How do you all store and search through documents, statements, bills, manuals etc

[idoc 405]

The reason why I am posing this question is that recent changes between Legacy and v10 have made manipulating pdf files a lot more difficult.  I won't go into that now because I've howled enough about it elsewhere.  However,  it did make me curious as to why other users were not so affected.  And that made me think that my algorithm of searching documents could be improved.  For example, like all of us,  I receive statements every week from banks, vendors, utilities, credit cards etc.  As an example: credit card statements.  Every month when I get that statement I append it to a growing pdf of all the previous statements from that card.  Therefore, the current pdf contains about 10 years of previous statements.  This is incredibly useful because if I am researching something that I purchased years ago, or simply want to remember a hotel or item that I used a long time ago, I can take that one pdf and do a simple search.  It will find every instance of the item throughout the years.  Likewise, a search of "MSFT" on my Schwab pdf will bring up every purchase of Microsoft stock that I ever made at Schwab investment bank.  For tax purposes, I can see every "lot" of MSFT that I purchased since 2007 along with its price at that time.  I do NOT have to sift through dozens of individual pdf files for any of these searches because I have used Acrobat every month to combine these files.  Likewise, there are times that I may combine hundreds of pdf files at the same time eg: Amazon purchases, faxes from server, a messaging service that transcribes voice mails into pdfs, invoices we sent to clients etc.  Every 6 months or so I may simply and rapidly combine hundreds of these using Acrobat.  So if I need to review a fax that I received 4 months ago regarding a specific patient, drug, insurance company etc I can search for it on that one pdf that I store all my faxes.  Also, every year or two I can take these enormous pdfs from my cards, banks, ulilities etc and move them over to Gdrive so that they don't clutter my EN.

So, apparently, am I the only one using such techniques?  Are there better ways of achieving this?  The move from Legacy to v10 has eviscerated the ability to do this and I am wondering why there are not more voices howling in protest about this particular point?  Which made me think, perhaps I just need to move away from this system and use whatever other system is working well for most others on this forum.

[CalS 5,292]

When I was using EN, Pre V10, all statements and the like were stand alone PDFs.  To your point if a hotel charge appeared in more than one statement I would have to look at each if I did not remember the month.  I felt it was easier to look at a couple of statements should the need arise as opposed to concatenating PDFs each month.  Lazy approach.  Still doing it that way.

[idoc 405]

Of course, this approach would be next to impossible if you were running a business, such as mine,  in which invoices to your clients need to be concatenated.  If client X wants to check on their billing history, credits etc I can use our practice management software but I can just as easily find it in our pdf.   Evernote has proved indispensable in my business, personal and financial life mainly in the way that I can concatenate large amounts of information into single pdf files, annotate and manipulate them etc.  I suppose that, perhaps due to the expense or learning curve of Acrobat, many users are not taking advantage of these techniques.  I would say that 90% of my EN usage is along these lines.

[avevers 75]

41 minutes ago, idoc said:

The move from Legacy to v10 has eviscerated the ability to do this

Out of interest, how has it been eviscerated? Genuine question, as I haven't yet made the leap to v10. 

[CalS 5,292]

@ldoc What happens if you skip EN and concatenate new stuff on the g-drive?  If bifurcating searching between EN and statement store is not a problem of course. 

From a Windows perspective I've found that if you turn on windows indexing to a controlled  folder set the search results are very fast.  I used Mega for my store when I left EN.  The end to end encryption lets me store anything.

 

[agsteele 2,997]

I keep all my business and personal receipts and statements in Evernote. I could not conceive of concatenation as an effective method of assembling invoices and receipts. I have a notebook for each year and scan or save PDFs into that notebook. A separate notebook is kept for bank statements.

I use the accounting software to check Sales Invoices. An Evernote search finds purchase invoices as I need them.

[Jon/t 1,421]

I'm similar to @agsteele where I record expenses note by note and PDF by PDF. Concatenation would add a level of complexity for me.

I do have a fairly strict naming convention though around the idea of "What it is"+"Month"+"Year" so my Evernote invoices always use the note title "Evernote Invoice March 2023" or a hotel stay is "Hotel April 2023" and its in the expenses 2023 folder. If I want to search for exact hotels the PDF search does this so I could search within the folder for "Ibis" or "Novotel".

