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HOWTO: Diff a conflict with the original


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Is there any way to check the differences between a conflicted note and the original?

When you have a sync conflict issue and the note is big, scanning through them with your eyeballs can be problematic. Is there a way to "Compare this to the original" or "Compare this note to..." to simply highlight the differences between the two?

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If you are using the Windows client, you could export them both to Evernote format, and compare them with a text file comparison program (we use Beyond Compare at work for source code).

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  • 7 months later...
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If you are using the Windows client, you could export them both to Evernote format, and compare them with a text file comparison program (we use Beyond Compare at work for source code).

The purpose of coming to Evenote is to bring all information that you read across various places in the web, save and concentrate content to a single organizing and archiving center. If Evenote has been around for so long and has versioning of notes, then the obvious logical step would be to have an integrated version comparing system within its own framework.

Exporting notes out of Evernote to make a comparison is nothing but plain stupid and i must say that for the lack of this feature, i simply have to give EN a thumbs down. :angry:

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If you are using the Windows client, you could export them both to Evernote format, and compare them with a text file comparison program (we use Beyond Compare at work for source code).

The purpose of coming to Evenote is to bring all information that you read across various places in the web, save and concentrate content to a single organizing and archiving center. If Evenote has been around for so long and has versioning of notes, then the obvious logical step would be to have an integrated version comparing system within its own framework.

If Evernote were primarily a content versioning system, then it might be a logical and obvious step, but they're not. They do maintain, on their servers, and at intervals not controlled by the user, note histories, available to premium users, but that's not the same thing.

Exporting notes out of Evernote to make a comparison is nothing but plain stupid and i must say that for the lack of this feature, i simply have to give EN a thumbs down. :angry:

If it's the only way to get a comparison at this time, then it's not stupid to use it as a workaround. I agree that this would be a useful feature, particularly if conflicts are common (I've had no more than three in over four years), but if that's the only reason that you have for giving Evernote a thumbs-down, then it seems to me that you're slighting the things that they do well.

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If Evernote were primarily a content versioning system, then it might be a logical and obvious step, but they're not. They do maintain, on their servers, and at intervals not controlled by the user, note histories, available to premium users, but that's not the same thing.

If it's the only way to get a comparison at this time, then it's not stupid to use it as a workaround. I agree that this would be a useful feature, particularly if conflicts are common (I've had no more than three in over four years), but if that's the only reason that you have for giving Evernote a thumbs-down, then it seems to me that you're slighting the things that they do well.

I obviously think that it is stupid, for the simple reason, that Evernote advertises its product as an organizer and productivity enhancing tool, which essentially means that Evernote is a time saver, and avoids redundancy in work. The lack of an logical extension of a feature , hence forcing a user to look for an external resource, is an obvious waste of time, and am sure many would agree with that.

If you've had no more than 3 in four years, then good for you. There are people out there, who have slow net connections ( even dial up/GPRS connections that take 5+ minutes to load a webpage at times when they are on the move) , or no net connections, all the time. { Please don't get started up with saying that Evernote is not designed to work for people who have dial up or no connections most of the time }

Note conflicts form a major portion of their Evernote daily life, and one has to be extra cautious ( means invest more time ) to ensure that they don't delete a note , therby losing precious data.

When i complement Evernote for being a wonderful software and acknowledge that it is an integral portion of my life, then i guess that i have the same rights to criticize and crib it at times for pissing me off, thanks to thier shortcomings, which would only have been logical extensions to thier existing features. I believe that it is one way, people would respond to my posts, and people at Evernote will have a look at their shortcomings.

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When i complement Evernote for being a wonderful software and acknowledge that it is an integral portion of my life, then i guess that i have the same rights to criticize and crib it at times for pissing me off, thanks to thier shortcomings, which would only have been logical extensions to thier existing features. I believe that it is one way, people would respond to my posts, and people at Evernote will have a look at their shortcomings.

Without trying to prolong the discussion, you have every right to compliment or criticize Evernote and their products, absolutely. But when you do so in public, you might find someone who disagrees with you, and, this being a user forum, they have the same right to disagree with you.

