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Quick access to bullets and indents


StephenBD

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I know! It took me a while to find the buttons, too. What a design fault!

I attach screenshots below that show where they hid them.

 

2 hours ago, Kay_Rock said:

Where are you all even finding the option to indent? I’d assumed they’d just removed it and was shopping for a new note program. I can’t find it and now I feel like an idiot.

 

(has anyone from Evernote every actually used their own program? Making notes organized is critical. Without the ability to tab/indent this might as well be just a line-edit raw text tool.. who decided that cleanly organized notes was a low priority and hid the function? Why? Ps You can’t let programmers make GUI decisions; they’re not equipped for it.)

5a30311398c6b_2017-12-1214_36_30.thumb.png.ca627831b7781b5bbf8903dd1dbc0222.png

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Yes, invu798, I agree.  Bringing back the bullet buttons to the tool bar is a great restoration of something that went missing nearly a year ago. But we need buttons to indent and outdent bullets too.  Maybe Evernote are forgetting that people often use the soft keyboard on the iPad not a hardware keyboard with shortcuts, tab keys etc? 

If there is not enough space on some screens, bullet hierarchy could be implemented as a pop-up from the bullet button itself - press to see promote/demote options?

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On 12/12/2017 at 11:45 AM, invu798 said:

I know! It took me a while to find the buttons, too. What a design fault!

I attach screenshots below that show where they hid them.

 

5a30311398c6b_2017-12-1214_36_30.thumb.png.ca627831b7781b5bbf8903dd1dbc0222.png

5a30310f208a0_2017-12-1214_36_36.thumb.png.943c9456e14d33953e450a885ae30e0f.png

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks for posting this.  Was shopping for a new note taking program.  Well, to be honest, I still am, since Evernote doesn't seem to listen to its users.  Quick bulleted lists (with multiple levels of indent) WAS the killer feature of this app and I have to believe there's someone out there who can do it better.  

If I were them I'd just allow people to modify the toolbar to their preference rather than ***** with the interface every other release.  

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I submitted a similar enhancement request when this feature was first deprecated.  It’s an absolutely awful design and the fact that nothing has happened on this is super frustrating.  This is such an obvious missing feature.  I have been using Evernote for at least the last 6+ years with a premium account but this feature is a must have.  I am currently evaluating other options for note taking.  Evernote has loaded up on so many other useless unnecessary bells and whistles- it’s a company that has lost touch with its customers.  Get your stuff together Evernote.

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This is so frustrating!!!

It adds so much time to every single note that I take...

There's got to be a short cut. The app in general has improved and become quicker , but this issue really sets things back more than all the other improvements.

It's enough pain that after 7 years I'm going to start looking for another app

 

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An ongoing failure, yes.  This clunkiness in the UI inconveniences and annoys me every day - and I do use Evernote every day. 

I cannot believe that a simple remedy to this has not been provided in all this time.  Bad design, bad customer service.

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27 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Can you provide details on this.  The default on-screen keyboard doesn't show a tab key.
I'm thinking an external keyboard is required (it doesn't have to be bluetooth).  

I think her explanation had enough detail. My iPad is an older one, so doesn't have the Tab key, but iPad Pro/Plus seem to do so.

keyboard-2.jpg

iOS 9 iPad Pro / Plus keyboard layout (top) vs. iOS 9 iPad Air keyboard layout

from: https://www.phonearena.com/news/iOS-9s-iPad-keyboard-layout-adds-more-legitimacy-to-iPad-Pro--Plus-claims_id70463

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18 hours ago, Guest Guest said:

I think her explanation had enough detail.

I thought so too -- but it turns out it didn't. I just remembered, there's a new smaller size of iPad Pro. DTLow, judging by the size of your keys, you must have the 10.5 inch iPad Pro as opposed to the larger original iPad Pro (which I have). I guess you could use an app like AZKeys to forcibly add a tab key, but again, this shouldn't be necessary.

I also messaged Evernote Support again to inquire if they had any ETA about this ongoing usability issue. The response:

"At the moment I don't have any updates or the ETA on implementing this feature. While we can’t commit to getting all feature requests into the product, we do rely on our community to tell us what they’d like to see in the future. "

Considering how many other suggestions in this forum have more upvotes and it's been such a long time, I am not feeling optimistic. At least this one is still on the first page. I'll ask some Evernote-using friends to consider upvoting this.

