Note taking app that integrate with Excel

TidBITS Talk
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Hello, I’m looking for a note taking app that can integrate with excel, actually while working with excel, I take lots of notes but in a separate notepad. Now, I want a app that help me to manage my work in place without any hassle.

Thank you

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I don’t use MS Office but I’d have thought OneNote would be the first place to try. If MS don’t integrate their own note taking app with Excel it might be difficult to find another app which does. Assuming you already subscribe means it would also be free.

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Actually, I don’t like OneNote, so I’m looking for alternative to OneNote that can easily integrate with it.

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I don’t understand the hassle of using Excel and a note-taking app side by side. What kind of integration are you looking for? Can you tell us any more about your use case?

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Maybe TextEdit or Notes app? Like @aldus_vet wrote, a bit more about what you want the note taking app to be capable of would help in providing App ideas.

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Have you tried the Notes feature in Excel?

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Thank you for reply, I understand that Excel and a note-taking app can be used side by side. But I want to streamline my workflow by integrating both things in one place. I want to take note along side my data. In my current setup switching between the Excel and a note taking app time-consuming and sometime confuse me and also it is error prone and I have done it in past. Actually I’m looking for a app in which I embed or add Excel sheets and take notes in various formats typing, handwriting. Which removes the chances of error.

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Yeah I have tried it. TBH it looks so messy and I have found it useless for me.

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I haven’t done this myself, and it seems to have real limitations if you want to share the spreadsheet or collaborate with others, but you can embed Excel sheets or data in OneNote notebooks. May be worth investigating.

For example:

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I have tried the OneNote before, but I don’t liked it so much. I had faced sync issue of my notes on my different devices, multiple times. And that would be great enough if an app allows me to embed excel sheet in it, where I can organise it.

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Possibilities I can think of:

  1. My own choice would be to add a worksheet to each working spreadsheet with a main wide column where the notes go, plus a few more columns for meta-data such as the sheet or cells discussed in the note, sorting tags, and a date column. One row per note. The idea is similar to having a worksheet devoted to explaining terms and setting assumptions for calcs. In Mac Excel you have to find your Excel version’s way to put a new line in a cell if you want the notes to have lists or multiple paragraphs(shift-command-return in latest Excel, Sequoia). You could probably write an Excel script to create the sheet, or keep a template that you copy into each working Excel doc. Years ago when every app was a separate (expensive) package, a grad student I knew could only afford Excel, and wrote a whole thesis in it.
  2. Similar to another suggestion, you could embed your Excel sheets in a Word doc.
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Thank you all for your recommendation, actually I have gone through a note taking app notability that allows me to import the excel sheet in it and where I can manage it and it offers both typing and handwriting. I am going to try this app, and let’s see if it will work for me or not.

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Thanks for your reply, actually I don’t want to put everything into my excel sheet itself and I get the idea of using worksheets for notes but I would prefer something that doesn’t clutter my sheet, which can complicate the process of reading data in my sheet.

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If you’re in the MS ecosystem, and don’t like OneNote, what about using Word? You can embed Excel sheets in Word docs. It should be two-way, so that you can update the spreadsheet independently and have the one embedded in the doc stay synced. Way back in the day, I used to do this on Windows, and it worked pretty reliably. I had occasion to try it in the past year or so on Mac, but was unhappy with the result, so just kept the two separate files.