Preview spreadsheets in notes used to be included when you were a paying customer – now you need to pay even more?!

[loynis.armitage 8]

I just opened a note where I have an excel file attached, and it shows half a preview of the sheet and the other half is an advertisement to upgrade to Professional to preview the whole sheet. This is outrageously greedy. To preview a spreadsheet has been a feature available to paying customers for years. It even works in Evernote Legacy! But in the newest version, they want me to upgrade to Professional to view the sheet. What is this? They are removing features from paying customers, hence making the app worse, and moving them to higher price tiers. It is so sad thay they had such a wonderful product and are ruining it more and more as time goes by …

[agsteele 2,952]

I've never seen the preview of spreadsheets. It is possible to open a spreadsheet but not view in place.

[PinkElephant 8,174]

This overlay is just a way to show users an option that is only available on certain plans, and not on others. There are other examples of hinting at locked features spread over the app, just look at the pdf export box: You will see that page numbers on the pdf are only available for Professional or Teams. You may notice something similar on complex searches, where a hint to Boolean Search appears.

It defies me that simply showing an option that can be unlocked with a different subscription level would be greedy. If you know why you don’t need it, you can ignore it. If you didn’t know the feature exists, you may be glad it is there, and can decide to unlock it. For me a user is greedy who wants it all for nothing, not accepting that developing features cost money and dev hours, and that this must somehow be recovered, for the good of all.

Comparing to legacy is nonsense - this was another app, sitting on a dead branch of the tree. The dead branch is named „natively developed software“, and it nearly destroyed the whole company. This branch will eventually break or rot away, finally taking this zombie down.

Disclaimer: I am writing this being on the Personal plan, paid out of my own pocket, with not plan to upgrade my subscription. Personal fits my need, and that’s it for the time being. I have seen the overlay a few times - not really often, because I mainly use Apple iWorks as my Office solution - the preview function will only work on MS Office formats. It doesn’t show on my Numbers or Pages attachments.

@agsteele When you are on Professional, you won‘t see the preview ad, because the feature is unlocked for you already, and will show the spreadsheet or document instead.

[agsteele 2,952]

9 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

@agsteele When you are on Professional, you won‘t see the preview ad, because the feature is unlocked for you already, and will show the spreadsheet or document instead

Thanks. I understood that. Just haven't seen it before on Legacy or Personal which the OP claims.

[loynis.armitage 8]

12 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

It defies me that simply showing an option that can be unlocked with a different subscription level would be greedy.

That in itself is not what I mean is greedy. What is greedy is that this feature was available for the plan I have - Personal - before Evernote 10, but on this version they suddenly decided it's not available anymore, that if you want to keep existing features that you are already paying for, you have to pay more.

Because I was paying for that feature, among others, before they removed it, and now added it back on a higher price tier. They give me less value for my money now than when I became a customer, and I can't see how that is a good or reasonable development.

[PinkElephant 8,174]

Nobody says anything that has been must always be. There is no guarantee, and your subscription buys you a user right for one subscription period. When it ends, it is a new ball game. This is different to purchased software, where you can stay on the purchased level as long as you want (and it still works).

Since the feature was not there for more than 2 years in v10 (and legacy is deprecated, unsupported code), you can’t argue something was taken away from you during the current subscription. That’s the legal stuff.

Fact is that v10 is completely new code. When the feature is now available again, somebody had to develop it. And the cost of doing so need to be recovered. You must not like it, but since it was not there for 2 years, you can’t really argue you desperately needed it while it was not there. So if you don’t need it, what are we talking about here ?

@agsteele Just opened Legacy on my other Mac, any yes, a preview of MS Office was available, as well as for iWorks and plain text (just what I found rapidly in some notes, maybe there is more). I think it was not natively coded - to me it looks as if a 3rd party previewer was integrated into the app. This will not work anymore, since everything is wrapped into the framework now.

[agsteele 2,952]

1 hour ago, PinkElephant said:

Just opened Legacy on my other Mac, any yes, a preview of MS Office was available

I wonder if that was one of those Mac only legacy features in the same way that import folders were Windows only.

[PinkElephant 8,174]

May be, I didn’t check on Windows. It can be that the previewer used is a native part of MacOS.

[gazumped 11,698]

1 hour ago, agsteele said:

I wonder if that was one of those Mac only legacy features

That's a yes - Windows users never had the preview feature in Legacy,  it's a total upgrade to us now in v10.

[Mike P 2,667]

Mac users won by getting (free) import folders that were only a feature in Windows legacy but lost the Excel preview and tabs that Windows users never had anyway. I guess a common interface across platforms is bound to have winners and losers.