59 replies to this topic

[David Heimer]

I'm amazed by several items in this thread:

1. Like me, many people assumed Evernote would have standard outlining functionality.

2. Evernote DOESN'T have standard outlining functionality.

3. Despite a large number of Evernote users saying how much want this functionality, the Evernote people commenting don't seem to care, which is odd. Typically paying attention to what your users want is a good idea.

A lot of people don't get the power of a full-function outliner. But for those of us that use it a lot, it's a great tool for collecting and then structuring your thoughts, developing relationships between items, and creating to do's, projects, or just for note taking. You can collapse levels, expand levels, move the items around, renumber and reorder at will. Typically they include all the different numbering styles and automatic indentation. A friend of mine says he "thinks in outlines" which makes sense to me. For him, having an outliner is indispensible. In fact, it's the only reason he doesn't use Evernote. I like Evernote, but I agree with all the other posts, that not having a true outliner is a major hole in Evernote. As soon as an Evernote competitor appears with a good outliner, I will switch. But I'm hoping the Evernote people will realize the power in outlining and give us what we want.

[jefito]

1. Like me, many people assumed Evernote would have standard outlining functionality.

Gotta be careful of assumptions -- they on the part of the assumer, not the target of the assumptions.

2. Evernote DOESN'T have standard outlining functionality.

True enough.

3. Despite a large number of Evernote users saying how much want this functionality, the Evernote people commenting don't seem to care, which is odd. Typically paying attention to what your users want is a good idea.

Please do not take Evernote's lack of delivering a full outline function as lack of caring. I know that they understand the importance of outlining to many people (who knows, there may be frustrated outliners among the Evernote staff), it's just the usual development thing of resources and priorities. Outlining is not the only proposed feature on their plates.

[GrumpyMonkey]

I know that they understand the importance of outlining to many people (who knows, there may be frustrated outliners among the Evernote staff)...

There must be a support group for this kind of thing

Of course, we'd all like the app to have everything that its 40 million + users have requested, but I wouldn't hold your breath, because I've never seen an app do that. Instead, we have a constantly improving app that is better than it was this time last year, but not as good as it will be next year. Hopefully, outlining is on the roadmap, but who knows. There are lots of reasons why things don't immediately appear, but the fact that the app is developed for every major computing platform is surely one thing to consider.

Anyhow, please keep suggesting the feature. The more data the developers have about what you do and what you want to do with the app, the more likely they are to incorporate your suggestions into the app. If you go through the forum posts, you can find numerous suggestions that have become reality, so it's a possibility, and the developers are definitely listening.

[Wildcard]

I love doing all my text work in evernote so it's with me wherever I go.. but I'm trying to make my life a little easier.

I'd like to do an outline in evernote with different levels of indentation.

There's an indent button in the toolbar which is inefficient, but can work ok... it has a keyboard shortcut though it's a bit hard to reach. It'd doable.. but unfortunately the formatting doesn't stay if pasted into another document which makes it quite limiting.

There's lists, which are more practical seeming, and appear somewhat more nicely, but they are limited to 2 levels. They can be pasted to other programs, but hierarchy is not maintined (list item or non list item).

I can use tabs, which can carry over, paste-wise, but they are frustrating because I do not start the next line at the same indendation.. I have to hit tab until it lines up.

How do you do outlining in evernote? Is there a better way that I'm missing? because this seems like a really useful capability to have

Thanks for the considered reply.

I am probably an edge case in that I use evernote pretty much just for the text capabilities.. for tagging and sorting all the text/notey type things I write up so I can get at them from anywhere and search through them easily. I haven't been in a situation where I felt it would be particularly useful to use the other features.. just hasn't ever felt necessary. So from that perspective I guess I'm not really using it for what it's meant for.. and that's why the features I specifically want are left in the dust a bit, but I haven't found any other service that has quite the same abilities with organizing text in the cloud, desktop and cross-platform.

I'm in this boat to some extent too. It's better now than in previous versions, but there's still more than can be done.

I try to keep related ideas and thoughts in one note in outline form, and add to them over time. Two out of three times, I'm most likely doing this on my iPhone, so it's a bit more of a hassle to outline effectively. I'm finally using Evernote on my MacBook Pro more now -- as in the last few months -- and foresee using it too on an iPad when I give in and buy one within the next year.

Copying and pasting text in from other sources hasn't been the best experience either. I often find myself spending more time than I should trying to keep the format consistant and in a similar manner I'm use to in Word for Mac 2011. I've had a few disastrous attempts with inconsistant outlining, fonts and spacing in the last week with copying and pasting. Often the biggest issue is trying to figure out if it's my ignorance or limitations of the software.