[idoc 405]

45 minutes ago, CalS said:

@ldoc What happens if you skip EN and concatenate new stuff on the g-drive?  If bifurcating searching between EN and statement store is not a problem of course. 

From a Windows perspective I've found that if you turn on windows indexing to a controlled  folder set the search results are very fast.  I used Mega for my store when I left EN.  The end to end encryption lets me store anything.

 

Good thought.  Unfortunately, doesn't work.  I can send those "evernote(x)" files to G drive but once they're there it's the same problem.  No software seems to know what they are.  With regard to checking Ibis or Novotel, that would work well if you have a rough idea where or when you stayed there (so you could find the exact pdf out of many possible pdfs).  Last year I wanted to stay at a hotel at Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris and I remembered that I stayed at a wonderful place there many years ago.  I was able to search within that single pdf file for "Charles de Gaulle", "CDG", "Novotel", "Ibis" etc and within 1 minute I realized it was the Novotel.  This way of doing things works for me because my long term memory is very bad and I can't remember months, years or names.  However, within one pdf file I can find pretty much anything if I change the search paramaters.

[PinkElephant 8,346]

EN can only index what is stored on its servers. A linked document can’t be indexed, you can only search for the title, or information in the note that holds the link. This includes tags - it takes an effort to apply them, but they can help to make such content searchable.

[CalS 5,292]

2 hours ago, idoc said:

No software seems to know what they are.

What does know what they are mean?  Windows or Mac?

EDIT:  I've got 26 GB of docs on my C drive which sync to Mega (a chunk came from EN).  Pretty much all one doc per PDF.  All searchable.  Not saying it is for everyone but again, not sure what doesn't know what they are means.  I may be missing something.

[PinkElephant 8,346]

@idoc Seems what you need is EN on a Mac. It uses the MacOS Preview app for pdf editing. This works seamlessly: Open the pdf from a note launches the Preview app and opens the pdf. You can now do anything Preview allows - it syncs back to the pdf stored in the note within seconds. You see the pdf in the note updating while you are editing.

When done, closing the window with the pdf takes you back to the note, with the pdf holding all your changes.

[idoc 405]

34 minutes ago, CalS said:

What does know what they are mean?  Windows or Mac?

EDIT:  I've got 26 GB of docs on my C drive which sync to Mega (a chunk came from EN).  Pretty much all one doc per PDF.  All searchable.  Not saying it is for everyone but again, not sure what doesn't know what they are means.  I may be missing something.

CalS, perhaps we are miscommunicating.  If you have 3 notes with 3 pdfs you can select them and Export to a directory on your computer.  What you will see there is something that looks like this:

To find the pdf buried within these things you have to double click on each one.  Only after doing that is your pdf revealed.  Therefore, even if I save these "evernote(x)" files into gdrive, or Mega or wherever I want, they will not be decipherable to any third party software (eg:Acrobat).  I literally have to open each one separately and extract the pdf from within.  Hence, no ability to merge hundreds of these like I used to do with Legacy (in which "save attachments" literally saves the raw pdfs and not that strange structure).

 

 

[idoc 405]

59 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

@idoc Seems what you need is EN on a Mac. It uses the MacOS Preview app for pdf editing. This works seamlessly: Open the pdf from a note launches the Preview app and opens the pdf. You can now do anything Preview allows - it syncs back to the pdf stored in the note within seconds. You see the pdf in the note updating while you are editing.

When done, closing the window with the pdf takes you back to the note, with the pdf holding all your changes.

Pink.  If this indeed does work it would be wonderful.  Although I'm a PC based person I could certainly invest in one Mac and do my pdf based operations on that.  I will investigate that as a modality.  I've always resisted Mac since the rest of my personal and business life is on PC, but that could change.  Thanks once again for all your excellent advice.  

Addendum: I just purchased a Win 10 computer because v10 will not update any longer on Win 7.  Based on this last thread I should have bought a Mac instead!

Edited June 1, 2023 by idoc
addendum added to clarify

[CalS 5,292]

Not sure what program you are using to display the three files.

Here is an example of a search against a PDF created from this topic.  It is in File Exporer.  The folder INBOX is indexed, all files are indexed for name and content.  So I think it is doable???

EDIT:  This is how I find documents now, post EN.

 

[PinkElephant 8,346]

Maybe give it a try. I moved to a Mac 2019 and never looked back.

