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Using Anchors within Notes, hyperlinking between notes


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  • Level 5

Anchors...

gWEMx.png

They're useful for jumping to specific sections of longer documents.

In this case I really want to be able to create inter-note links within EN to specific sections/paragraphs etc.

e.g. evernote:///view/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/yyyyyyyyy#myimportantsection

I don't believe this is possible, is it?

If not, please consider this my official plea for this feature.

My horrible workaround for the lack of anchors is breaking up long notes into lots of little chunks so that when I link to them I can see what I am looking for. but this results in somewhat of an organizational clusterf**k.

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I don't believe this is possible, is it?

Correct.

My horrible workaround for the lack of anchors is breaking up long notes into lots of little chunks

I use the same workaround if I need a reliable note link to the info. Otherwise, I use:

- Note search to locate info in a longer note

- Clipped anchors as links back to original source page at the anchor

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  • 3 weeks later...

My horrible workaround for the lack of anchors is breaking up long notes into lots of little chunks so that when I link to them I can see what I am looking for. but this results in somewhat of an organizational clusterf**k.

I use the same method of breaking down notes. I will have so many notes this way by the time I am done it is going to be a ridiculous amount of work. Not to mention each time I break a note into a subnote I to sync to get the link to paste back the original note. This is an extreame time waster makeing a program with such great potential so much less useful than it could be.

Why I am on it, why do I have to go to such extreams to do such basic and simple things? I have to some how train my team to copy text out of Evernote and into an exteranl HTML editor ( web base becuse we work across different Operating Systems and different locations in North America ) Highlight the text and then copy the text from the HTML Editor and back into Evenote again replacing the original text. Really! All of this just to highlight text?

Can anyone explain to me why Evernote would not have plugin cababilities, especially for the desktop version. I don't understand why I have to use so many third party tools to do things that ought to be build in or have plugins for.

For me as a serious user the interface has Serious limitations. As someone who has done lots of programming in the past I do not understand such limitations. I am not ready to toss evernote just yet but my team is already complaining. We do not need uncommon features here, just ones that you would expect to be there. The Evernote interface has many great features that make it attractive but makes no sense to me that such a lack of basic things could be a deal breaker.

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  • Level 5

I hope Evernote keeps the program simple for the typical user and continues to shy away from the corporate folks.

Quote from Dave Engberg (Evernote CTO) on April 4, 2011 (emphasis mine)

"Basically, a bunch of the people who built Evernote have a lot of experience in the "Enterprise software sales" business, and it's completely 180-degree different than Evernote's "freemium" personal memory service.
It's hard to do both business models under the same roof
, in my experience."
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  • Level 5

Anchors are for "corporate folks" ? huhhh... ?? Sometimes the comments here just leave me baffled. JBenson what makes you any more qualified than Amour Spirit to define the "typical user" ? If EN wants to ignore power users/corporate users/whatever-you-want-to-call-them then what the heck, let's just remove the subscription option completely, make everybody "Freemium" and let's put huge banner ads and Facebook "like" buttons all over the place. Go for broke!

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  • Level 5

I was responding to the difficulty Armour Spirit was having in the corporate environment.

"I have to some how train
my team
to copy text out of Evernote and into an exteranl HTML editor"

By the way, even Phil Libin (Evernote CEO) offered some comments about the problems dealing with enterprise customers.

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  • Level 5*

I'd posit that jbenson2 might have a better grasp of what a typical Evernote user might be because he's here, every day, answering questions, and has been for a while. We see a lot of requests posted in the forums for all different types of features, and while anchors are not uncommon, neither are they appreciably all that high up on the list. My own intuition is that while having anchor support in Evernote would be undoubtedly useful, most users (and I'd guess many "Serious users") are not crippled without them, certainly not to the extent that Anchor Spirit seems to be. It's unfortunate that Evernote doesn't have the features that Anchor Spirit's team needs, doubly so because it was apparently chosen before the teams needs were known, but it's not Evernote's business to manage others' expectations of what features they should provide...

