Tutorial of the MarginNote App for Mind Mapping and Studying

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today’s video, I will give you a quick review on the MarginNote app.

A while ago, I was asked by some viewers to compare a couple of apps to GoodReader. One of these was MarginNote.  GoodReader is my primary app for reading and highlighting PDFs and managing PDF files. I use another app, Notability, or for handwritten notes.  

After diving into MarginNote, I’ve come to the conclusion that it would not be a good replacement for GoodReader. Instead, it is more of a mind mapping and studying app to help you to understand information from multiple sources.  This video lays down my initial thoughts, but I plan to use the app more, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it after some practice use. 

Unfortunately, there’s not a ton of good documentation on how to use MarginNote. You just have to kind of dive in. The developer provides a MarginNote “mind map “as a form of documentation, but the limitations of this format for teaching others becomes clear almost immediately.  If you don’t know much about mind mapping, I have a video about this concept.  Essentially, it is a way to categorize and group information so that you can understand it better or write about it coherently.  It is a deconstructive process, meaning that you are taking disparate  pieces of information and then making connections between them to form them into a different but coherent narrative.  In other words, mind maps helps with the process of thinking something through, so that, in the end, you can present it in a more coherent way. They are not end products – they show the journey.  Having to learn from somebody else’s mind map is like diving into someone else’s mind — it’s confusing and easy to get lost.  

That said, MarginNote is a really cool tool for pulling together pieces of information from different sources. It is available on iOS and Mac devices and syncs between devices.  It costs $13, but they offer a two week free trial period. Let me show you how it works.

There are three screens in MarginNote: Document, Study, and Review. Let’s go through each one. First,

Document

This is the area where you pull in all of the files that you will be using as source material.  MarginNote deals primarily with PDF files.  You can add PDFs from your files, from your computer, you can create files from webpages by URL, or add videos from your camera roll. I was excited about the option to add documents from Evernote, but I could not get it to work with my account.  Maybe others have had more success.  I also was able to successfully add PDFs using the share sheet from other programs. I have found this process to be broken on many apps, so I was happy that it worked well.  I found myself wanting to be able to add different kinds of documents to this area like photos from my camera roll and text documents. Perhaps later versions will have this ability.

Once you import your document, you have these options indicated by icons on the top. The pencil icon allows you to Excerpt and Annotate, which is what you will be doing most frequently with your documents.  Again, this is confusing since there is very little documentation, but what I have determined is that you use the excerpt function to add portions of document to your notebook.  OK, so in other PDF annotation apps, excerpting is like like highlighting and your notebook is like the list of highlights.  In order to use those portions of the document in a mind map, you will need to excerpt them. MarginNote gives you a couple of different ways to do this. You can highlight the text using these two text selection tools and choose from a variety of color options. These tools also allow you to add a comment. Or, if you are not selecting text, you can use one of these two icons to select an image in the shape of a rectangle or in a freeform shape.  This is a really nice option for PDFs without text recognition. So, anything you excerpt will be added to a default notebook for the document.  Annotation simply allows you to mark up the text, but those edits and markings are not available in your notebook – they are just visible in the document. So you can draw, highlight, erase, but remember, unless they are on an excerpted portion, those edits or notes won’t be available in your notebook AND you won’t be able to pull them into a mind map. You can just see them on the document. Hope that makes sense. 

If you click out of the excerpt/annotation mode, and click on this icon that looks like a stack of papers, you can see the notebooks for this document. This icon here will allow you to export your excerpts. I definitely find myself wanting more options here.  MarginNote essentially exports in PDF or Word document format. I prefer text format, and would ideally want it to be emailed.  This next icon allows you to upgrade your notebook for study purposes. This is confusing since they call  the document-specific list of excerpts a notebook, BUT they also use the same term to describe the primary document for mind maps. I’ll go into this a little bit more later.  This is the search icon and an icon where you can see contents, thumbnails, and bookmarks. This doesn’t seem to be particularly useful, unless you were reading a large document and then the thumbnail view would be very helpful for navigation. This 3 dots icon gives you some other more granular options.  This little arrow handle here allows you to slide to the left to see all of your highlights and comments. You can hit notes list to see all of them together.  You can also use this select button to choose specific notes to tag, merge, change color, delete, or add to the card deck. We’ll talk about that in a bit. OK, let’s click out of the screen and go to the