That being said, I do understand what you're asking for; I'm not so sure that a lot of people have the problem, though (Evernote certainly does, as it can track that through their servers). I'm guessing that Evernote is aware of the issue (since the Conflicting Notes notebook exists, at all, right?). You're the first person that I can recall asking for a note comparison facility as part of Evernote, though. I can see some pluses and minuses to that. As it is now, there's no such facility, but comparing via an external tool is feasible, if awkward; that's why I suggested it.

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Well, i didn't mean to be rude or something, but anyways, I am sorry. Since you told me that comparison via external tool is feasible, i will give you a test case of 2 notes, that i had to compare once, that literally made me tear my hair off.

The note was a note of bullet points, essentially, sprinkled with color differences in highlights, font changes and strike throughs.

Just export both the notes in ( all 4 possible export options in Evenote ) and compared using Beyondcompare, and i literally went mad.

You can try it for yourself.

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Speaking for myself, I would like two things:

(1) Conflicting Modifications notebooks generated on all clients (not just the desktop ones)

(2) Highlighting of discrepancies between two conflicting notes

Why? The bibliography for my dissertation (several tens of thousands of words) encountered a conflicting modification back in September, and what iOS does in this situation is to paste the conflicting note onto the bottom of the original without any notification. I went along for a long time making corrections and changes to both versions until I discovered that the content had been doubled (without my permission, of course), and in the middle of my note was a message saying there were conflicting modifications. It would have been bad enough to go through the note line by line to figure out where the conflicts were, but now that I have made changes as well, it is a daunting task.I cannot tell you how many hours I have spent on sorting this out, and it may well take me several more months to deal with this one note (I actually have several other conflicting modifications -- I seem to get a few a month now).

An additional problem is that the note is now inaccessible on the app that created the problem in the first place. It now takes fifteen seconds or so to open the note, and so far, no amount of tapping in the text field allows me to edit the note. Basically, when I am on my iPad, the note I use the most has now become useless. It is a tragedy of Greek proportions! And, since I do most of my work on the iPad, it has has quite an impact on my daily work.

I've lost no data. I'll live. However, a couple of simple features (simple to imagine, but maybe difficult to code) would have enabled me to recognize the conflict had happened, compare the two notes, and get on with my work.

What's the solution for now? Because, I don't think we are likely to get either of these feature requests answered soon, if at all (I imagine it is not a high priority). This is my advice: break up long notes into shorter ones. This will make sorting through the conflicts easier, and you'll avoid the problem I encountered. This was actually my policy for everything, but over time the bibliography just kept growing, and I never spent time to break it up. Now, I have one master list with note links to 26 notes (one for each letter of the alphabet) containing my bibliography. Of course, this occurred in September, and by the time I got this set up and running, the Mac version lost its back button, and that made my "solution" untenable. This might explain my grumpiness about the missing back button, but that is griping for another thread :)

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Well, i didn't mean to be rude or something, but anyways, I am sorry. Since you told me that comparison via external tool is feasible, i will give you a test case of 2 notes, that i had to compare once, that literally made me tear my hair off.

'Feasible' doesn't mean the same thing as 'easy'. :) I've had plenty of experience doing diffs of source files, less of binaries, but it can be done. I don't think I need examples to understand that. But thanks anyways.

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I would like to put in a vote for the "Diff Comparison" feature as well. I use Evernote pretty heavily w/ my team at work and we've been storing documentation, project planning, todo lists, etc that we use every day. I have at least 15 copies of "Conflicting Changes" notebooks I've been meaning to clean up eventually, so just now I went to do the work and it was really difficult. I do a lot of coding so I used BBEdit's compare feature, copied and pasted the contents of each different file into their own text files, and then compared and merged missing lines one by one. Eventually I think I got them all but it took at least an hour.

