New to Evernote... where do I belong?

[CGT0613 0]

Dear Evernote members,

I am new to Evernote. What drew you to Evernote? How has Evernote impacted your life? I would like to know how it can help me. I love to use a planner, journal, and i do extensive research. I primarily use an Ipad Pro. I need to annotate as well as organize all the research as well as collaborate. What benefits would joining premium afford me? I would love to know the file types that can be migrated to Evernote. I want to use Evernote but i need lots of data. Hit me with it.

CGT

[DTLow 5,746]

5 hours ago, CGT0613 said:

What drew you to Evernote?

Initially, there were two motives

1. Syncing between devices.  Back then, it was a Mac and PC.  Now its a Mac and iPad
2. I was fed up with the folder filing method.  Evernote offered a better methodology; Tags and Search

>>How has Evernote impacted your life?

- All my data is stored digitally and retrieveable when required

>> I would like to know how it can help me. I love to use a planner, journal, and i do extensive research.

First off; you have to use the product for everything
If you just file a couple of documents away, its not much use to you
Evernote is not really a planner/journal/research tool.  Its a filing cabinet.
- however each of these activities benefits from having access to your data
- it also helps that you can also cross-reference your data

>>I primarily use an Ipad Pro

I have to tell you that mobile devices are not the best user experience
I love my iPad, but if I only had one device - I'd chose my Mac
The mobile device supplements the desktop platform

>>I need to annotate as well as organize all the research as well as collaborate
Evernote does have simple annotation tools but my preference is to use dedicated apps.  
I like Notability for PDF annotation on my ipad

For research, I feel Evernote's input features are impressive
I can simply type notes; attach pdfs and other files; capture web pages

I feel organization is Evernote's strength.
Actually to clarify that, I should say my need is data retrieval
Organization is just a tool to allow data retrieval.
An example, you can organize your documents and file them away in folder/subfolder/subsubfolder/... but when you go to retrieve your documents you can't find them.
Using Evernote's approach, you can use a common Tag with the documents, or a common keyword in the title

Evernote offers collaboration in the form of shared notes and notebooks

>>What benefits would joining premium afford me?

You can check the comparison at https://evernote.com/pricing/
Some highlights
- increase maximums on the upload limit and note size
- pdf searching
- note history archive

>>I would love to know the file types that can be migrated to Evernote.

Evernote's native format for notes is html
You can attach any other file type as an attachment
- create a note; drag a file into it
Evernote has built-in viewers for some files; images and pdfs

 

 

 

[gazumped 12,085]

I'd imagine most posters here have at least as long a list of uses and tips as @DTLow went through - with a lot of overlaps.  If you really want to ingest a lot of information about Evernote I'd suggest you start with the YouTube Channel - and move on to the Help & Learning site.  But rather than take on board 1,000 or so techniques before you start to find out what's actually useful for you,  it might be better to start off with something basic - like documenting your research - and actually start doing that,  so you learn from experience rather than from our variously developed and totally selfish preferences...  Good luck!  You can always find help here if you get stuck.

[Machine_Learning 6]

What initially drew me to Evernote was the ability to sync my notes between my laptop and phone easily, and also have them available from any computer if I log into the web. 

What brought me back after trying alternatives for a while is they seemed to be the only company that cared about securing your note and offered encryption. I falsely operated under the assumption that this meant they didn't look at your data either. But with the new machine learning initiative and transferring to googles cloud, which is purely a data mining company, it's painfully obvious I was naive about that. 

Sure, they supposedly can't view encrypted notes, but if you are going to encrypt all of your content, then way it's currently implemented would be quite a headache to use efficiently. 

I wish they operated somewhat like LastPass or Mega does with their encryption, IE enter a key to use the app, it's all decrypted client side, but encrypted upstream and when stored on their servers. 

 

[DTLow 5,746]

On 2016-12-15 at 9:55 AM, Machine_Learning said:

But with the new machine learning initiative

There is a Machine Leaning Program but user's don't have to participate - just don't opt-in

its a good idea to encrypt your private data before uploading to the cloud
Evernote has a text encryption feature, and I use encrypted pdfs

>>googles cloud, which is purely a data mining company,

That is a false statement - Google is not a "purely mining company"

Evernote is using the Cloud Services at Google for their data servers.
However this has no connection with data mining

[gazumped 12,085]

On 15/12/2016 at 5:55 PM, Machine_Learning said:

But with the new machine learning initiative and transferring to googles cloud, which is purely a data mining company

The new 'machine learning initiative' is now an opt in service to be introduced at some future time next year,  and Google's hosting company is separate from the search engine which does data-mine for advertising revenue.  They have commercial hosting customers in the same way as Amazon Web Services and would go out of business very quickly if they did not hold their clients' data securely.