My first several months of using Evernote was text only. It was only fairly recently I started using the Web Clipper, audio and photo features. Now I'm trying to get the hang of the new major update. Pretty pleased so far. Still, I'm creating text in outline form the most and doing this multiple times a week now. It would be pretty awesome if there was a plugin for Word to export into Evernote and an export to/open in Word feature (.docx) in Evernote.

[JimHooton]

Here's one more voice requesting the identical outline features of OneNote. It's a huge missing piece of functionality in my opinion.

[neo1701]

Although full outlining capability would be nice, I'd be satisfied with having bulleted lists that aren't buggy.

With capability for OCR and note taking, Evernote could be an excellent office companion but the lack of simple, hierarchical note taking is a big limitation. I tried using an embedded word doc but then the problem becomes 1. lack of editing from a mobile device and 2. lack of integrated search of office apps.

For now, a google document works great for an outline. Evernote will keep my OCR'd documents and whiteboards.

<sigh>

[das852]

I see this has been argued to death without a result ion...I'd just like to add my voice for some outlining / hierarchical capabilities. It's the way a lot of people's minds work...

[Tiggerlou]

I'm one of those people who "think in outlines" and probably always will. I'm such a devotee, I've even made decisions about upgrading hardware and OS, based on whether they would support my ancient version of Clarisworks. I'm not a Luddite, I just don't want to give up powerful functionality.

Simple indentation is not outlining. That just makes text easier to read. The real power of outlining is in the writing --collapsing your text into headers in order to rearrange big chunks of text. If you try to do that with ordinary cut and paste, you can get totally lost in the scroll-scroll-scroll, trying to remember where you wanted to put that text. But once everything is collapsed into headers --you see exactly what you want to do with your text. Slip, bang, done. It - just - works!

I've been hunting for a more recent alternative to Clarisworks, but still haven't found anything that will let me convert my hundreds of docs without losing the precious formatting. Any suggestions?... BTW, if you're going to suggest one of the many outline-based task managers, thanks but no thanks. I don't need a bunch of features to help me get things done --I'm already a very happy Toodledo user. What I want is an outliner with for *text editing*.

 

Which brings me back to the topic of this forum thread...

I do love Evernote's portability and other fabulous features. But I keep holding back on really using it simply because of the lack of outlining capability. When I saw Cloud Outliner I thought my prayers were answered --until I found out that it's only for iOS   I've contacted the developers and they told me they have no plans for a Windows version. No joy in Mudville...

 

There has got to be a developer out there who can write a outliner that will work on Windows and coordinate with EN. Please, pretty please..?

[KellyH]

Up until this point I haven't used Evernote too much due to the terrible ability to expand/collapse lists.  This seems like such a core function to what Evernote is.  Forget Hello, Skitch, Food etc.  They aren't core.  It would be nice if Evernote would a) give more visibility into their road map and use UserVoice or something similar to let their users influence the road map.  They would be far more successful if they did this.  Evernote does a lot of things very well, but this is just such a basic need and I don't know if I can ever use it extensively without something like this.  Workflowy is so basic, but does this sooo beautifully.  I can't imagine the Workflowy concept is too hard to implement.  I think it is silly to say people should use a different app to construct outlines... outlines are core to so many things and the whole point of Evernote is to have everything in one place.  This is a note taking app... notes ARE outlines.  How well you can take notes should be the number one thing they should be paying attention to.  It wasn't until recently that you could even create a basic outline.  I understand the limited resources, but they raised a ton of money last year and they are rolling out far less important things.

 

Please Evernote listen to us I am begging you!!!

 

 

 

I fully agree with David Heimer when he says:

I'm amazed by several items in this thread:

1. Like me, many people assumed Evernote would have standard outlining functionality.

2. Evernote DOESN'T have standard outlining functionality.

3. Despite a large number of Evernote users saying how much want this functionality, the Evernote people commenting don't seem to care, which is odd. Typically paying attention to what your users want is a good idea.

[JonS]

I would really like to second everything said here. Even if Evernote's primary purpose is to be data capture & search, the fact that it purports to be a place to store notes (even short ones!) but has such horrible formatting is a great failure. I'm not asking for OneNote like formatting, or even Microsoft word formatting. But basic bulleting is not hard. Neither his highlighting. Nor is it a herculean effort to get this stuff working cross-platform (if it is, they have made some bad technology decisions up to this point which will burden them forever or until they decide to make a change). Every platform supports some extremely basic formatting operations (bullets, indents, proper tabs, text color, background color, bold/italic/underline). That's really all we're after. The editor that I'm using right now, or on any other online forum, supports MUCH more formatting/etc than Evernote. 