Because of this and several other issues we've had with using Evernote this way we have decided to move to using Confluence for our documentation and shared project planning, and Google Documents for collaborative live-editing. I'll probably only keep Evernote in my workflow for personal notes, meeting notes that I later transfer to Confluence, and things that I don't plan on sharing. The sharing features are just a bit weak, and with some improvements in this area I think Evernote would be more competitive when it comes to collaboration solutions.

I'd like to put in a much heavier vote for Evernote to provide a live-editing solution like Google Docs. This would completely eliminate the need for Conflicting files, Diff comparisons, etc, and solve a much more important problem of being able to work on documents together with remote team members and see the changes live without sync delays.

I really love Evernote and I use it on all my devices and it's great for managing my personal life, but as a business tool unfortunately it's just not up to par. Would love to hear if any of these things are on the roadmap and when we might be able to expect them!

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I'm definitely in agreement that this would be a most useful feature. I too run across conflicts at least once a month, having EN on three different devices. EN does a pretty good job of syncing them, but when there are conflicts, they're typically in large notes that are hard to merge without some outside help.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I had a duplicated notebook since July (2000+ notes). This was due to and EN upgrade which duplicated them. Is ther a safe way I can delete this duplicated notes without risk of losing something? Id like to be able to compare both notebooks in order I can be sure they're identical duplicates.

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Rather than a lot of the third party developers, who create apps , most of which are already there in the stock evernote app ( Like A HTC phone that advertises saying that any information will be syncd to evernote, it doesnt take rocket science to install EN from the google play store and sync it through the default app, so what's so special about this phone, me wonders? ), the 3rd party developers need to develop functionalities lke this which are not present in EN.

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the 3rd party developers need to develop functionalities lke this which are not present in EN.

Yes, that's probably the best way forward in cases like these, where Evernote probably doesn't see the need as being great enough to justify the effort. The problem is making it worth the effort to 3rd-party devs (noting that some of them do it for the best reason, which is "just because I needed it and thought that it would be useful to others").

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Rather surprising that Evernote cannot handle conflicts. I did nothing special other than edit a note on my iPhone and Mac, now I'm sitting with a problem and no easy way to resolve and instead of saving me time, I'm researching "diff tools".

Conflict resolution really should be built in and I don't even think user based diff are the best way to go about it.

See operational transformation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

As for attitudes, it's great that there are evangelists here and all, a company needs those, but also they need to be flexible and not take a "x can do no wrong" approach eg or defend the status quo, or defending the company at the expense of the user experience.

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As for attitudes, it's great that there are evangelists here and all, a company needs those, but also they need to be flexible and not take a "x can do no wrong" approach eg or defend the status quo, or defending the company at the expense of the user experience.

As it happens, not one of the evangelists claims that Evernote "can do no wrong", but since we have no real power to change anything and don't really know much more about Evernote's internal goals than any other user, we find it's usually more realistic to deal with the way that Evernote exists currently and offer workarounds. If that comes off as defending the company overmuch to you, so be it. *shrug* Of course, if you want to help out the community, you're welcome to teach by example; I can tell you that the condition of evangelitis is pretty much self-inflicted. :)

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As for attitudes, it's great that there are evangelists here and all, a company needs those, but also they need to be flexible and not take a "x can do no wrong" approach eg or defend the status quo, or defending the company at the expense of the user experience.

As it happens, not one of the evangelists claims that Evernote "can do no wrong", but since we have no real power to change anything and don't really know much more about Evernote's internal goals than any other user, we find it's usually more realistic to deal with the way that Evernote exists currently and offer workarounds. If that comes off as defending the company overmuch to you, so be it. *shrug* Of course, if you want to help out the community, you're welcome to teach by example; I can tell you that the condition of evangelitis is pretty much self-inflicted. :)

Fair enough.

I'm surprised given your time investment, that the company would not give your more power/responsibility. That said, it's really cool that you helping out. Not that I understand why someone would do that, that but it is nice :)

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Fair enough.

