Is it time to replace evernote?

[jwalter007 3]

Been using it for at lease a decade and it would be really hard to replace.
It seems each time they do an update it becomes worse.
The first major disappointment came when I lost the ability to scan a PDF into any folder. It used to be that whatever folder was last viewed, it would can into. That was great. Now all scans go into a single folder and I have to move them all around. If I dont move them, then it effects searching for something.

Now, and an even bigger issue is searching. It just doesnt work well.
For example, I want to search for bank docs. I enter the last 4 of the account number. It used to find the docs. Now it wont find them and the last four are clearly in many documents. It used to work for those docs. They arent new and it wont even find the ones where I entered the last four as part of the note, so not where it has to find it in a PDF.

And on the topic of a PDF, when scrolling notes on my PC it shows a thumbnail of the pdf, but on my device, it doesnt so most of the time searching on a device is useless.
IDK, it would be a real pain to switch to another service but this is becoming not usefule...

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,986]

I appreciate your sharing specific issues rather than the blanket "the new Evernote sucks" that shows up so much on the forums. WRT the first one, I'm not sure I remember Evernote ever scanning every "folder last viewed." There have been designated import folders for many years, so it's hard to address this issue. If you use an import folder and want to keep files in other folders for finding by other software, then yes, you do need to move them after importing. Some folks here probably have automated processes for this that they can share.

Evernote searches (even before v. 10, I think) work from the beginning of a text string, so you can't, for instance (as you can with some other apps) search for "*1234" and find text that ends with 1234. That said, I do find that a string like ********1234 will be found with a search for "1234". Can you say any more about how the text you're searching for is formatted (without revealing sensitive information)?

WRT the third item, what kind of device is not showing the PDF thumbnail? On my Android phone, for instance, yes, PDFs only display as a kind of placeholder, not a thumbnail or preview. Searches will find a note that contains a PDF that contains the search term. But then you do have to open the PDF and look through or search it secondarily for the search term. Is that the issue? It's definitely inconvenient, esp. with a long PDF, but it is possible to find what one is looking for. But again, I'm not sure this is anything new on mobile devices (I could be wrong, though).

[PinkElephant 8,305]

at 1) You can scan right from the app: Open a note, hit the camera button, scan. It will import exactly there. If you mean the EN edition Fujitsu Scanner, it was deprecated by Fujitsu. It was possible to convert it by a firmware update to a regular ix500. But this firmware package was removed from the Fujitsu website, leaving the scanners more or less bricked.

at 2) EN never had the (official) ability to search inside of a character string. It searches the beginning of a string. Using a * as wildcard does not make sense - it means "an undefined number of undefined characters leading", which pushes the search string out of the picture. Other search systems have another type of wildcard, usually the # . It stands for "one undefined character", which means that ####1234 is looking for "1234" behind any 4-digit character leader. But I don't think EN uses it.

The best way if you search on a regular basis for a specific account is probably to use a saved search with the account number.

at 3) I see thumbnails of all of my pdfs. And in most of my other notes in card view I see a thumbnail, usually from a picture. I see a grey symbol with attached Office files, and no thumbnail in text only notes.

If you don't see thumbnails (and made the switch to v10 just now) maybe the conversion of the notes into the new data structure must happen first. Leave the client open, can be in the background to let it communicate with the server.

[VincentC 278]

Have you tried the quick switcher?  cmd-J on a mac, cntl-q on Windows.  It will give a list of notes with the text you enter in the title, even if the text is not the first text of the title.  Also, at the bottom of the list that cmd-j produces, will be a link to "search for 'text' in notes". 

But maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to accomplish.

 

Vinnie

 

[s2sailor 2,345]

4 hours ago, jwalter007 said:

The first major disappointment came when I lost the ability to scan a PDF into any folder. It used to be that whatever folder was last viewed, it would can into. That was great. Now all scans go into a single folder and I have to move them all around.

I think you mean scanning into the last used notebook.  That I believe is a scanner profile setting.  I'm on a ScanSnap ix500 and it has been a while since I last used Legacy, but I think it may have functioned a little differently before.  Let us know what scanner you are using and we may be able to help further.

4 hours ago, jwalter007 said:

I enter the last 4 of the account number. It used to find the docs. Now it wont find them and the last four are clearly in many documents. It used to work for those docs.

I don't recall search ever working like this.  It will search on the first characters in a string, but not on embedded or end characters IIRC.

4 hours ago, jwalter007 said:

And on the topic of a PDF, when scrolling notes on my PC it shows a thumbnail of the pdf, but on my device, it doesnt so most of the time searching on a device is useless.

Which device are you referring to?  On my iPhone PDFs show as an icon, but I don't see the relationship to search.  Can you explain this concern a little more?