Preview allows to add or delete pages, rotate them and all sort of annotations. It is build into MacOS. What it doesn’t allow is deep editing, which means editing the pdfs original content. To do this a pdf editor is needed - many use Adobe Acrobat (which is not the reader, and it costs money), I use an app called PDF Expert (paid app as well) for this task.

Searchability is provided by Spotlight, which makes everything on a Mac searchable. Well, not everything, the EN data folder remains off limits.

[DTLow 5,739]

4 hours ago, avevers said:

Out of interest, how has it been eviscerated? Genuine question, as I haven't yet made the leap to v10. 

My workflows are automated with integrated scripting (Applescript) on the Mac platform    
This feature was dropped with the v10 conversion   

An example is exporting receipt data to a spreadsheet for budget/expense reporting

[DTLow 5,739]

4 hours ago, idoc said:

Every month when I get that statement I append it to a growing pdf

I maintain each record as separate notes    
The title is prefixed with the date (yyyy-mm-dd) and tagged as required

[idoc 405]

44 minutes ago, CalS said:

Not sure what program you are using to display the three files.

Here is an example of a search against a PDF created from this topic.  It is in File Exporer.  The folder INBOX is indexed, all files are indexed for name and content.  So I think it is doable???

 

So, let's say that you have 100 more of those kinds of notes.  Each one containing a pdf .  Now, let's say you want to combine all of those into one pdf.  How would you do that?  If you are using v10 on a windows desktop then you can ask it to export those 100 notes to a directory on your hard drive.  When those files arrive there they will look like this    evernote(1), evernote (2), evernote (3) etc.  You will not be able to combine them unless you open them one by one, line them up and then use a third party pdf app to merge them.  There is no third party app right now that is able recognize "evernote(x)".  I hope that makes it clearer. Anyway, it seems as if I will have to change my workflow or look into a Mac for the time being.  

[CalS 5,292]

33 minutes ago, idoc said:

So, let's say that you have 100 more of those kinds of notes.  Each one containing a pdf .  Now, let's say you want to combine all of those into one pdf.  How would you do that?  If you are using v10 on a windows desktop then you can ask it to export those 100 notes to a directory on your hard drive.  When those files arrive there they will look like this    evernote(1), evernote (2), evernote (3) etc.  You will not be able to combine them unless you open them one by one, line them up and then use a third party pdf app to merge them.  There is no third party app right now that is able recognize "evernote(x)".  I hope that makes it clearer. Anyway, it seems as if I will have to change my workflow or look into a Mac for the time being.  

I opted to leave EN when V10 appeared for other reasons. Sounds like V10 and PDFs would have been a hard fail for me as well. 

Anyway, to bulk export to a folder you need to install V6 legacy and use it to batch save attachments to a folder.  Then you can combine any way you like and index if you like.  But not a long term solution obviously

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,989]

@idoc, not my circus, not my ... you know. But to the extent that I can follow this, I think I'm more or less with @CalS. Super-massive concatenated PDFs don't seem to be what Evernote is designed for. If you know which PDF to search and what term to search for, then you don't need Evernote, just a PDF reader and some reliable cloud storage.

[gazumped 11,810]

9 hours ago, idoc said:

I append it to a growing pdf of all the previous statements

Hi - are you saying this is one PDF?  Or,  as suggested above,  one note with many PDFs?

[idoc 405]

Yes, when you combine 1000 pdfs that are 6 pages each, you get one pdf that has 6000 pages. Often under 10MB when compressed with Acrobat.  These are searchable, annotatable etc. Bits and pieces of them can be copied and sent to relevant team members. They can be removed from EN annually and sent to online storage. Saving in this way allows you to be sloppy ie: everything is OCRd and easily searchable. Can you tell Im a big fan?

[gazumped 11,810]

Well - my gracious!  That's a lot of pages...

Don't know whether it would be useful to you for the future,  but this page includes some possibly relevant stuff - https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005347-Save-emails-into-Evernote

Quote

To add the text of an email to an existing note, put a "+" at the end of your subject line and we'll place the body of the email into the most recent note with that title.

 

[PinkElephant 8,346]

What I don’t understand here: When I export a selection of notes to one HTML, and each note has a title and an attached pdf, I get one folder, holding one HTML file with all the notes, and one folder holding all the PDFs.

The HTML file is Note titles and (disfunctional) links to the PDFs, but that’s not relevant for the described use case.

I can then select all PDFs, and join them into one big pdf file. This I can import again, or file away. If I use an import folder, I can even define the name of the note and the notebook without opening EN again.