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3 hours ago, jengagne said:

I just remembered, there's a new smaller size of iPad Pro. DTLow, judging by the size of your keys, you must have the 10.5 inch iPad Pro as opposed to the larger original iPad Pro (which I have).

Got it; the tab key is available on the 12" iPad Pro 

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I use bullet points a lot to make lists and record ideas. Indenting bullet points is critical for this.

The "increase indent" button/functionality in Evernote iOS is buried in another button click/menu.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE make this button more prominent by adding it to the primary menu of available buttons/features.

This would enable making bulletted list so much simpler.

 

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Yes!!!!  I use Evernote for personal notes and OneNote for business, both on iOS.  The OneNote app has increase/decrease indent in the top function ribbon, and it makes a huge difference when taking notes.  Please add this to Evernote iOS, or better yet make the function ribbon customizable!

Thank you!

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I'm curious why this was removed from the main edit screen.  It is VERY tedious.  I take most of my notes in outline form, and the controversy regarding Evernote's handling of outlines suggests many others do as well.  I agree with the OP, there is plenty of room in the iPad layout in particular.

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Yes, PLEASE! This was the first thing I noticed (to be very annoying) after updating the app.

I used to write notes during a meeting real-time with the bullet list + indentation, but now having to tap twice for everything it's almost impossible to catch up the speed.

 

Reverting back to the previous layout would be the first step; even better is allowing the user to customize the bar so that one can add favorite shortcuts and remove/hide rarely used ones.

 

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I am so happy to read that I'm not the only one with the bullet and indent frustrations. I use bullets a lot in my notes and really feel having taken a leap backwards with version 8 in this respect. Please, please - bring these functions back where they belong. 

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Evernote need to sit up and take notice. This is a very retrograde step and has slowed me down completely. My only option is to take the note in an unstructured format. If they don't fix this quickly, I will be looking at other options. 

 

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11 hours ago, Mike Mannion said:

Evernote need to sit up and take notice. This is a very retrograde step and has slowed me down completely. My only option is to take the note in an unstructured format. If they don't fix this quickly, I will be looking at other options. 

 

Yes, exactly.

What I do now, instead of indentation, is pressing the space bar. How ridiculous!

 

 

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On 1/19/2017 at 2:16 PM, StephenBD said:

V8 for IOS is nice, but a real backward move was requiring two clicks to insert bullets and another two to indent them.  On iPad there's plenty of room to give direct access to these functions in the bottom bar.  

(But thanks for at last putting the Expand button in the top bar instead of the top of the note - great improvement). 

Thanks. 

Hi Stephen, we're actually working through some changes/improvements to the formatting options. We've heard a lot of feedback similar to yours, and we agree, we need quicker access to bullets, checkboxes and other formatting tools. I can't give an exact estimate of when the improvements will be available, but please know we are working on it, and definitely taking the feedback seriously! Thanks!

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In the past there were a set of quick toolbar actions for taking notes with bulleted lists.  For some reason this feature was removed in a recent release.  In the past you could create a bulleted list of notes and use an easy tab feature to indent subtopics - just one touch/key stroke.  With the new nested menu approach that same action takes 3 tedious touches on the ipad UI - awful design and now that feature is completely unusable.  This also makes using evernote for taking notes virtually unusable for most purposes.  An unbelievably poor UI design choice - please correct this ASAP so I can start using evernote again  

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I often used bullets when writing notes and it's now a huge hassle on the iPad since there is no tab or shift+tab capability without an external keyboard or going into list options.

I gave Evernote the benefit of the doubt and assumed this must be a drag+drop customizable menu and tried that but unfortunately it didn't work. I have a huge empty bar begging you to put more on it on my landscape iPad.

Note the huge white space on the bar. Let me add options to it!

 

IMG_0090.PNG

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It has been a few months since users started complaining about this. Same problem for me. taking notes in meetings became very diffucult since I cannot indent text easily and hence organizing ideas in a hierarchical way while typing. Searching for alternatives to Evernote seems like the only way ... sad because I liked Evernote a lot so far. 

