I have been an Evernote user for a little over a year now, but I never really used it to its full potential. This may have been in part due to the fact that I had a BlackBerry for a while and there was no Evernote application for the BlackBerry (there is now of course). I recently bought an iPhone, and there is a pretty solid Evernote client for the iPhone. I also have been feeling the need lately for better organizing and mobilizing (is that even a word? - looked it up... it's a word, but not the definition I am using here) my notes. I suppose I have simply used email in the recent past, but that's not a great solution and is too cluttered (in my opinion), so searches tend to have a lot of junk I'm not interested in sifting through and wastes time. I have also used Microsoft OneNote for some things, but it's SOOO limited to a PC (or Windows Mobile device which I don't own any longer... and even that mobile app is lame for mobile notes access IMO). My main concern, similar to my Task Management Solution concerns, is that the solution needs to be ubiquitous and work on all of my devices... which dictates some form of web-based backend and syncing.Evernote seems to fit that bill, and since I have an account and notes already in it, I am deciding to experiment more with it and see if I can make it work better for me. I am trying to find tips and tricks to make it work for me, rather than me working for it. ;-) I intend to list them in posts and revisit this one with updates.
Here is a tip I found on another bloggers site that explains how to create a "Send-To" shortcut to attach files to your Evernote default notebook. Simple enough... but what I found out today is that you can only attach certain files with a free account through Evernote. The premium account will allow you to attach any file to Evernote... but then I'm not sure what those attachments would look like in Evernote... especially on the iPhone app. Meaning: If I attach a MS Word document to Evernote, would I be able to read it and search it like any other note from my iPhone?? I don't know that I am ready to upgrade to a premium account, because I'm not yet sure it is the right solution for me. I still find the interface to be a bit of a kluge to use (more on this further down). Scrolling through notes on the desktop client has been painful to me so far. A premium account with Evernote will set you back either $5/mo. or $45/yr. Because they have a month to month subscription level, I *may* try it out for a month for $5 and see if it's worth it to me (during the course of composing this blog post, I exceeded my free account bandwidth usage and decided no time like the present to try it for a month... so I upgraded for the $5/mo. plan for starters. If I like it enough I will opt for the yearly subscription of $45/yr. If I don't think it's worth it, I'll cancel and go back to free). For now, pertaining to MS Word documents, I simply select all and paste into a new note. This is not a great solution, but it works easily enough. I am also curious about what any formatting would look like in the MS Word attachment in a Premium account... if it produced the same results as my copy/paste method, it would be a huge waste of money. However, if it maintained the formatting and graphics, etc, it may be worth the extra money.
Another nice thing about Evernote, even the free account, is the ability to email notes to your default notebook. Here is a bit of text from that same blogger:
"Email Notes - With your Evernote account comes a custom email address. Anything sent to this address automagically is added to your default evernote notebook (Login to evernote.com, under settings is your email address)"
This can be VERY useful to forward emails you get to Evernote so they can be referenced later. Combine this with a premium account, and I would think it would include the ability to have Word and Excel attachments in the email get into your notebook as well. Again, not sure how all of this would display on a mobile phone app (like the iPhone). May have to play around with this one a bit and report back.
I found this blog post about scanning things in and getting them into Evernote automatically that is specifically for Macs, but noticed in the comments that you can set the Evernote desktop client to monitor folders, so if you set it to monitor your scanning folder it will get the notes automatically. For work, I have to scan in business expense receipts for record keeping, etc, but this will come in handy for SOOO many things. I can see that a bit of management will be required to filter them into the appropriate notebooks and tag them... but the search capability is so good that this becomes less of a concern (IF you know what you are looking for... which sometimes you don't, so refining the number of things to look through is nice). I set it to monitor my expense receipts folder and it started pulling in all my receipts into Evernote immediately... which is what sent me over my bandwidth limit for my free account, so I upgraded to continue and will explore the other features (like attaching MS Word documents and the formatting of these). This post says the following "Choose PNG, JPEG as the format. If you would rather scan to PDF, keep in mind that images in PDFs will not be recognized by our image recognition" which I'm wondering if this is still the case with PDF documents since this post is about 7 months old now. My guess is it is... one thing I noticed on PDFs imported into Evernote is that you cannot select any text within the PDF (unless I'm missing how to do this). So I'm wondering if it makes sense to import these at all? It *does* allow you to search them and read them... but what if you want to grab some text off one and email it or something? If it is a scanned PDF, I don't think even Adobe Acrobat Professional will allow you to select text because it sees it as an image that is not editable... just checked and you can't, so no loss of feature there. ***update - I also tried opening one of the PDF notes on my iPhone... it has to download the PDF, which the one I selected was 2.6MB and therefore took a while to open even over wifi... on top of that, it was sluggish to view and pinch zoom, etc... but it did work. Not sure I want to continue to use PDFs and will look at trying out JPGs or PNGs and see how well that works - /update***
Pertaining to the UI of Evernote, I started using Evernote via the web interface only at first. The web interface seems to have a view option not available in the desktop client... that being the ability to display all your notes as smaller thumbnails, which I felt it seemes easier to quickly visually scan those for what I was looking for... but now, I realize this is pointless with the search capabilities of Evernote. In the beginning, I only had a few notes, so visually looking for the note I wanted seemed to make sense... but now that I have hundreds of notes, this doesn't matter as much. However, I still say this view would be welcome on the desktop client because, let's say, if you do a search and it comes back with 5-15 notes that contain the keywords you put in, if you could see all those as thumbnails with their titles, it would be easy to pick the one you are looking for without having to type more keywords to refine your search. Maybe I'm alone in this thinking.
