College means a lot of taking notes. It's just a fact of life.

If you want it to be as easy and smooth as possible, you’ll want a dedicated note-taking app instead of just Microsoft Word.

These six apps are the best of the best at helping you get organized for the semester.

1. Evernote (free for basic, $34.99/year for plus)

Evernote is probably the king of note-taking apps. It has a nice interface where you can add pictures, audio, and files to your notes, as well as organize them into notebooks.

That’s helpful for breaking things down by class, as well as even breaking them down by chapter or topic for what you’re learning in a class at the moment.

Evernote also has a great browser extension called the web clipper that lets you save a full article — or just the important bits — to one of your notebooks. You can also take notes on the article and include that with the snippet you saved.

Even with the free package, you can sync Evernote with two devices, giving you easy access to notes on both your laptop and your phone. You also get 60MB of uploads per month, while Plus gets you 1GB per month. Plus also allows you to access your notebooks offline and sync to multiple devices.

2. Microsoft OneNote (free for basic, $69/year for Microsoft Office and the full version)

If you’re a stickler for paper notes and are transitioning to a laptop, OneNote might be your best bet. It has notebook and section tabs, meaning the sections can separate your lessons for classes.

You can type anywhere on the page and arrange things however you want, which makes it feel like a real notebook — only with audio and video capable of being added.

If you’re used to Microsoft Word, the controls of this will feel easy and familiar, which is helpful if note-taking on a laptop is something you’re not used to yet. And if you had a very particular system for organizing your paper notes, this is one of the more flexible options, so you can keep that system in place.

Free users get 5GB of storage space, while Microsoft Office provides 1TB of storage to share throughout all of its apps. The maximum file upload size is 100MB, which should only really be a problem if you’re planning on uploading a large video or audio file.

3. PowerPoint (comes with Microsoft Office)

Okay, this isn’t technically a note-taking app. But it’s insanely helpful if your professors make their PowerPoints available to download, which many do. (Or, at the very least, would make them available if you asked.)

PowerPoint gives you the option to put a set of lines beside every slide so you can take notes based on the content of each slide. Some professors may also have blanks to fill in to make sure you’re paying attention.

Professors rarely put all the information they want you to know on the slides. They want you to listen and add other important points they say. With this, you can make sure you have the important things on the slide as well as the extra information side by side when you go to study for that next exam.

4. Google Keep (free)

While this is more of a sticky note or to-do list format, Google Keep is not without its benefits. Digital sticky notes serve as previews, but if you want to go further with note-taking, you can use the “copy to Google Docs” feature so that you can include more information.

The best feature of this app is the audio transcription. If you manage to get a good recording of your professor or read notes to Keep’s audio recorder, it’ll both save the audio version and transcribe it so you have a text version as well.

5. Zoho Notebook (free)

If you want to make your notes look nice, this is the app for you. Their notebooks have fun designs on them, or you can design your own. There are five card types as well, so you can select the one that will be the most beneficial to you.

Zoho also has a Web Clipper like Evernote, giving you the opportunity to save articles and images. Their cloud ensures all of your notes will be backed up, too. Zoho is a good, simplistic interface that is comparable to Evernote, though it doesn’t have as many of the features Evernote does. Its price tag can’t be beaten, however, for everything it offers.

6. Genius Scan (free for basic, $7.99 for premium)

Sometimes, handwritten notes are just the way to go. Some people just learn better when they’re actually writing things down instead of typing them. This is where scanning apps like Genius Scan come in.

While handwriting notes may help you learn the material, they can still be unorganized in a notebook. It’s nice to have them available for studying on your phone or laptop, so you can easily carry them wherever you happen to be.

Genius Scan is super easy to use and automatically isolates the notes you’re scanning and enhances them, so the upload is as perfect as possible. It converts the image into a PDF so you can have it for later.

Batch mode lets you scan a bunch of documents in a row, and you can bundle them into a multi-page PDF, letting you organize your notes with others that belong together.

While premium isn’t necessary, it definitely comes with some nice features. You can export documents to apps like Evernote, Google Drive and OneNote to save them there. That’s also how you get the ability to name your documents exactly what you want, so you can label certain pages “Important” or something like that. Premium also eliminates ads, which is always nice.

With these apps, note-taking can be a breeze — and even fun!

Make sure you’re organized for college, and your notes are as efficient as possible.

Good notes are the best way to get that A.