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  • Level 5

Yes jbenson2 is here quite a bit. I used to be quite active here myself, but in the last few months I've cut back to almost zero. I put so much time into testing, suggestions, bug reports, I created a "saveevernote.com" website to campaign for the fix of the horrific .NET fuzzy font rendering, EvernoteVote.com to allow people to vote for new features, etc. The relative return on that time investment was next to nil. Instead I found myself constantly attacked by "Evangelists" with just about every new post or feature request, suggestion for how to make the product better. It just isn't worth it. I realized that EN is basically a monopoly (there is nobody else providing a similar service) and as such they pretty much do whatever they want and ignore most user requests. I cannot steer this boat any more than anyone else. Once I gave up trying, I found I had more time for other things. That's fine, but I do always hold out hope that a competitor comes along to take my money because I am ready to switch as soon as such an option presents itself.

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  • Level 5*

luckman212 sounds frustrated. sorry to hear that.

it seems to me that there is a distinction to be made between listening and doing. i think evernote does listen. in fact, their representatives frequently comment right here on the forums. some of the comments i like. some of them i don't. but, they are listening.

we all have things we wish evernote did. the fact that they don't, and we can't make them is simply a fact of life we need to accept. if evernote listened AND did what every one of its millions of users said, we'd have an app that nobody likes.

just my thoughts on the matter.

as far as anchors go, i just don't see them as a big deal. put them in or not, i don't mind. i often think it would be cool to have markdown or some other way to handle the layout, but so far evernote seems to be headed in a different direction. it's not my ship to steer :blink:

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  • Level 5*
Yes jbenson2 is here quite a bit. I used to be quite active here myself, but in the last few months I've cut back to almost zero. I put so much time into testing, suggestions, bug reports, I created a "saveevernote.com" website to campaign for the fix of the horrific .NET fuzzy font rendering, EvernoteVote.com to allow people to vote for new features, etc. The relative return on that time investment was next to nil. Instead I found myself constantly attacked by "Evangelists" with just about every new post or feature request, suggestion for how to make the product better. It just isn't worth it. I realized that EN is basically a monopoly (there is nobody else providing a similar service) and as such they pretty much do whatever they want and ignore most user requests. I cannot steer this boat any more than anyone else. Once I gave up trying, I found I had more time for other things. That's fine, but I do always hold out hope that a competitor comes along to take my money because I am ready to switch as soon as such an option presents itself.

Case in point: you seemed to take my fairly benign observation as a personal affront. Feel free to read what I actually said. There's very little there about you at all, in fact.

You had some good input into the the bug stream awhile ago, but they often seemed to come with the implicit message "Evernote are idiots". They're not idiots, and they're not a monopoly either (or you're using a different meaning of the term "monopoly" that most other people do), and they don't ignore their users. I don''t understand why you think that you should be the one to steer the boat; this is a user forum, and users do not steer the boat (although they can choose to get off the boat at any time). I find that instead of expecting Evernote to implement my every whim, I do better when trying to help others to use Evernote better as it is; Evernote improvements will come with time.

Sorry you're unhappy -- I think that you could contribute.

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  • Level 5*

Agreed. Why not contribute? You may not agree with where Evernote seems to be going, what it seems to be now, or what some of the forum members might seem to be saying. But, surely there are things you like about Evernote, people's contributions that you have found helpful, and members you get along with well. Right? I hope so.

Anyhow, it's good to see you are passionate about the app.

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For whoever is asking EN team to add a feature or two should have in mind huuuge user base (something as 20 million if I am not mistaken) with several different clients (Windows, Android, iOS, Mac...). With this in mind I would say that ultimate priority to EN team is keeping the system stable, cross-platform and usable enough.

I also had couple of recommendations that would make my life easier but not something that is worthy of giving up of EN. For every such idea there was workaround. Also there are very experienced users on this forum who can (and are giving) good even excellent advices. So for anchors I could say yes it is nice to have but, if you want to have huge amount of text in one single Note you may consider splitting it in several plain text or HTML files and attach them. I find this very convenient and applicable in cases where I need text with formatting that does not exist in EN (usually docx or xlsx files). I know that it is not perfect but also it will not add too much overhead.

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No anchors so far. I can see how they'd be useful on the desktop, but I think much less useful across the mobile clients. This would contribute to how we prioritize the feature.

Regarding the highlighting and other rich text options, yeah I know. We'll be working on it

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I was responding to the difficulty Armour Spirit was having in the corporate environment.