Study Screen

I prefer to think of this as the mind map area. If you click on New you can start a new mind map notebook. Name it whatever you want. Once you do, a list of documents come up. Remember, mind maps in MarginNote allow you to put together and organize information from multiple sources.  So, here you are going to add each of the documents for which you have excerpts that you want to include in your mind map.  I can already tell this screen will drive me nuts. The fact that it doesn’t seem to have organization by file folder means that this, after adding lots of documents, will be a mess and hard to navigate through. So each time you add a document it will ask you if you’d like to import your document notes. Click to import and answer the question "do you want to have these notes displayed in the mind map and outline after importing". What this is asking, is whether you want them available on the mind map workspace, or hidden. So, i’m opting to place them all on the workspace, but if I chose the other option, there is a little icon down here where you can see all of your hidden excerpts.  You can drag them from this box onto the workspace.  So the mind map area is divided into two screens: the document area and the mind map workspace area. You can adjust how much space each screen takes up using this little handle here.  

• First let’s look at the document area. The tabs show you all of the document sources that are contributing excerpts to your mind map. Hitting this manage button will allow you to get rid of documents, add new ones, or put them in a new order.  If you look up here at the icons, you can see that you can perform most of the excerpting and annotations right from the screen. This is nice since you don’t need to flip back-and-forth between the areas of the app to excerpt additional material from a document.
• Now let’s look at the mind map workspace.  You can expand it by sliding this handle all the way over. This is where the magic happens with MarginNote. All of your highlights and comments are gathered here together in individual boxes. You can add titles, comments, move them around, add emphasis or bold words, change the color, add tags, and lots of other things that I didn’t even scratch the surface of.  But most importantly, you can group these with like quotes and comments.  OK, so let’s say I’m researching a paper on the different types of psychotherapy. I’ve pulled in all of my documents and have all of my highlights and comments (or excerpts) here on this workspace. Now I can start to put all of the comments about psychodynamic therapy in one place, behavioral therapy in another, you get the idea.  Once I’ve done that, I can start to see that some of these highlights are about the definition of the therapy, some are about techniques, and some are about the theory behind it.  So, by dragging and dropping these highlights together, I can start to create a tree (or hierarchy) where those comments are grouped together under a topic.  Dragging one highlight into another makes it a child and each block has icons to help you create additional children or siblings on the tree. 
• At any time, I can push this outline button up here, to see a more linear view of my thought organization.  In fact, you can move things around in outline view, by hitting on the gestures icon down here and then swiping left or right to nest or a nest your excerpts. I can see myself spending quite a bit of time in this area. If your ultimate goal is writing a paper, this outline/linear view is what you will ultimately use to organize your paper, with the quotes already lined up for you.  If you want to find the source, each of these excerpts maintains a link back to the original document. So if you push the arrow on an excerpt, you’ll see what document it came from, and clicking on that will take you directly to that spot in the document.  You can see how this could be a very powerful tool for organizing lots of different ideas and quotes from many different sources.  And ultimately, a fantastic tool for structuring an argument, presentation, or research paper.  Finally, let’s talk about the

Review screen

In all honesty, I didn’t spend much time in this area. I am in a grad program that doesn’t require a ton of memorization, but this is great feature for people who need to be able to regurgitate information.  Again, if I was required to learn the definitions of a bunch of different types of therapy. I would go into my document, look at my notes, hit select and choose which ones I wanted to make into Flashcards. Then I would add to my card deck. MarginNote would prompt me to add to an existing deck or create a new one. Now when I go to review, 70% of my work is done for me, I may have to add a title or change up what is on the front or back of the card. Then I can hit the play button up here and test myself on whether I know the information. I can tag the cards with whether I found it hard, good, or easy, and later filter the cards to just do the ones that I found difficult. Right now it’s going through these by creation date, but if I hit the sort button, I can sort by duty, document, or randomly. In addition, and the whole app has good text to speech support, the speech feature is particularly nice for flashcards.  This is a great feature and one that I probably will want to explore more later.

So, that was a brief overview of the MarginNote app. I’m really impressed by the number of features and by the integration between the three areas. I can see myself making use of this app and will definitely spend the $13. One note – it’s a little temperamental. I had to kill the app at several points when things weren’t working properly, but I’m thinking that the good will far outweigh the bad.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching.