Evaluating Evernote

[bobc 11]

I am reevaluating Evernote (version 6.4, in Windows) after having used OneNote for some time.

 

Here are the main things that I like about Evernote:

 

• You can assign a note to more than one tag. This is tremendously powerful in terms of being able to categorize a single note in multiple ways. I view tags in Evernote as if they were "folders" in another application, such as Outlook, or like "sections" in OneNote. (After all, the import-from-OneNote feature maps OneNote sections to Evernote tags.) There's a duality: You can assign a tag to a note, or looked at another way, you can assign a note to a tag... or you can "drop" it into the tag.
• The way you can pop notes out in a separate window. You can achieve this in OneNote, but it's awkward.

 

Here are things that drive me nuts in Evernote:

 

• The way that notebooks work with tags. Mainly, the issue that tags unique to a specific notebook. At least as an option. You use the notebook metaphor, but there is no concept of "opening" a notebook. You click on a notebook in the left panel, and all the notes in that notebook are listed -- that's fine. But the tag list contains all the tags in the database, even if most of them have no relevance to that notebook! And then you want to browse through the different tags... but... as soon as you click a tag, presto, the notebook is unselected, and now all the notes with that tag are listed, regardless of what notebook they're in. Arrrggghhh. (I know you can approximate the desired behavior by holding down the control key, but that's awkward.)
• Inability to apply custom, arbitrary, sorts to note list and tag list.
• And... still incredibly, the lack of tag hierarchy in iOS!

 

Some of these issues I know Evernote will say, well, you're using Evernote wrong, or it wasn't intended to work that way, or just don't use tags use searches instead, or maybe you should use a different program, etc. But I think this is a cop out. People work in different ways, and with a few of these features, Evernote would be useful to a broader base of users, and more would want to upgrade to premium.

 

Here's a few newish features that I'm seeing in Evernote that I think are great...

 

• When you select a tag in the left panel, all the notes in the tag's sub-tag structure are listed. A very powerful concept.
• When you select one or more tags in the left panel, and then add a new note, it's automatically tagged with the selected tags. This enables the concept of "working in a tag" (which, again, I view as a folder). Very nice.
• The ability to apply styling in the tag and notebook lists in the left panel. This really livens up the appearance of the main screen. 

 

A final thought:

I wonder if the reason Evernote has trouble with bugs and difficulty implementing new features might stem not from lack of good intentions, or programmer competence, but possibly from the fact that the original code base may have been written in a way that makes it hard to maintain code -- you fix one bug and break something else, and difficult to add features. When I see products struggling with quality issues, I know that this is sometimes the case.

 

 

 

 

[DTLow 5,736]

You've posted this in the Feature Requests forum, with several suggestions under "drives me nuts"
If you'd like, I can move the discussion to the General Discussions forum and you can post specific feature requests.
It makes it easier to vote on requests

>>You can assign a note to more than one tag.

I agree - that's one of my favourite features.  
I was happy to abandon the folder filing methodology that forced me to file in a folder/sub-folder/sub-sub-folder and then try to find where I filed it.

>>Inability to apply custom, arbitrary, sorts to note list and tag list

I know people have requested this but to me, it just seems chaotic.
Evernote proved they could implement this by including the feature in the Reminders and Shortcut section; they added a reminder-order field
Also, when you say "note list" are you referring to the notelist per notebook
- most of my notes are in a single notebook and I use saved searches for organization

>>And... still incredibly, the lack of tag hierarchy in iOS!

I'm impacted by this but I really don't use the taglist in IOS
I usually just start typing the tag name, and select from the dropdown list

[jefito 5,589]

5 hours ago, bobc said:

You click on a notebook in the left panel, and all the notes in that notebook are listed -- that's fine. But the tag list contains all the tags in the database, even if most of them have no relevance to that notebook!

Sure, and that makes a certain amount of sense: what if you want to tag a note with a tag that's not been used in the current notebook? As it is (and if I recall correctly), the tag tree used to actually filter along with the current notes, but I believe that that caused more confusion than it helped. Resulted in queries like "hey, where did my tags go"? Maybe an option would be OK for those people who have specific tag vocabularies for specific notebooks; I don't.

5 hours ago, bobc said:

Inability to apply custom, arbitrary, sorts to note list and tag list.

The Windows client allows custom sorts (sort on a particular note field) to be applied to different contexts (notebook, tag, saved search), but not arbitrary sorting (move note lists into arbitrary order). For that, the only place you can do that in Evernote currently is in a reminder list.

5 hours ago, bobc said:

When you select a tag in the left panel, all the notes in the tag's sub-tag structure are listed. A very powerful concept.

Fortunately that's an option; I have it disabled. This feature is implemented using an implicit 'any:' search, and that tends to increase the note filter result set, which is generally what I don't want. It'd be all the more powerful if I could perform ad hoc searches like that, via the search language, but that's probably not in the cards (search language changes are rare, as they need to be coordinated across all Evernote clients). 

5 hours ago, bobc said:

When you select one or more tags in the left panel, and then add a new note, it's automatically tagged with the selected tags. This enables the concept of "working in a tag" (which, again, I view as a folder). Very nice.

It's important to understand that in Evernote, tags and notebooks are distinct in their behaviors: notes belong to exactly one notebook (a notebook is a container, just as a file folder is), but can contain multiple tags (a tag just is a label). "Working in a tag"? You can do it in Evernote, I guess, but Evernote isn't particularly geared that way, since Evernote doesn't enforce that idiom with tags. A lot of the power of Evernote's tag language is that notes can have multiple tags. The feature is nice, agreed, but it doesn't scale well for me, since I rarely use the tag tree (too many tags, and not rigidly hierarchically ordered).

 

Anyways, I'm with DTLow: I'd suggest individual feature requests for individual features, in the appropriate Product Feedback forum for the Evernote client you're using, or this forum for general Evernote features. That way, other users can upvote individual features that they like and ignore ones they don't. And in general you should name the client you're referring to, as different clients have different capabilities and it helps to get better responses.

[bobc 11]

@DTLow: Yes, please move the post if that would be more appropriate. Thanks.

@jefito: I did name the client, Windows version 6.4.

[jefito 5,589]

11 minutes ago, bobc said:

@jefito: I did name the client, Windows version 6.4.

Oh, duh, you're right. Guess I skipped right to the good stuff; my apologies. Moving to the appropriate subforum, (though the point about separate feature requests for separate features still stands).

[DTLow 5,736]

12 minutes ago, bobc said:

@DTLow: Yes, please move the post if that would be more appropriate. Thanks.

Done; moved from Feature Requests to General Discussions forum

[bobc 11]

I wrote a new post regarding the idea of manually reordering tags and notes,and placed it in the Requested Features forum.