I'm surprised given your time investment, that the company would not give your more power/responsibility. That said, it's really cool that you helping out. Not that I understand why someone would do that, that but it is nice :)

Not really sure that I want more power or responsibility, outside what a moderator can do. I started out on the old forums, learned a little bit about Evernote from other users, thought that Evernote was a cool idea, got into the discussion, and lo, it just sorta became a 'thing'. I like to help out because I still think that Evernote is cool & useful, but sometimes it's a little bit unapproachable for new folks, and if I can pitch them a hint or two, then maybe they'll think it's cool/useful too. That being said, I'm not obligated to be here every day; I can respond to as many or few posts as I care to, and I don't need to worry about it. I have a job, and that's enough, this is mainly for fun, though there's enough interesting ideas around Evernote that it's interesting to me.

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  • 2 months later...

I use (on Mac) opendiff

* In terminal type opendiff file1 file2

* This will graphically display differences.

* I create a new note, copy in the one I think is more up to date.

* Using the visual opendiff info, I copy/edit the parts that are out of synch.

* I archive the two conflicting notes and move on.

 

I only do this with text only notes.

 

Using opendiff require you to manage your notes a bit more than I think you should. Why I get conflicts is because I was editing the same note on two different computers and that is a behavior I have to be wary of:)

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As for attitudes, it's great that there are evangelists here and all, a company needs those, but also they need to be flexible and not take a "x can do no wrong" approach eg or defend the status quo, or defending the company at the expense of the user experience.

As it happens, not one of the evangelists claims that Evernote "can do no wrong", but since we have no real power to change anything and don't really know much more about Evernote's internal goals than any other user, we find it's usually more realistic to deal with the way that Evernote exists currently and offer workarounds. If that comes off as defending the company overmuch to you, so be it. *shrug* Of course, if you want to help out the community, you're welcome to teach by example; I can tell you that the condition of evangelitis is pretty much self-inflicted. :)

As it happens, not one of the evangelists claims that Evernote "can do no wrong"

 

:D :D :D

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  • 1 month later...
I'd like to obtain your feedback about software I'm creating that solves this conflict problem in Evernote.   
 
I'm the CTO of a software company and I use Evernote to store all my business ideas, development plans, suggestions and research information - and I share a lot of this with my teams.
 
My conflict management solution will identify which notes have conflicts, and resolve these in most cases automatically, allowing you to preview the resolution before accepting it. In advanced cases, you'll be able to manually resolve conflicts using a UI - thus you will avoid using lots of time or energy to export notes in order to fix the conflicts.  
 
I would appreciate knowing if you would use such a product, would you please be able to take another 2 minutes to answer the following questions?
 
1. Do you wish there was a better way to resolve conflicts in an Evernote note? (yes/no)
 
2. Do you wish there was a better way to share changes you make to your Evernote notes with those you are sharing them with? (yes/no)
 
3. What do you think such a solution is worth paying for - if offered as a subscription based service:
 
  • 15 - 20 p/month
  • 10 - 15 p/month
  • 5 - 10 p/month
  • Nothing
4. What Evernote intergrations are you using already - mark all that apply:
  • IFTTT
  • Hojoki
  • Zapier
  • Other (please provide it's name): _______________________
5. Why do you use the product indicated in question (4) above:
  • ___________________________________________________
 
I would like to thank you for the time you've spent answering these questions by offering you a free 1 year subscription to the product when it is released.
 
If you wish to ask me any questions or provide further feedback, please pm me.
 
Sincerely and with thanks, 
--
John Clayton 
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For what it's worth, you can use Microsoft Word to diff two versions (including formatting). Paste the two versions into two different documents, save them and use the Tools>Merge Documents function.

 

@John:

 

1. Do you wish there was a better way to resolve conflicts in an Evernote note? (yes/no)
 
yes
 
2. Do you wish there was a better way to share changes you make to
your Evernote notes with those you are sharing them with? (yes/no)
 
not really.
 
3. What do you think such a solution is worth paying for - if offered as a subscription based service:
  • 15 - 20 p/month
  • 10 - 15 p/month
  • 5 - 10 p/month
  • Nothing
John, not to sound snarky, but I hope the "p" stands for "pence"... The complete Evernote premium costs 5USD/month, less if you subscribe for the whole year. For a good and easy way to resolve conflicts, I would pay an additional 50c/month.
 