[jwalter007 3]

Thanks for the replies.
It is a Fujistu scanner and it worked that way until the scanner made me take an update and it all seemed to fall apart after that. It seems they phased out a good software and replaced it with one that always has probs. So apparently that is a scanner issue.

The search issue appears to have been address by the answers, but I feel like I used to be able to just type the 4 digits and it showed up. But that must not be the case since it doesnt show the results for those 4 anywhere in a document. Something is different because I just cant find things anymore. Maybe since its dumping all the scans into a single folder and if I dont get around to rearranging them it makes the search harder because there are many more results than when things went into the correct folder. IDK, I just can't seem to find the docs Im looking for lately.

With the PDF on my android, the prob is the title of the PDF doesnt say anything about its contents. So lets say I'm looking for a certain credit card statement. On the PC I can see the PDFs are from certain credit cards and I can scroll down and find the one I need. Its impossible to do that on the phone, unless I look at every scanned doc.

Some of this stuff seems pretty important and that evernote should be addressing.
 

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,986]

21 minutes ago, jwalter007 said:

The search issue appears to have been address by the answers, but I feel like I used to be able to just type the 4 digits and it showed up. But that must not be the case since it doesnt show the results for those 4 anywhere in a document. Something is different because I just cant find things anymore. Maybe since its dumping all the scans into a single folder and if I dont get around to rearranging them it makes the search harder because there are many more results than when things went into the correct folder. IDK, I just can't seem to find the docs Im looking for lately.

If the 4 digits are standing alone, they should be searchable, but not if they're embedded or at the end of a string. It would be a little more work, but you might think about using tags to mark notes that relate to a particular account.

22 minutes ago, jwalter007 said:

With the PDF on my android, the prob is the title of the PDF doesnt say anything about its contents. So lets say I'm looking for a certain credit card statement. On the PC I can see the PDFs are from certain credit cards and I can scroll down and find the one I need. Its impossible to do that on the phone, unless I look at every scanned doc.

Yes, this is what I see too. On my Android phone, a PDF just shows as an icon with its filename (or the start of it). One tweak might be to name the PDFs with the credit card (e.g. "Chase" or an account no.) at the start of the filename, to make them easier to find on the phone.

[s2sailor 2,345]

49 minutes ago, jwalter007 said:

It is a Fujistu scanner and it worked that way until the scanner made me take an update and it all seemed to fall apart after that. It seems they phased out a good software and replaced it with one that always has probs. So apparently that is a scanner issue.

Ok, yes, Fujistu is doing away with Scansnap manager and wants folks to move to Scansnap Home.  I prefer manager and was able to find it, after some digging, last year.  It sounds like you may have made the change to Home.  If you want to go back you might be able to still find the scansnap manager installer.

51 minutes ago, jwalter007 said:

With the PDF on my android, the prob is the title of the PDF doesnt say anything about its contents. So lets say I'm looking for a certain credit card statement. On the PC I can see the PDFs are from certain credit cards and I can scroll down and find the one I need.

With Scansnap Manager, after the scan, I'm allowed to rename the file.  Then it is pulled into Evernote and the note title matches the file name.  Instead of looking at icons, I search for the title to find what I need.

[PinkElephant 8,305]

Actually ScanSnap Home allows to do the same: You can review the file, you can change the name, you can file it - for example into an Import Folder.

I sticked with the Manager for a while myself, but didn't really find a reason not to continue with Home. Home does everything I need, after tweaking the profiles a bit.

[s2sailor 2,345]

I'm currently avoiding Home since I see no need for my scans to pass through another online service.  Manager is still working great.  I'm curious to see what will happen when it goes EOL later this year.  I think, since it is running locally it should continue to work fine but is no longer supported.  If this turns out to be incorrect then I will grudgingly migrate to Home.

[PinkElephant 8,305]

Home works entirely local. It's installed software on the Mac.

There is Scan Snap Cloud, but that's an entirely different approach to using a ScanSnap scanner. And there is the mobile app. So there are 4 methods of doing the same thing, plus with one of the newest models the possibility to scan directly into the cloud without a connected device.

[s2sailor 2,345]

If Home is also local, I wonder why they are doing away with Manager?  Does it provide any advantage over Manager that you can tell?

[agsteele 2,985]

Home had more features but, as a result, is more complex. 

Fujitsu announced that Manager would be withdrawn and cease to work on the coming months.

I now use Home and it works well enough.

[Caicos 0]

Evernote is terrible. They are locking me out of my account. First it was need to reduce # of sync users. Fine. Now it is you only have 50 Notes. Guess they are eliminating the free users and going for the money grab.  Down they go.