 

The reality, I think, is that the massively cross-platform support effort has become a) a good example of extreme bog-down from supporting multiple codebases and a crutch to justify poor user experience on the creation-of-content and UI/UX side of things. Evernote is amazing for storing, searching, and just generally capturing information - which is why I continue to love and use it, despite the many ways in which I have sadly grown to hate it.

 

But if a company that has been around for 5-7 years and has raised over $250 million dollars cannot get basic formatting right, they shouldn't be claiming they have anything to do with notetaking or the creation of unique content. Universal capture, fine (again, they're great at this). But it's unfair for Evernote and it's supporters to defend a company that can't get something this basic right. Evernote does not do this well, never has, and yet they market themselves as a note-taking repository in addition to being a capture-bucket. Either they should fix it, or they should market themselves differently, or they should just be honest about the fact that they made a few bad technology decisions combined with spreading themselves too thin across too many codebases and as a result are failing on this front. Bog-down from way too many focus areas isn't an excuse, but it's at least an explanation (is it really necessary to have Evernote available on obscure platforms, and are all the loosely-integrated side-projects really more important than this core functionality (skitch, hello, evernote food, clearly, evernote peek, etc)

 

Off the top of my head, a few random examples (using bullet points): 

• Bullet points in evernotes are fraught with technical issues. I'm not sure why they insist on using their own GUI, there are plentiful codebases out there for rich text editing that are cross-platform. A quick search on Evernote forums will show you the scope of this issue. An example is that on the Windows client, un-indenting a bullet (if it's not the first bullet in a list) is not possible. Whether you try the un-indent button or you hit shift-tab, the bulleted list simple dissolves and you have to re-create the bulleted list then indent. One example of this is here http://discussion.ev...hortcut-broken/
• No highlight/background color support: why is this? It's particularly weird since on the mac client the text-color picker is insanely robust (detrimentally so, in my opinion: do you really need to be able to pick between CMYK, RGB, HSB color schemes AND have the options of crayons, color wheels, color spectrums, and color sliders to select a color? A bland 8x5 of color boxes would be fine! ). This is even weirder because Clearly CAN highlight stuff -- so I end up with evernote notes where things are highlighted, but I cannot un-highlight or add highlights! So inconsistent. 
• Image insertion: if you insert an image to evernote notes, you can't resize it !! At all!
• Etc etc (a quick search for evernote editor on these forums will bring up many issues

Again, I'm really trying to be constructive here. I love Evenote.  I want to see it succeed. But I do not think that basic RTF functionality, available in ever web-email program in existence as well as all forums etc, is really that unreasonable. I'm not asking for any features that are unique or special or next-gen, I'm asking for the stuff available in a crappy program like MS Wordpad or a random forum post.

 

I think that the backlash against these types of feature request is really unusual and odd. They are not unreasonable requests, and it has been a long time. 5-7 years and $250 million dollars should be able to get you the basics of text editing, on a piece of software that purports to be "your external brain" where you can dump thoughts and notes and capture content. If this is really that hard or if they really have that many other priorities, maybe they should rethink those priorities. Is a food-picture add-on that's loosely integrated, really more important than a very basic level of functionality in their core product? Is it really more important to support the Nth different OS or Mobile OS or browser? 

[jefito]

@KellyH, Jon Sheller:

I'd be happy if Evernote upleveled their support for better formatting options on their various clients and brought better consistency to their various Evernote clients. No backlash from me against these improvements, in other words.

I will, however, continue to defend their right to make their own business decisions as to what it and is not feasible to do in the interests of the preservation of their company. It's their livelihood that's at stake, and their future as the company that wants to be around for 100 years. I don't find a lot of value in second-guessing what they should do next; Evernote is today -- imperfect as is noted -- still a useful tool for me.

[JonS]

@Jefito,

Totally agree that the final calls are up to them, in terms of balancing what the right priorities are after weighing all the incoming feedback.

 

Don't agree though, that it's not useful to second-guess them. I think being second-guessed by your customers can be extremely valuable. I'm not even second-guessing per se, rather providing feedback. This should be something valuable, given that they're a 100% consumer/smb-facing company. Their livelihood is their consumer satisfaction. My point is that MANY users seem to voice this concern, or related concerns, and there really has been very little progress over many years. I know they have other priorities, but my intention was to point out that at some point "we're busy with other stuff" becomes an empty or at least very weak excuse (becuase we all know that the "other stuff" list is infinite). Particularly when that other stuff is all over the place (food photo clipping, evernote peek, etc). I'm 100% ok to be overridden by popular outcry seeking flash-card-like ipad functionality. I just a) don't believe that in reality these features are as important to users as the core functionality of note-taking, thought-jotting, etc and don't think that being multi-platform is an excuse. Basic text formatting capabilities, via html or markdown or whatever, or not a cutting-edge technology. If I can make webpages work in IE7, Evernote should be able to get their note-taking interface up to current standards across platforms (unless it's not a priority). 