"I have to some how train
my team
to copy text out of Evernote and into an exteranl HTML editor"

Sigh! I guess I led you guys to an assumption. I do not work in a corporate enviroment. My team is not that big just spread out. I happen to be the most experienced with these matters and thus was tasked with putting together our communication and study tools. After weighing the skills of other members of the team along with what our needs would be I found Evernote to be closest to what we need. Mostly we are a sudy group trying to learn a rather complex amount of data. The the data is spread all over the web sort of speak so we need to gather it and cross reference it. Many of these notes will be long with many parts that need to be references in other notes. Also the highlighting is sorely needed as that nature of the data does not lend itself to changing of the text but hilighting would be acceptable, Comments such as google docs offers would be perfect but I am not asking for the world.

If I was not doing this with a team then I would still be doing it on my own for my own personal use so from that point of view corporate has nothing to do with it. I don't see any immediate reason why all of Evernotes' platforms could not use anchors and other aforementioned features. If a platform did not support Anchors such as Android then just disable the anchor part and display the note. Does not seem to be a big deal to me. Not to mention that Evernote writes the programs for all the clients so they do have complete control. Just my two cents worth on my understanding base upon my programming experience.

I am however eternally greatful that Evernote added the feature of note links.

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  • Level 5*

I think if you have a "team" you are "corporate" in the sense of several people united into one group (hahaha). Seriously, though, the anchor feature sounds fine. I could see it working well enough on mobile as well. As an individual gathering lots of information, though, I haven't had any need for anchors yet, but I can see why someone might.

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  • 1 year later...

No anchors so far. I can see how they'd be useful on the desktop, but I think much less useful across the mobile clients. This would contribute to how we prioritize the feature.

Regarding the highlighting and other rich text options, yeah I know. We'll be working on it

 

I realize that this is an old thread, but I was searching for information on anchor functionality in Evernote and came across this.  I'll just mention my use-case: adding a table of contents to a long note.  I frequently clip articles to Evernote with many sections and would like to add a table of contents at the beginning to link to the sections for easy navigation.  The ENML spec already allows named anchors and relative hrefs, it's just that they're non-functional, which I don't suppose would be very difficult to add.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I'd like to pile on to this feature request since the thread was bumped. Unless this has been implemented otherwise or there's a convenient work-around I'd say this feature limits the hyperlinking feature. I read that there's a technical limitation where mobile is concerned? I'm not sure how that's possible: if you can already resolve a hyperlink and return a specific note then you're mostly there. If the anchor is still accessible it's a matter of moving content into view by whatever means available via the API. There's reference implementations everywhere. This is HTML 1.0 stuff here.

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I think what's happening is that people are using Evernote for much more than it was originally intended. It's become an environment. The request for anchors indicates that people are creating LONG documents in Evernote. It means that they would rather create these documents in Evernote than in a word processor.

 

This is an opportunity for Evernote. Adding this feature will get power users to move more of their work into Evernote. Once in, it will be harder to leave in the future. And these long documents are probably shared with others who will then be motivated to get Evernote or upgrade to Premium.

 

There's people who use Evernote to go paperless. Evernote has adapted by having folder that automatically import scans, selling scanners optimized for this purpose, etc.

 

Then there's people who want to use Evernote as their task manager, such as the Secret Weapon. Evernote has adapted by adding Reminders, and (sometimes) the improving tools needed for these systems of tags, and saved searches.

 

And then there's those of us who wish to create more of our documents in Evernote. As a premium user, being able to give a note URL, or various access levels to a shared folder, makes Evernote a superior collaborative tool than sending word documents through the mail. I also have my "notes" synchronized across multiple platforms. I'd rather stay in Evernote where I've got so much than add to another tool like Google Docs, or to use a secondary step of embedded Word documents.

 

Currently, I'd consider anchors to be the most essential missing feature for using Evernote for long documents. 

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  • 1 month later...
  • Level 5

No anchors so far. I can see how they'd be useful on the desktop, but I think much less useful across the mobile clients. This would contribute to how we prioritize the feature.

