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
- OneNote is more flexible than we are
- What we add
- A result that stays attached to its evidence
- Switching
- Bring it across; keep OneNote if you want
The one difference
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.
This is why it wins. It's not inertia — it's a fair fight that OneNote keeps winning on flexibility.
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.
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.
What changes, honestly
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. If it doesn't, you've lost an afternoon.