I'm one of those folks that is drowning in paper sketches, notes and such and sometimes to aliviate this, will use so-called note-taking software. However, a lot of them cost money, require internet connectivity which isn't available, etc., so I thought I'd see how far Xara could be pushed into 'note taker' functionality. Personally, with a few small issues, it can do pretty dang well on it's own in most personal situations, even able to serve as a personal handwritten wiki, even though it's not exactly optimized for that.

I'm posting a couple of files here to peruse on setting up Xara's menus and tool settings to use it as a digital notebook. Hopefully you can read my handwriting! :P

Quick analysis of why might one use Xara as note-taking app and the pros and cons that seem most relevant to doing so.
xara notebook preface.xar

The actual guide to using Xara for doing note-taking stuff.
XARA NOTES.xar

Save these as templates if you don't want to make your own notebook or graph paper. Includes minimal palettes for pens and hiliters.
graph paper.xar
notebook paper.xar


Hopefully someone here might find this useful or at the very least amusing someone would even consider this.

Peace