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As I enter this comment via my Safari browser on my iPad, I see a text formatting bar that allows me to manage bold, italics, underline, links, emotes, bullet points, numbered lists, alignment, indents and more.

It is absolutely disgusting that the Evernote iPad App does not support these formatting features.

But, what is worse is that I am blocked from accessing the browser portal on the Evernote site simply because I am using an iOS device and they force me to use their iOS App.

EXTREMELY DISSATISFIED

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I'm curious, also, why this was removed from the main edit screen.  This, Apple Pencil support, and PDF markup make me wonder if EN is doing much Use Case analysis.  It may work ok in a very basic note taking case, but much of this is supported by Apple's notes.  Other use cases seem to be made more complex as time goes on.  Bullets, etc. are VERY tedious.  I take most of my notes in outline form, and the controversy regarding Evernote's handling of outlines suggests many others do as well.  I agree with the OP, there is plenty of room in the iPad layout in particular.  The delay makes me wonder if EN is really committed to meeting what appear to be common use cases.

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I was also very frustrated by how bulllets worked. I have learned something new though that has helped. If you type an asterisk + space at the beginning of a new line, it turns into a bullet automatically. Then Tab will indent the bullet. Also, typing the two square brackets “[]” will convert automatically to a checkbox. Hope this helps until Evernote fixes this glaring UI issue.

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13 hours ago, Krosenfeld said:

I was also very frustrated by how bulllets worked. I have learned something new though that has helped. If you type an asterisk + space at the beginning of a new line, it turns into a bullet automatically. Then Tab will indent the bullet. Also, typing the two square brackets “[]” will convert automatically to a checkbox. Hope this helps until Evernote fixes this glaring UI issue.

Thanks for your tip. 

But it seems that it requires 4 key strokes, as opposed to 2 the other way, in first starting a bullet list; or am I missing something?

Also, how do you Tab in iOS?

Thanks!

 

 

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Looks like they fixed this issue (but only partially) by adding the bullet point button in the tool bar in the edit mode.

But they still left the indentation button hidden requiring three taps to make an indentation and come back to the text keyboard.

 

I am sure whoever is managing the development of the text editor doesn't seem to use Evernote to edit text.

If you think about it, what needs more access is actually the indentation buttons, rather than the bullet point button.

When someone makes a bullet point list, more often needed is a way to give hierarchy by indentation, rather than completely going out of one bullet list and creating another.

 

If Evernote is monitoring this forum, could the indentation buttons also be moved (back) to the tool bar in the next round of update? What's better always is giving the user freedom to *customize* the tool bar, please.

Thanks.

 

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Where are you all even finding the option to indent? I’d assumed they’d just removed it and was shopping for a new note program. I can’t find it and now I feel like an idiot.

 

(has anyone from Evernote every actually used their own program? Making notes organized is critical. Without the ability to tab/indent this might as well be just a line-edit raw text tool.. who decided that cleanly organized notes was a low priority and hid the function? Why? Ps You can’t let programmers make GUI decisions; they’re not equipped for it.)

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Just to quantify this: all of my notes are in plain text, so I NEVER use the bold/italic/underline/strike thru (why the EFF would you have one click for STRIKE THRU and not for INDENT??)/pictures/check boxes/any of the other formatting.  

I like plain text notes and the ability to create bulleted lists with them.  Fast.  

Obscuring the buttons that let me do this behind other buttons I will never use makes this extremely cumbersome.  

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Evernote employee Karahodecker replied to this thread in MARCH that this was being dealt with. Just now, tonight, DECEMBER 17, I updated Evernote on my iPad.

 

STILL NO REPAIR!!!

 

Honestly, Evernote, is it really so hard that it takes 9 months and counting to repair this functionality? Giving us back one tap to turn on/off outline mode and calling it a good days work is silly. When was the last time anyone needed the ability to swiftly use that button while taking notes vs the need to swiftly increase/decrease the hierarchy of a line? I'd be willing to bet the ratio is at least 1:1000.