Regarding the highlighting and other rich text options, yeah I know. We'll be working on it

 

I was reading this comment again and it occurred to me that actually, anchors are probably more useful on mobile clients. They have smaller screens and thus being able to link directly to the specific section you are looking for (e.g. via a saved search or from inter-linked notes) would definitely be a win. Dlu- what is your thought process for saying that they'd be "much less useful" on mobile?

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Bumping this thread as well.

 

I write long documents on EN 'cause I use it to study and it's easier to find text on EN than on a normal word processor. This feature would help me a lot to organize my notes :) 

 

And as luckyman212 said, 

 

I was reading this comment again and it occurred to me that actually, anchors are probably more useful on mobile clients. They have smaller screens and thus being able to link directly to the specific section you are looking for (e.g. via a saved search or from inter-linked notes) would definitely be a win. Dlu- what is your thought process for saying that they'd be "much less useful" on mobile?

 

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  • 4 months later...

I too would find this feature very useful. I have an Alfred workflow that creates a wiki of sorts with selected notes, but I'd very much like to be able to make a table of contents at the top of a note, similar to the sections of wikipedia. I agree that this feature would be MORE useful on mobile, as it's much more inconvenient to scroll through long notes on a small screen. one of the reasons i became a premium subscriber was that i wanted to be able to edit long documents on both mobile and desktop, but anchor links would make that much easier.

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The long-time lack of this feature is one reason I've finally switched to OneNote for day-to-day needs, and only use Evernote for information dumps. Evernote has SO MANY half-way issue like this -- no indent on iPad, intrusive development that changed line spacing on iPad checkboxes, still no font settings on iOS, etc., etc. I just couldn't take it anymore. OneNote isn't perfect and is a bit slow, but it's clean, professional, better organized, and more colorful.

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The long-time lack of this feature is one reason I've finally switched to OneNote for day-to-day needs, and only use Evernote for information dumps. Evernote has SO MANY half-way issue like this -- no indent on iPad, intrusive development that changed line spacing on iPad checkboxes, still no font settings on iOS, etc., etc. I just couldn't take it anymore. OneNote isn't perfect and is a bit slow, but it's clean, professional, better organized, and more colorful.

I've considered OneNote, but I use quite a few Applescripts and Alfred workflows with Evernote, and I'm not sure I'd be able to convert them to work with Onenote (if Onenote is even Applescript compatible). I've finally got a routine down that I think will work long term for academic things (I've been using Evernote on a few different accounts since I started college in late 2008, and finally got premium this May) and using an EN notebook to host a personal wiki has become a huge part of that. I'm hesitant to switch since I've been using EN for so long, but lack of anchor links is making that increasingly more likely.

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  • 1 month later...

I think what's happening is that people are using Evernote for much more than it was originally intended. It's become an environment. The request for anchors indicates that people are creating LONG documents in Evernote. It means that they would rather create these documents in Evernote than in a word processor.

 

This is an opportunity for Evernote.

...

And then there's those of us who wish to create more of our documents in Evernote...

 

Currently, I'd consider anchors to be the most essential missing feature for using Evernote for long documents. 

I see also a lot of potential here. For example if I want to share my notes with my colleagues; it would be great to link inside of the meeting note to some previous note in the same document (e.g. decision points, action points).

 

I hope to see this feature in the future. Thanks! :)

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  • 2 months later...
  • 8 months later...

 

I don't believe this is possible, is it?

Correct.

My horrible workaround for the lack of anchors is breaking up long notes into lots of little chunks

I use the same workaround if I need a reliable note link to the info. Otherwise, I use:

- Note search to locate info in a longer note

- Clipped anchors as links back to original source page at the anchor

 

 

What is a "clipped anchor"? Thx.

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  • 2 months later...

First post on this thread was four(!) years ago, and still no anchor functinality... W.T.F. Evernote!?  :wacko:

 

This would be an extremely useful feature for us. Especially when we need to link between long notes (something I at least find myself doing a lot). How complicated can this feature be to implement vs the userfriendliness one gets? Effort vs impact is a nobrainer here!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Anchor would be really practical since we also use Evernote as a knowledge base in our company. And if it get's too much for light users, you just hide it a bit right? Power users will find it anyway ...

And otherwise we just use the new 'paper' tool from dropbox and paste it in our notes right ;-)

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