 
4. What Evernote intergrations are you using already - mark all that apply:

 

QuickOffice


5. Why do you use the product indicated in question (4) above:

Edit MS Office documents on iOS.
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I'd like to obtain your feedback about software I'm creating that solves this conflict problem in Evernote.   
 
I'm the CTO of a software company and I use Evernote to store all my business ideas, development plans, suggestions and research information - and I share a lot of this with my teams.
 
My conflict management solution will identify which notes have conflicts, and resolve these in most cases automatically, allowing you to preview the resolution before accepting it. In advanced cases, you'll be able to manually resolve conflicts using a UI - thus you will avoid using lots of time or energy to export notes in order to fix the conflicts.  
 
I would appreciate knowing if you would use such a product, would you please be able to take another 2 minutes to answer the following questions?
 
1. Do you wish there was a better way to resolve conflicts in an Evernote note? (yes/no)
 
2. Do you wish there was a better way to share changes you make to your Evernote notes with those you are sharing them with? (yes/no)
 
3. What do you think such a solution is worth paying for - if offered as a subscription based service:

 

  • 15 - 20 p/month
  • 10 - 15 p/month
  • 5 - 10 p/month
  • Nothing
4. What Evernote intergrations are you using already - mark all that apply:
  • IFTTT
  • Hojoki
  • Zapier
  • Other (please provide it's name): _______________________
5. Why do you use the product indicated in question (4) above:
  • ___________________________________________________
 
I would like to thank you for the time you've spent answering these questions by offering you a free 1 year subscription to the product when it is released.
 
If you wish to ask me any questions or provide further feedback, please pm me.
 
Sincerely and with thanks, 
--
John Clayton 

 

Conflicts are so infrequent for me (I am using a Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Nexus 7) that I might only be able to use such an application a few times a year. More importantly, I don't subscribe to very many things, and I have a pretty high bar for services I will spend money to use.

 

Microsoft, for example, has a new subscription model, and I am quite certain they will never see another dollar from me. I would have upgraded to Microsoft Office 2013 or 2014 for the Mac if I were purchasing a license from them (as in the past) with a one-time fee, but now that they want me to pay $10 every month for the rest of my life (the same scheme you suggested), I am afraid they have killed off this particular golden goose. I should say that I consider Microsoft Word to be one of the best word processors I have ever used, I quite like it, and word processors are central to my professional life, and I am not even willing to pay $10 a month for it. How much less am I inclined to pay for a service that resolves a few sync conflicts in Evernote :)

 

If you have the programming skill, I'd recommend something more worthwhile. For example, I know there are many people, like myself, who would like to see Markdown support in Evernote, an alternative iOS app (in case the main one is acting funky), etc. 

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  • 2 weeks later...
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This is definitely a feature that is required. How much a user would pay for it, depends on how ferrequently, he comes across conflicts that ought to be resolved. Ideally, i think after a few trial versions, a one time payment of 1-2 dollars from the app store would be acceptable for me, and that too, based on how well, the app manages to resolve the conflict. Definitely, not a recurring fee.

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  • 2 months later...

I whole heartedly support this effort to achieve an Evernote that includes a feature capable of assisting you recognising differences in original and conflict notes. It's extremely frustrating when you get a conflict of a long note and you have to spend considerable time sorting it out manually!

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  • 2 months later...

I am traveling internationally and using Evernote to keep my notes on destinations as well as draft blog posts. Given that I frequently have a flaky network connection, I get conflicts incredibly frequently, often with fairly long notes that are impossible to visually inspect. Sometimes I either can't find the conflict or it appears to be something on the order of extra whitespace. The current workflow to resolve these "conflicts" is atrocious, and a huge time-waster for me, which is ironic given I'm attempting to use Evernote as a productivity tool. I'm in the process of finding a replacement because this one issue is so time consuming.

 

IMO, if Evernote detects a conflict, it should highlight where it thinks the conflicting section is. I don't need a full blown VCS merge tool, I just want to see where it thinks I'm having an issue with higher fidelity than an entire note.

