(Archived) Feature Request - batch processing

[gazumped 11,667]

Let me say up front that I'm not sure this subject heading is a proper description of my thought for today. Let me explain...

I'm suggesting that there should be a way in which we can set up several (lots) of notes from scanned-in paperwork or other sources and specify titles, tags and created dates in the most time-effective way. There's maybe an option via ENscript to set this up, but I don't have the time or the confidence as yet to experiment.

Since it is a way to help vacuum information into the application and store it more accessibly, I think it's something which is worth proposing as a development rather than an add-in.

The background is - for some time I've been involved in the boring-but-necessary task of turning my paper file storage from a garage with boxes and shelves (and spiders) into a fully backed-up, arachnid-free and much more easily searched electronic repository available from any location, and fully portable with my little Android helper. Running in parallel with that, there's the day job of tweets, emails, cuttings, snail mail and other general sanity overloads; and the ongoing task of sorting out my own taxonomy so that when I store stuff, I can actually find it again.

My ideal, in "finding" stuff, is to have a single search result, or one that is a short list of accurately timelined and relevant notes from which it is easy to pick the correct one(s).

All the above is slightly complicated (but in a very nice way) by the occasional Doh! factor of finding that I forgot / didn't know something about Evernote's capabilities, and/ or the new versions that sneak out of the Elephant cave from time to time with brand new functions.

After processing a lot of notes I've come to believe that it's pretty fundamental that each note should be properly dated; that is to say it's creation date should be the date of a letter or an event, not the date on which you made the note. It goes without saying that you also need to tag and title it suitably. But creating a new note and changing the created date does add significantly to the time involved. If you're going through a lot of paper with different datings, setting up the dates correctly takes time. To save that extra overhead I've used yyyymmdd in titles extensively to help sort notes into the correct timeline, and that's my current work-around.

It did occur to me that the email option might offer a solution - if there were a function that allowed the created date, title, notebook and tags to be specified in an email subject line, I could more easily scan or copy to email rather than scanning to Evernote, and have my subject line(s) saved (in an Evernote note) to copy and paste into the email. I can then concentrate on converting paper rather than clicking and typing in the desktop client to change settings.

Like Owyn, one of my guiding principles is LAZY, and the easier I can make converting the real world into virtual, the more I like it... 8)

[Owyn 457]

I have run into this situation several times. i.e. I have some collection of notes which all need a similar change.

Frequently I can use discrete tools in Evernote Windows to accomplish part of the tasks.

e.g.

Drag & Drop to left panel to change notebook.

Note Tags (Ctrl-Alt-T) to fix tags.

Some times I would really like to use regexp find and replace on note titles, but, that is probably asking too much, but a subset of that function, adding a Prefix to the note title could be really useful.

An analogous task is meta-data maintenance in my music library. Something like this for scalar value attributes would be useful in Evernote.

e.g.