As noted earlier, the need to swiftly access strikethru via 1-tap should absolutely take a back seat to outline functionality. I can't imagine an argument that would persuade your engineers to code 1-tap strikethru over outline hierarchy buttons in the tool bar - unless the arguement was tied to them continuing to receive a paycheck, of course. Please, educate us lowly masses on your lofty thinking!

I'm about to move on to your competitor's offering, I'm so darned fed up with this issue! NINE MONTHS AND COUNTING! pfft!

Mike

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Agree. I use indenting far more frequently than strikethrough.

Please put indent controls on the main button bar so it's one click. Don't mind if it's to the right so you have to scroll (it's not as important as Bold etc). Would make sense to be just to the right of the bullet list buttons to me.

 

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Agreed - Indent for anyone taking notes on multiple topics (sales discussions) if far more important and need to be on the top bar.

I have free access to OneNote and need to consider changing after this period of time instead of paying annually for this product.

Why not simply let people finger drag the icons they want to the top level bar like you do with the taskbar in Windows? This lets the user decide what they want and use the most. iAnnotate lets you do this so its not an IOS issue.

 

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Dear Evernote,

please move the tab key onto the keyboard header. Indentation is a constant function for note taking. It may not seem like a long way to go,  it having to open a menu every time I want to indent or outdent, slows down the ability to take notes and keep up with fast talking colleagues (or I may have trouble with that for other reasons)

The text editor I’m using to write this comment even has the indent/outdent keys readily available. Please, please, please, can you bring this out of the sub menu and add it to the header.

Would be extremely grateful.

Thank you,

Cody

D359D44B-2FE9-4BA4-963B-E7D90FF3FC14.jpeg

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This is an ongoing failure in terms of usability. Considering there is a ton of toolbar space above the keyboard on the iPad app, why are the bullet indent/outdent options buried three taps away (one to get in there, one to tap it, one to close the screen and get back to the keyboard)?

We used to have these functions right there in the toolbar above the keyboard, but they took it away back when this thread first started and I’ve been increasingly annoyed every since. 

Is there any alternate Evernote app out there that gives you immediate access to these functions, since Evernote hasn’t fixed it?

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Update -- a sliver of positivity! I just talked to Evernote support about this and got this reply:

Thank you for sharing your experience with me. I've reached out to our technical support specialist to share your feedback and I'm happy to report that we are continuing to look into optimizing the formatting bar on iOS. Although I don't have an ETA at this time, this feedback is on our radar. -Aaron

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Having been a very heavy Evernote user years ago, I just purchased an IPad and have been trying to figure out the conversion from Android.  The other day I was completely taken by surprise when working with a client I had to ask them to hold-on for a minute so I could figure out how to get to a new sub-menu tab.  Couldn't find it in the moment so I moved on and came back to research it now.  I couldn't agree with Cody (from above) any more.  And he posted his comment 6 months ago?!  Maybe I'm missing something but this seems like a bigger issue than it should be...  Hopefully someone can clue me into this problem already being resolved.

 

John

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People have been asking for this since the redesign, well over a year ago.  It’s such a huge oversight it makes me wonder if anyone at Evernote actually USES it to take notes.  At this point I’ve been frustrated for years at this kind of thing.  It’s time to move on from Evernote for me.  It’s hard to fully replace with all its OCR and web clipping abilities but it’s just not a good note taking app.

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I don't know if this changed recently, or if I only discovered the function... but sometimes on my iPad, if you hit Tab it will indent the bullet. Then if you're already at the start of an indented bullet and hit Delete, it'll outdent it.

I say "sometimes" because the behavior seems inconsistent and sometimes it just dismisses the keyboard instead. Sooooo, still needs some work.

Really, I'd prefer to just have some actual buttons less than three clicks away.... there's plenty of room...

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On 10/1/2018 at 8:05 AM, StephenBD said:

How are you hitting Tab on an iPad?  (Sorry if this is obvious and I am being stupid...)

Hello, I apologize for not spotting this sooner. No, I am not using a Bluetooth keyboard -- I have an iPad Pro and it includes a tab key. Based on your comment, I assume the smaller iPads don't include that key!

