Microsoft OneNote for Mac

Microsoft's OneNote 2016 is one of the top-drawer note-taking apps for OS X.

Pros

Available everywhere: Well, not quite everywhere. But with OneNote available on OS X, Windows, iOS, Windows Phone, and via the Web, you are never far away from your notes, clippings, and images.

Syncs with OneDrive: OneNote syncs your notes with OneDrive, Microsoft's cloud storage. Microsoft offers 15GB of storage space on OneDrive for free, and with an Office 365 subscription, you get 1TB of space.

Share your notebooks: OneNote lets you share a notebook with others and allow them to either collaborate with you or simply view your notes but not make changes.

Formatting tools: OneNote offers a useful collection of text-formatting tools. It lets you create new sections and pages, attach files to notes, and insert images and tables.

Cons

Good but not complete support for Office files: You can embed Word and Excel files in notes, but the files become read-only. By contrast, the Windows version of OneNote lets you edit the Word and Excel docs as well as create them within OneNote.

Bottom Line

Mac users have a solid collection of note-taking apps to choose from, including the built-in Notes app in El Capitan, Evernote, and even Google's Keep. But OneNote deserves to be on the list; it's a versatile tool for collecting your thoughts.

More Resources

Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac

OS X El Capitan

Evernote

Google Drive apps