 

If the real answer is, rather than "we're really busy with important stuff", actually "we're not a note-taking app, we're a universal-capture-but-not-create app" then that's 100% OK with me. But this is not the current message/marketing/pitch. If evernote is my "external brain", it should be a place where I can at least have a non-buggy, basic level of text and note-taking support. 

 

My last point, and the reason that I wrote my original post, is that the debate surrounding these issues can be frustrating to watch on these forums. Often (to be clear, not always) the response from Evernote or Evernote Evangelists is , roughly, to criticize folks for even asking/expecting these types of features (or, even more, for feeling they have a right to know whether these features are on the roadmap). As far as I know this is the only place to discuss features with a chance of being heard by Evernote (I wish they used UserVoice or something similar!), and most people are really genuinely well-intentioned. I just don't agree with the blanket responses that "evernote can't immediately deliver everything it's 40m+ users request, so don't hold your breath" and "evernote can't immediately do everything because it's working on so many platforms, maybe it will work on this someday, or is working on it, but who knows".

 

I think that there are probably a lot of people who want this, it shouldn't be THAT difficult, we're not asking for it immediately but sometime soon would be nice, and I do think it's reasonable for users to expect some degree of visibility into these things vs unquestioning support of an invisible roadmap. We don't need a full roadmap, but rough priorities or at least a commitment to NOT say "we're definitely interested in doing this at some point" if that's not really true. I think it's fair for people to get frustrated when something they consider core to an application they care a lot about isn't up to par, and when they feel like they're getting either misleading answers, unsatisfactory answers ("it's too hard"), indefinite/misleading answers ("it's hard but we're really trying to deliver on this sometime soon"),  or no answers as to why and whether it will ever change. 

 

My ten cents. Again, genuinely happy to be outvoted here if I'm in a minority of caring about this feature. Just wish the message would be clearer one way or another from evernote. 

[David Heimer]

@KellyH, Jon Sheller:

I'd be happy if Evernote upleveled their support for better formatting options on their various clients and brought better consistency to their various Evernote clients. No backlash from me against these improvements, in other words.

I will, however, continue to defend their right to make their own business decisions as to what it and is not feasible to do in the interests of the preservation of their company. It's their livelihood that's at stake, and their future as the company that wants to be around for 100 years. I don't find a lot of value in second-guessing what they should do next; Evernote is today -- imperfect as is noted -- still a useful tool for me.

 

@jefito

 

I have no idea what defending Evernote's "right to make their own business decisions" has to do with outlining. Did one of the many people requesting basic outlining features say that Evernote couldn't make their own business decisions? Since you're an Evernote Evangelist, surely you would see the benefit of keeping this little part of the Evernote discussion forum strictly focused on the subject -- OUTLINING. 

[jefito]

@JonS: I was going to write up a long point-by-point response to you, but I don't think we really need that. I do sympathize with a lot of what you say and always hope that Evernote can deliver a better editing experience. Just some points:

* My notion of "second-guessing" is something beyond just feedback and suggestions (these are good things and are certainly encouraged here). It seems like you were hedging on the distinction yourself. I guess where I draw the line is somewhere between "it would be great to have X" and "Evernote ought to have X", and that can depend on my perception of the attitude of the poster.

* I doubt very much whether you will hear criticism from Evernote staff of people making feature requests. You're far more likely to get a bland (but not unmeant) "thanks for the request". And they do read them. They have some idea of what's on the roadmap, but they do not generally divulge it (I think that they probably call it the "Due Date Rule", backstage ) Sometimes they do talk about motivations for what they do or do not do, but they don't care to repeat themselves if their stance hasn't changed, so using search or reading all of a long thread can be useful.

* I can't speak for all of the Evangelists -- we are separate individuals. Personally, I've tried to learn to tone things down, though sometimes -- if the requests are made in a rude and/or uninformed fashion (and they can be) -- I am not always as polite as I might be (certainly not as polite as GrumpyMonkey). I feel as though it's OK to ask what's on the roadmap, but the stock answer is as above: Evernote doesn't generally reveal what's coming up. For me, that's their policy, so I accept it. I never claim to know what's on the roadmap (because it's almost always true); however, after several years of fielding forum posts, I do have a feeling for some of the things that I think might be more or less unlikely, and that sometimes seems worth sharing. I do tend to disclaimer things that I don't know for sure.

