No Cost Noting

The free/Basic version of Debrief is "PC software to handle note overload. Keep your notes in one place, saved in your PC. With Debrief, organization can becomes habit, while hardly even trying. Debrief provides a significant step toward remembering what you know, and where you put it. The goal behind Debrief is to organize notes in different contexts and formats with simple mouse clicks. Examples include: daily notes, meetings, to-dos, assignments, issues, changes, risks, decisions, research, contacts, and more."

Features:

"Arranged by Date
To imitate how you may be taking notes today, Debrief automatically dates each note when it is created. Your notes can be viewed by date, similar to how you may do that today in a written notebook. To display notes from a particular day, click on that date in the calendar. If you need to write a status report, highlight the entire week on the calendar to review what you did during that week.

Arranged by Subject
Do you like notes with similar subjects grouped together, like folders in a desk or file cabinet drawer? Then drag them to Debrief folders, similar to how you may drag email notes to folders in your email software. This is convenient for reviewing several notes on similar topics in a single view.

Note-Based Reports: Dated Journals, and Organized Files
Do you like notes printed, or saved to a file for word processing? The Reports features offers several different formats, such as by date or folder. If you print them by date, they are in a similar format to what you may have in a spiral binder.
If you kept notes all your life in this format, you could print them in date order and have a journal. Or, print them by subject folder and have a biography. It is fast can can be done with just a few mouse clicks.

Arranged like Note Cards
If you would like to rearrange your notes like note cards, try the Note Deck feature. Arrange notes by dragging them in a new order, and a new draft document is automatically created. This can be useful for using your existing notes to draft a whitepaper, a research paper, a script, or a novel.

Associated with Reading Material
If you have reading material, like books and magazines, mention these in Debrief and let Debrief start building a virtual library. You can take notes pertaining to specific reading material, while the notes are also organized by subjects and date. The items in the library can be viewed as a reading list, and printed as end note material for research papers.

Indexed like a Book
Sometimes notes contain many ideas. In these cases, you can create an index to notes, similar to an index in the back of a book. On a project at work for example, you may want to list lessons learned. In this case, create an index for "Lessons Learned." When you have noted material that you want to later refer to in this context, click the index when editing these notes. Then later refer to them in one view, no matter what their dates or subject folders.

Grouped by Action Items
Sometimes it is useful to keep a thread of notes that cover tasks or issues spanning days, or even weeks. In these cases, associate these notes with tasks and issues. Later, you can review to each entire note thread, even if it spans multiple subject folders and months.

Quick Reference
It is useful to keep some notes only a click or two away, such as a glossary, timesheet, expenses, or file locations. In these cases, tag notes with the Favorites attribute. That keeps them within a click or two with the Favorites button.

Find
Now just where did you store that note. When you need to search notes for keywords, try the Find feature, one click away. Imagine being able to search all your notebooks.

Speak to Debrief
Are you using speech recognition software on your current PC? If so, point it to Debrief. With speech recognition and your mouse, talk to Debrief and drag paragraphs to folders. Notes are automatically dated, and instantly organized."

(OS: Windows: 98, Me, NT4, 2000, XP, or Vista)