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  • 4 months later...

This morning I got a conflict on my Mac copy of EV on an activity log note, where I absolutely dont want to lose any of the entries I've made in the file.   I make very important decisions on the entries in this note.

 

To avoid conflicts, I am constantly manually syncing my various copies of Evernote.  I use EV on two laptops (Mac & Win), on a few virtual machines, two IOS devices, and two or three androids.   Some of these different copies of evernote get far out of sync as some aren't used very much, others are often used within minutes of each other. Sometimes I dont have internet handy when I need to use one of them and can't sync it. I now paying $20 extra month on my cell phone for hotspot to make sure I can always update EV.

 

To solve the conflict:

* Cutting and pasting the two notes into text editors, then saving

* make a new folder to save the two note versions into,

* make sure I actually saved one of each version,

* then start p4merge

* manually select both files into the two entires of the p4merge compare file dialog

* click the compare button

 

Discover that p4merge says there are no differences. Redo the whole process above just to make sure I got it right....

 

Now I regularly deal with diffs and revision control.  But to have to go through the above set of steps is ridiculous.  I have many friends to whom I have recommended EV for their use. But some of them are novice computer users, or they have limited mobility, and trying to talk them through the above series of steps (plus taking them through downloading p4merge to make sure they have a diff tool) would be very painful, if even possible at all.

 

And I just noticed for first time a conflict folder from two weeks ago with three notes which are also activity logs for another project.  I have heavily updated those acitvity log notes since the conflict. Lots of fun to try to figure those out.

 

EV should make it easy to do a simple compare of any two notes. I can't imagine this would take more than 3-4 man-days for one of their experienced devs.

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Since I know Excel, and can work fast in it: I fix sync conflicts by row as follows:

  • Make Excel full screen
  • Copy text from one source starting in A1
  • Copy text from other source starting in B1
  • Make column A and B wide (about 1/2 screen each) but leave Col C visible
  • Select the entire sheet and collapse row height to best fit
  • Scan down the columns and enter a blank cell where needed to keep the column text aligned
  • Enter this formula in C1: =IF(A1<>B1,1,0) and copy it down to the last row with text
  • Where the formula returns 1 there's a sync conflict

I get only a few sync conflicts per year, so I haven't taken the time to make this into a macro.

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Since I know Excel, and can work fast in it: I fix sync conflicts by row as follows:

  • Enter this formula in C1: =IF(A1<>B1,1,0) and copy it down to the last row with text
  • Where the formula returns 1 there's a sync conflict

I get only a few sync conflicts per year, so I haven't taken the time to make this into a macro.

 

Oooh, that's a great idea for note conflicts! I currently do this a lot in Excel to compare columns of data except I just use the formula "=A1=B1". You should get returned a column of "TRUE" and "FALSE". Then I just filter the columns for "FALSE" to find the discrepancies. 

 

Another thing I do when looking for minor differences between two docs that are essentially the same is open both documents (notes) on the same monitor (so the docs are on top of each other) and then Alt-Tab multiple times rapidly between the two docs. Your eye should pick up any visual differences between what you're viewing on the screen, e.g, text or formatting that is different between the two files. If what's there is the same you won't see any differences "flashing" other than the file name. Every few Alt-Tabs I hit Page Down to go to the next section of the file until I've reviewed the whole thing. Sounds time consuming but it's really not once you get the hang of it, especially if you zoom out on the doc. This'd probably be best if there are only minor conflicts between the two note versions; I imagine if the note has many conflicts this would not be feasible.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I would like to add a vote to add this soft of thing as an enhancement.

 

I would love to see something like this when merging a note with conflicting changes:

 

This is my first line
This is my second line
 <<<<<<< Note 1
 This is my third line - foo
 =======
 This is my third line - bar
 >>>>>>> Note 2
This is my fourth line
 
There are certainly more graphical ways it could be done, but even something as simple as the above would be a big help.
 
Thanks!
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  • 2 months later...