* Bottom line is for me is that most of the time we just try to help solve problems for users of Evernote, with the actual Evernote product as it exists. Beyond that, when I hear someone insisting that Evernote must have feature X, I think it's valid to point out something like "if you need X, and Evernote doesn't have it, then you should perhaps find something that does, rather than agitating over something that may never change".

[jefito]

David Heimer, on 03 Mar 2013 - 21:31, said:
I have no idea what defending Evernote's "right to make their own business decisions" has to do with outlining. Did one of the many people requesting basic outlining features say that Evernote couldn't make their own business decisions? Since you're an Evernote Evangelist, surely you would see the benefit of keeping this little part of the Evernote discussion forum strictly focused on the subject -- OUTLINING.

Making feature requests is fine. Editorializing that Evernote doesn't seem to care or doesn't pay attention to their users is strictly speaking not topical, either. But since you seemed to want to have that conversation...

[Tylast2]

I'm one of those people who "think in outlines" and probably always will. I'm such a devotee, I've even made decisions about upgrading hardware and OS, based on whether they would support my ancient version of Clarisworks. I'm not a Luddite, I just don't want to give up powerful functionality.

Simple indentation is not outlining. That just makes text easier to read. The real power of outlining is in the writing --collapsing your text into headers in order to rearrange big chunks of text. If you try to do that with ordinary cut and paste, you can get totally lost in the scroll-scroll-scroll, trying to remember where you wanted to put that text. But once everything is collapsed into headers --you see exactly what you want to do with your text. Slip, bang, done. It - just - works!

I've been hunting for a more recent alternative to Clarisworks, but still haven't found anything that will let me convert my hundreds of docs without losing the precious formatting. Any suggestions?... BTW, if you're going to suggest one of the many outline-based task managers, thanks but no thanks. I don't need a bunch of features to help me get things done --I'm already a very happy Toodledo user. What I want is an outliner with for *text editing*.

 

Which brings me back to the topic of this forum thread...

I do love Evernote's portability and other fabulous features. But I keep holding back on really using it simply because of the lack of outlining capability. When I saw Cloud Outliner I thought my prayers were answered --until I found out that it's only for iOS   I've contacted the developers and they told me they have no plans for a Windows version. No joy in Mudville...

 

There has got to be a developer out there who can write a outliner that will work on Windows and coordinate with EN. Please, pretty please..?

 

I like the features of Cloud Outliner, but Evernote could easily incorporate some of those features.  That and some sort of greying of text when an item is checked.

[chux52]

They realize it is an issue. dlu even said that he uses Workflowy, sometimes.

 

The problem is that notes are created in a restricted type of HTML(ENML) which only allows certain tags and doesn't allow javascript. My guess is that being able to have a collapsible outline would require a new basis for how all notes are formatted.

[jefito]

The problem is that notes are created in a restricted type of HTML(ENML) which only allows certain tags and doesn't allow javascript. My guess is that being able to have a collapsible outline would require a new basis for how all notes are formatted.

JavaScript is not part of HTML; not sure why that would be a problem.

I'm guessing that Evernote might be able to implement outline collapsing using the current set of HTML tags, but I'm not sure how they'd go about persisting that state. Maybe by adding special properties to the CSS "style"? Another problem might be recognizing outlines at all; I am also guessing that they've had more than one outline implementation over the years, so it may be difficult to recognize an outline as such.

[chux52]

Not a part of HTML, I meant to say not a part of ENML. 

 

If your input has <script> it removes it before outputting in ENML so that JavaScript is not allowed.

 

I'm not very advanced in this stuff, but you can hide and unhide, just with CSS, so maybe it could be a possibility to do without JavaScript. So, instead of you clicking the button to bold and it inputting <b>, you would have a button that inputted <style = display:hidden> (not sure if that is even correct) The funny thing about the ENML is that each line has a <div> or something strange and that id's and classes are also blocked, so I don't know how you could send a command to hide more than one line, just by inputting tags.

[jefito]

That's right -- the script tag is explicitly disallowed by ENML (http://dev.evernote.....php#prohibited). 

 

ENML doesn't have a requirement that <div>s be used for each line (though that's a recommendation for plain text notes: http://dev.evernote....l.php#plaintext, which outline notes are not). Aside from that, Evernote does use divs, but if you ever peek inside the ENML for a note that contains outlines (and I recommend that you do -- it's interesting), they use <ol>, <ul>,and <li> tags to implement their outlines.