Since I upgraded to a premium account during the sporadic composition of this blog post (they can sometimes take me days to complete) I tried attaching a MS Word document to Evernote. This worked just fine and, on the desktop, double-clicking it opens it in MS Word... convenient I suppose. I'm not sure what would happen if I tried to do this from a desktop/laptop where MS Word was not installed... but I don't actually have any PC without it installed so I can test this. I did check what this would look like on the iPhone, since MS Word is not present. Similar to the PDF notes, it shows that it is an attachment that needs to be downloaded. Once I did this, it showed the document fairly well. I did not have tables or images or other odd formatting in this specific example, so I'm not sure what it would do with those, but I was impressed with what it displayed. Perhaps the Premium Account in Evernote is worth it just for this feature?? Not sure just yet.
Well, I am going to post this as is and revisit it with updates appended to the bottom as I learn and find more. ;-) Cheers!
Update 1: Just posted and already found something. I just tried to do a search on some text within my attached word document and Evernote did not find it inside the attachment. I'm not sure if this is because I JUST added it and the Evernote servers have not processed it yet or what... but not being able to search inside file attachments would be a HUGE bummer and pretty much a waste. I mean, Windows Desktop Search and Google Desktop can perform this action for me! Hopefully it's just a timing issue... I'll post back if it starts working.
Update 2: I am listening to the Evernote Podcast #5 right now (from 6/5/09) and they said that they are writing a brand new Windows Evernote Desktop Client from the ground up and it will address many of the things that people have been requesting... such as thumbnails of the notes and quick view. WooHoo!! They said it should be out sometime later this summer (so maybe August??). Hopefully this will make the desktop client more user friendly for me.
Update 3: Thought I'd share this post about using Evernote for "Getting Things Done" (GTD). I saw this and gave it some thought before finally developing my Task Management Solution. My problem with using Evernote for GTD is that it doesn't offer me the ability to pop-up reminders or easily/structurally specify a due date to sort/filter on, etc. I think it's a great idea, and if someone can make it work for their needs, that's awesome! It just wasn't "enough" for me and my wants/needs. BTW, I think there are some things to be learned from this that could be helpful in organizing notes. One thought is to create a notebook called "Inbox" and make that your default notebook. Then, all notes get placed into this bucket by default, and you can schedule time each day or week to parse through the information and move it to the appropriate notebook or add tags... just a thought. Not sure it's worth much.
Update 4: This one's pretty cool... you can link your twitter account to Evernote so that you can send tweets to Evernote. All you need to do is go to http://twitter.com/MyEN and follow the directions. Once you link your account to Twitter, all you need to do is include @MyEN in a tweet and it gets added to your default notebook.
Update 5: If you are into GTD (Getting Things Done) at all, this one may be interesting to you for using Evernote for your GTD system. Darren Crawford posted what he does to use Evernote for his GTD system. The reason I kind of like his idea is that it's very simple. I may give this a try myself... but one thought is that you may not even want to use the contexts, and thinking about moving things around and changing tags, etc, could become too time consuming. Not only that, but the iPhone Evernote app is VERY different from the desktop or even web app... you cannot easily limit the displayed notes by notebook or by tags... so I'm not sure this design would work for my needs. Thankfully, the search capabilities in Evernote are second to none.
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