I have been using Evernote for couple of years now and everytime I have a conflict, I wish that there was a Diff tool.

 

Anyone suggesting to take it outside and take a diff is just stating the very very obvious but claims by evangelists etc. that one is not required is laughable.And saying that they have not heard anyone needing this or asking for this should just go through the different requests on this chain itself and count.

 

I just want to add to that request that a diff tool between notes should be there

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And saying that they have not heard anyone needing this or asking for this should just go through the different requests on this chain itself and count.

If you're referring to this: https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/25197-howto-diff-a-conflict-with-the-original/?p=173256 (since you couldn't be bothered to quote what you're objecting to), where I say "You're the first person that I can recall asking for a note comparison facility as part of Evernote, though", that was absolutely true then (~2 years ago, by the way). Maybe you're thinking that we should have psychic powers when posting here -- how else could I, at the time I made my comment, "just go through the different requests on this chain itself and count" the posts requesting the feature that were made *after* mine?

 

Of course, since you've read through everything here, you also know that: "I agree that this would be a useful feature, particularly if conflicts are common". 

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but claims by evangelists etc. that one is not required is laughable.

It's really tiring when someone attributes inaccurate info to other users. I'm pretty certain no evangelist ever said a diff is not required. Please link to any post you've found that does make such a claim. Unless & until you do, it appears you are twisting words to suit your own agenda & is just a cheap pot shot and, well, laughable. (To use your own word).

Thank you.

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  • 4 weeks later...

+1  For a diff view on conflicts.

 

Poring through large notes with conflicts is so extremely tedious as to make the conflict feature almost pointless for such notes.  It leaves me searching for needles in haystacks, and always worried that I've missed some.  No good at all.

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  • Level 5*

If it were me, I'd export the two notes to .enex format, and pull out my favorite diff program (Beyond Compare, if you're asking), which I use daily at work, and frequently at home. Conflicts only occur rarely in my case, thankfully. It would be hard to imagine Evernote doing a better job than a dedicated diff tool, though providing even a simple one might be enough for most peoples' purposes.

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  • 1 month later...

+1  For a diff view on conflicts.

 

Poring through large notes with conflicts is so extremely tedious as to make the conflict feature almost pointless for such notes.  It leaves me searching for needles in haystacks, and always worried that I've missed some.  No good at all.

 

me too: +1

 

Comparing same issue with Google Docs, Evernote loses the competition, definitely.

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  • 3 months later...

+1

 

Evernote seems particularly vulnerable to thinking I have conflicting changes - I use it on a BlackBerry, and two desktop PCs (one with Windows, one with Mac), and if I happen to be reviewing a file that hasn't yet been sync'd, Evernote plays really conservative (thankfully) and creates a potential "conflicted" memo.

 

If only it had an integrated way to "diff" between memos.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Compare differences feature seems like a no-brainer.  I need this on a regular basis to compare note conflicts.  The only person who doesn't crave this feature is the one who has never used a text comparer before.  Please include this feature!

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  • 1 month later...

Also for me it's incredible that it cannot handle conflicts.. it would also be very easy to completely avoid the conflicts. Dropbox has really really few. Evernote has often. The fact users don't complain is because users don't trust company to solve their problem.  Try to use tools like UserVoice and see how many people would like a similar feature: (example) http://blog.merlinox.com/seo-magic-prova-del-tool/

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  • 5 months later...

I'm proposing a solution here! (for programmers only)

https://www.drupal.org/project/diff_different

https://www.drupal.org/project/diffadvance

 

In drupal CMS, using these 2 modules together can diff html by highlighting the difference instead of diffing the plaintext. I'm not sure how evernote stores notes but it should be something similar.

For end users, we can install drupal with these 2 modules to check the conflicts.

For evernote developers, they can download the source code of these 2 modules and make use of it. 

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  • 7 months later...
  • Level 5
8 minutes ago, michael.freidgeim said:

4 years later-still no progress in tool to show differences.

Does Evernote staff monitor this forum?

Or it's required to be submitted to support?