[idoc 405]

2 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

What I don’t understand here: When I export a selection of notes to one HTML, and each note has a title and an attached pdf, I get one folder, holding one HTML file with all the notes, and one folder holding all the PDFs.

The HTML file is Note titles and (disfunctional) links to the PDFs, but that’s not relevant for the described use case.

I can then select all PDFs, and join them into one big pdf file. This I can import again, or file away. If I use an import folder, I can even define the name of the note and the notebook without opening EN again.

Not sure if I'm understanding your question.  Most of my "growing pdfs" are not exported but are added to.   For example, my note "Chase Bank" includes about 7 accounts there.  Each one of them is represented by a pdf file eg: "Chase bank", "Chase Mortgage", "Chase Credit Card" etc.  Each one of these pdfs represent monthly statements going back 10 years or more.  All my statements are automatically sent to EN through a file service previously described.  When I receive this month's statements for a Chase account I simply append it to the end of that "growing" pdf.  I do the same for all my banks, credit cards, home related statements, business invoices etc.  Everything is chronologically added to the end of the relevant pdfs.  For example, my employees payroll pdf is 3000 pages and stretches back for years.  Even though I use a fancy payroll service I can more easily resolve any issue within minutes by searching that pdf.  In some cases, I have notes in which the pdfs are piling up so fast that I don't even have time to concatenate them.  For example, faxes that we send and receive, prescriptions that we write, invoices etc.  After a while those notes are bursting at the seams with pdfs and we then need to export all of those to Acrobat where they are combined into giant pdfs.  We then delete all of the individual pdfs in the messy notes and replace with the giant one.  So a note with 200 individual pdfs from Amazon purchases becomes a note with one pdf (eg: "Amazon 1st quarter 2023") .  We do this throughout the year and will wind up with 4 giant pdfs in that note which we then combine again in December ("Amazon 2023").  This workflow requires 100% dedication to the pdf platform, familiarity with Acrobat, multiple Fujitsu scansnap machines, and converting absolutely everything to pdfs (wife and cat included).   

[PinkElephant 8,346]

Sure, if you want to append it every month.

In this case I usually ask why append at the end, and not at the top. As files are growing, the reverse order usually serves us better (hard to reverse once it’s established, I know).

I would probably run a mix, maybe a yearly file.

In general I have a doubt about which service you should use. I am on the Mac, and for such use cases a combination of DEVONThink and a file tool like Hazel or Alfred could work to automate things. At least more than by using EN, which has a weak spot on automation.

[bmcl26 531]

On 6/1/2023 at 10:15 PM, idoc said:

Pink.  If this indeed does work it would be wonderful.  Although I'm a PC based person I could certainly invest in one Mac and do my pdf based operations on that.  I will investigate that as a modality.  I've always resisted Mac since the rest of my personal and business life is on PC, but that could change.  Thanks once again for all your excellent advice.  

I use a PC and also have Adobe Acrobat installed. PDFs open in it can be amended etc and the changes are saved back to EN.

[catsknit 17]

On 6/1/2023 at 1:25 PM, idoc said:

Of course, this approach would be next to impossible if you were running a business, such as mine,  in which invoices to your clients need to be concatenated.  If client X wants to check on their billing history, credits etc I can use our practice management software but I can just as easily find it in our pdf.   Evernote has proved indispensable in my business, personal and financial life mainly in the way that I can concatenate large amounts of information into single pdf files, annotate and manipulate them etc.  I suppose that, perhaps due to the expense or learning curve of Acrobat, many users are not taking advantage of these techniques.  I would say that 90% of my EN usage is along these lines.

For personal files such as your Schwab account or credit card statements, you could keep a copy of your ginormous pdf on your hard drive, append the new one each month and then save a copy to Evernote for searching, each month replacing the previous giant one in EN. For a giant database of business client info, seems to me that's what practice management software is for. But you could still probably work around in EN by doing the same thing I mentioned for personal files, except you'd have to combine them daily and add to your local copy and then upload, etc.

[idoc 405]

Well, the term “ginormous” is a little unfair. A 3000 page compressed pdf takes up less data than a 30 second tik tok video of my cat drinking from the toilet. 

[catsknit 17]

LOL, fair enough! Still 3000 pages *seems* ginormous so I can certainly understand the appeal of being able to search it quickly using Evernote.