As previously noted, it would be better usability for everyone (including me!) if Evernote would add the bullet control icons back to the main bar on mobile. I suppose you could install some third-party keyboard app that includes a tab key, but nobody should have to do that as a workaround.

It's been months, so I'll try bugging tech support again.

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On 10/11/2018 at 3:59 AM, jengagne said:

I have an iPad Pro and it includes a tab key.

Can you provide details on this.  The default on-screen keyboard doesn't show a tab key.
I'm thinking an external keyboard is required (it doesn't have to be bluetooth). 

edit; it seems the 12" iPads have an onscreen tab key 

edit: My iPad Pro default on screen keyboard is

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Hello Evernote. 

I am a medicine student and i use my ipad all day to type my classes, my patient care, my studies, scanning my handwriting notes. I moved to iOS recently, when i was on android i dont had this freaking and annoying issue of no quick access to indents. I lose too many information because of the amount of time i spend to reach the indent button.

 

ITS AWLFUL AND HURTS ME TO SAY, BUT I REALLY REEAAALLY LOOKING FOR TO MOVE FROM EVERNOTE TO ANOTHER CONTENDER OF EVERNOTE (NOTION MAYBE?) BECAUSE OF THIS ISSUE. 

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE. ITS SIMPLE. 

PUT THE INDENT BUTTON ON THE TOOLBAR. THATS SOOO MANY SPACE IN THERE. 

I really hope a quick feedback about this complain. 

Sibelle.

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Doing things only in response to popular vote, @DTLow, is not a good policy.  We can see that in US and UK politics right now.  🙂 

The design worked fine before EN took an arbitrary decision to suddenly hide an important interface element several clicks deep.  I am guessing it was motivated by a desire to standardise between the iPad and iPhone versions even though there was ample screen-space on the iPad to keep these functions at the surface.  It was a silly decision that could easily, at the time, have been reversed. 

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I first flagged this problem in January 2017.  Now at last it has been solved.  Thank you, Evernote.

It should not take three and a half years for a bad initial decision to be reversed. It could have been fixed in the next release. 

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EN took a decision to freeze all development of the "vintage" platform, and put all efforts into rebuilding the server and app structure from ground on.

The new feature is in the first client that got released based on the new, common framework. This means it should be transferred automatically to the other clients when they get released.

EN Management promises that in the future, EN will be much faster in releasing new functions, because they need to be coded, tested and released only once. I think we will simply take them by their word !

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2 hours ago, StephenBD said:

I first flagged this problem in January 2017.  Now at last it has been solved.  Thank you, Evernote.

It should not take three and a half years for a bad initial decision to be reversed. It could have been fixed in the next release. 

You posted a request which has received 24 user votes
It doesn't seem to have been a high priority issue

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10 hours ago, DTLow said:

You posted a request which has received 24 user votes
It doesn't seem to have been a high priority issue

Even though this one is in the top 20 in this section, you know vote counts don’t set Evernote priorities or timelines.

To clarify, why did you respond by pointing out the vote count and priority? I’m having difficulty reading your comment as anything but trivializing.

Anyway.... Like Stephen, I’m relieved and thankful that Evernote restored these buttons they deleted 3.5 years ago. I’m still surprised they would freeze development on an app for _years_ in the fast-paced mobile device era.

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14 minutes ago, jengagne said:

To clarify, why did you respond by pointing out the vote count and priority? I’m having difficulty reading your comment as anything but trivializing.

@StephenBD and I both commented that this request doesn't seem to be a high priority   
I do trivialize the comment that "it should not take three and a half years"

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For mobile, I love that it does not take multiple taps to access indentation like it used to. However, after not using the app for a while I could not find the indentation icons for the life of me. The only way I found them was by turning my phone to landscape, revealing all the options on the toolbar.

My current concern is that there is no indication that the toolbar is scrollable while in portrait mode. I would consider this an accessibility issue (especially for new users). Two ways this could be fixed: the next off-screen icon can be barely visible on the edge (would work well with the already-implemented translucency), or if that creates an undesirable look, a temporary horizontal scroll bar should show when the keyboard is first opened, which then fades away after a moment. 

C31265AC-453C-48BC-A318-C71D5DDBFBE4.jpeg

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