Evernote employees occasionally drop by this forum.

To be assured someone from Evernote eyeballs your request - use the Support System (either the web or the twitter), but I have a feeling you won't get very much further.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hello all, 

 

sorry I got a bit confused reading this thread- when a "conflict" is detected, is there anyway to tell Evernote, to use the current version you are looking at and overwrite the other versions saved elsewhere?

 

How this happens is i use PC Evernote to prepare for a meeting, and then I just use a tablet in the meeting to take notes, which I then sync back to the PC version and the process repeats. I sometimes tidy up the notes on the PC. Hence, sometimes when a sync has not occurred and the tidy up occurs, I guess there is a conflict. I want to be able to say "keep this version and override" others etc- is this possible?

 

OR must I manually go in and delete the "conflict" written into the header/title etc?

 

thanks!

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12 minutes ago, AMZ said:

when a "conflict" is detected, is there anyway to tell Evernote, to use the current version you are looking at and overwrite the other versions saved elsewhere?
...

OR must I manually go in and delete the "conflict" written into the header/title etc?

Evernote detects a conflict and provides you the two versions to review.
You have to resolve the conflicts yourself.

In another discussion, this website https://www.diffchecker.com was identified as a method to resolved conflicts.
You copy/paste each version and it identifies the differences.

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  • 2 years later...

I want to second this feature. I have a set of web page scrapes for an online book from my university that I am reading. I accidentally made a change to a note. While I think that I pressed CMD-Z enough times to undo all changes, the note is showing a different version in the history. There seems to be no way to verify that I preserved the original note. I installed Xcode and the tools to run opendiff against the two versions, and it showed me the attached screen. The changes continue for several pages. Are the notes truly different? I really don't know.

Screen Shot 2018-10-13 at 10.11.30 PM.png

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Some observations about this thread and curiosities about how EN employees perceive requests/rants here.  This was started six years ago, prior to previous post it was dead two years. There's been 52 replies, mostly volleys back and forth.  17 followers. 14k views.  In other recent posts a 'code snippet' thread had 78k views (didn't bother looking at thread life).  While the views are high, far from the top. EN could perceive hey that's a lot of interest; or think wow 14k views and only something less than 52 bothered to comment, and only 17 follow. What percentage of forum members is that? What percentage of total users is that? It's likely better to go direct to EN if paying.  With regards to this issue, happened once, obviously edited on two clients before synching.  Notified promptly once synched. Resolved easily.

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  • Level 5*
31 minutes ago, Gear64 said:

how EN employees perceive requests/rants

Feature requests have a voting mechanism with a vote count in the top left corner of the mechanism.  That's a direct metric of the user support for a request.  

Rants are pointless, but seem to give satisfaction to some users.

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  • 8 months later...
On 4/12/2012 at 3:42 PM, joomux said:

Is there any way to check the differences between a conflicted note and the original?

When you have a sync conflict issue and the note is big, scanning through them with your eyeballs can be problematic. Is there a way to "Compare this to the original" or "Compare this note to..." to simply highlight the differences between the two?

 

I hadn't seen this thread... And I created this one. 

 

 

Still a problem in 2019! 

Will this continue to be a problem in 2025? 

 

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  • 3 years later...
  • Level 5

Another revival of a dead thread.... The lack of posts over periods of 2 and 3 years says something about the prevalence of the problem. I agree it would be nice to have an auto-comparison of conflicting notes. I suspect there are a bunch of other desirable improvements in line ahead of it. I can guarantee that if it is ever implemented, a flame war will break out here with people screaming that Evernote is reading their notes to compare them, which it promised never to do.

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@Dave-in-Decatur Mirrors my thoughts exactly... I think it would be nice to have as well since I have to do a manual review of differences a couple of times a year, but it just seems like the return on investment for this one isn't there and I'd rather see other desirable improvements ahead of this one as well. Also, hopefully with the syncing overhaul this year, there will be even less of a need to compare conflicts because the number of them will be kept more in check. (But also, it would be nice to have just to compare note history revisions in addition to conflicts.)

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