Coming from OneNote, Excel or paper

OneNote is a good notebook. It just can't prove anything.

Most labs that keep a decent record keep it in OneNote, Word, Excel and a paper book — and that combination genuinely works. It's flexible, everyone already knows it, and it costs nothing extra. There's one thing it can't do, and it's the thing a reviewer asks about.

Honestly
We are narrower than OneNote, on purpose
What we add
A result that stays attached to its evidence
Switching
Bring it across; keep OneNote if you want

The one difference

what OneNote does well

Type anything, anywhere, in any shape. Paste a plot next to a scrawled note. Nobody needs training. It syncs to the phone in your pocket, which matters more at a bench than any feature.

That is why it is still open on the bench — and why woodle imports it rather than asking you to abandon it.

what it can't do

A page can be edited afterwards, and the edit history can be turned off or cleared. So a record kept in OneNote can't show that a result was written down before the conclusion was drawn.

Nobody in your lab would falsify anything. That isn't the point — the point is that the record can't demonstrate it either way.

What we're not asking

You don't have to give up the way you write.

The failure mode of every lab-software rollout is the month where people keep the record twice — paper by day, typed up at night. It's the documented reason these moves are abandoned, and it's entirely avoidable.

So bring the OneNote notebook across whole. Sections, pages, attachments, dates. It stays readable and searchable, and it becomes the history you build on rather than something you left behind.

See how import works →  ·  Is woodle an electronic lab notebook? →

A thermal cycler touchscreen showing a protocol editor with an unsaved programme.

What changes, honestly

Writing things down
Much the same. Free text, images, tables, paste from anywhere.
Finding things later
Better. Results are attached to the run and the file that produced them, so a search returns the evidence, not just the sentence.
Editing an old entry
Different. You can correct anything, but the earlier version stays. That's the whole trade.
Working at the bench
Same. It runs in a browser on a phone or tablet, which is where most notes actually get made.
Getting the group to use it
Slower than you'd like. Start with one person and one study. Mandating it is the reliable way to get thin, resentful record-keeping. There is a guide on handovers if that is the pressing problem.

And the spreadsheet

OneNote holds the notes. The instrument folder holds the raw files. The spreadsheet holds the result — which makes it the one we have to be most careful about, because it is the thing woodle is actually for.

We are not going to tell you to stop using spreadsheets. Our own guides recommend them — for a dataset log, for a figure-to-file table, for a data management plan. They are the right tool for a table, and nothing here changes that.

The narrow problem is this: a cell holds a number. It does not hold where the number came from.

The chain breaks three times
Instrument export → a cleaned copy → the chart. Each step is a new file, and none of them carries a pointer back. By the time it is a figure, the connection lives in one person's memory — and that person graduates.
Two files, no decision
A folder holding analysis-final.xlsx and analysis-final-v2.xlsx does not have a naming problem. It has two files nobody has chosen between, and no convention can choose for you.
What woodle adds
The result stays attached to the run that produced it and to the file underneath. Keep the spreadsheet — import it, or link to it where it already sits. What changes is that the number in it stops being the only surviving copy of the reasoning.

Try it against one study.

Bring across one project you already finished, and see whether the record holds together better than the version you have now. That is the first thing we do with a founding lab, and it is the fairest test there is — you already know what the answer should be.

Request a founding place

Keep OneNote. Bring one finished project across.

One project you have already published is the fairest test, because you know what the answer should be.

Request a founding place Talk to us about your lab
for verified researchersFour questions about your lab. We are setting up founding labs in small waves, by hand.
where we arePaid plans aren’t open yet — the gateway isn’t onboarded, and we’d rather say so than take a card we can’t charge. What else we won’t claim →