing process as above.

Drawings : from time to time I need to draw, for which I exclusively use my notepad.

So far I rank this usage as follows :

• ++Digital notes allow me to search my notes. I have to do a lot of business interviews, and this saves me a lot of time when trying to retrieve info in the mass of data I've gathered
• ++OneNote provide quite good organization
• ++Notepad offers good versatility for drawing
• --still relying on paper notes for meeting where I'm the presenter, so still wasting time to do retranscription

Future :

I'm wondering regarding the iPad, and I have the following questions :

• I would need to sync notes to my laptop (over 3G or mail), so evernote seems to be a very good choice. Are there other ?
• Do you recommand a specific keyboard (I'm afraid manual notes will be unreadable, and I type faster than I write
• Is stylus worthwhile for drawing ? Which app do you recommend for drawings ?

Thanks !

Answer 1

Note, that I have never used an IPad for meeting notes but I think EverNote will meet your current and future requirements: http://www.evernote.com

Your current needs:

• Evernote's search feature is amazing. It has a very flexible search system that searches for text by keyword, tag or even printed and handwritten text inside images.
• Very flexible in terms of oranization ( i switched from onenote to evernote ). You can organize by notebook, tags etc.
• Has a drawing tab where you can draw & take handwritten notes
• Paper notes if you so desire can be scanned into the app and you can rely upon the image textual search feature

Your future needs:

• out of the gate, evernote automatically will sync across all your devices. It comes with multi platform (mac pc) desktop applications, along with smart phone access (ipad, iphone, android, blackberry). If that isn't enough it also has very robust web access.
• I can't speak for keyboard / drawings as I don't use an Ipad for meeting notes

Answer 2

By far may favorite method for note taking is GoodNotes with a Cosmonaut stylus. I find handwriting to be faster and more effective for my means than trying to type on the iPad. That stylus is key, I can't recommend it highly enough, it's actually usable and a proper analog for writing on paper versus the several other ones I've tried.

I've tried several apps (Bamboo Paper and Noteshelf) and always return to GoodNotes. I think it's the best for me (most of that is experience, some of that is selection bias). I create agendas for every meeting and "print" them to a .pdf file. Sync that with dropbox and now I'm following my agenda and making notes along the way. If I need to send out meeting minutes I can email my handwritten notes on the agenda to an admin, or I can update the agenda I sent with my notes and send them off.

I only do mild (and I'd add poor) drawing, and then I've used SketchBook (which is overkill), or just in a GoodNotes page.

I sync everything through Dropbox, which is another key in my workflow. The one time you've called a meeting, everyone shows up, and there's a question about say "how many units are we forecasting to sell next year", instead of "I'll send that to the group afterwards", you pull up the document that you've already saved in Dropbox and keep moving. Some things you can handle by searching your email on the spot, but I find that having a folder dedicated to each meeting and the corresponding documents inside of that solves questions faster.

The OneNote app is pretty great, but doesn't work for me when I'm running a meeting.I keep a synced OneNote notebook on my iPad as well that syncs back to my laptop.

Answer 3

A little off-the-question but hope it's helpful...

I've been testing a Motorola Xoom (Family edition) for these type of use cases.

It has a direct HDMI port and Mini USB for hooking up to projectors, presentation software and can sync to evernote as well as other similar products.