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Lock a note-function


BurnThatGloom

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Hey y'all, 

It looks like a lot of you are interested in having the ability to create read-only notes, so I've moved this thread to the Mac Product Feedback forum so y'all can vote on this to bring awareness to the request by clicking on the arrows at the top of the thread, to the left of the thread title. I've added my vote to get things started :D.

 

Vote Read Only.jpg

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On January 14, 2016 at 5:09 PM, jbenson2 said:

It doesn't support note locking of any kind, which is a curious omission:

For sure, we need this.  I would also agree about it being a "curious omission".  You'd have thought it would be first on the design list, and on by default.

@pepr You might consider using the voting button at the top of this subject.

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Professional writers have requested the note lock feature over the years. 

Here is a lengthy article by Paul Thurrott who explains why he uses Evernote. 

He also points out the drawback.

"It doesn't support note locking of any kind, which is a curious omission: Once I'm done with an article, I'd like to know that a future errant keystroke isn't going to wipe it out or edit it in some fashion."

"And, as it turns out, I can't completely replace Microsoft Word."

http://winsupersite.com/article/paul/evernote-word-writing-141902


 

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A functionality to lock/unlock notes to make them "read only" would be of great help.

There are notes that you create to use them as a frequent reference, but you don't want to change them by mistake. Or let others borrowing your tablet to change or delete anything. A lock/unlock button or similar would prevent that.

Just an idea... Thanks.

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This would really be a great help.

 

It is far too easy to accidentally modify a Note just when you are trying to select some text, or click on a link.

 

My other big use case is that most of the time I have multiple apps/windows open.  While Evernote is still the active app/window, I can use my mouse scroll wheel to scroll another app/window without making it active.  Sometimes I forget and start typing, thinking I am in the other app, but I'm still in Evernote.

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+1 on this.  Please add the support.  I have just one premium account and would like to have an ability to archive without altering.  An option to flag a note as read only or lock out of change, would be great.  Example notes that are not touched keeps moving down the list as more are added.  This gives you an ability to roughly know how old a note it based on how deep it is.  If you accidentally alter it, then you are stuck as it moves to the top again.  locking it down or in read only mode will prevent the movement within the view.

 

Thanks for your consideration.

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Just a followup to the Powers That Be: please do consider this idea: Note-Locking.

 

As we enter the new year, I help run a number of business oriented Evernote subscriptions and the inability to lock notes (make them read only) once they have been put out there for the team or for a person's own account is truly an issue.  The functionality is not far off form the idea of setting the share-accessibility of a note to read-only.  The difference being is that you can set it yourself that way and reset the not to read/write if necessary for updates.

 

Over the past year we can not count the number of notes that have been corrupted because multiple devices hit the notes at relatively the same time.  the worst is with our IOS devices as your IOS-app changes the note if we simply look at it and try to copy ANYTHING (thus requiring an update/sync). We are not reliably able to use notes as reference because people are now afraid they are gonna cause sync errors (some notes have had dozens of these "conflicting change" notes strung to the bottom, which must all be resolved and cleaned up).  If you are updating notes all the time, then the current Evernote setup is perfect, but if you setup notes to be reference or source info (to be copied from, not to) then the current Evernote is a serious FAIL and should be addressed.  

 

PLEASE do consider this.

 

...pat

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Hi.

Wouldn't a lock a note-function great? I haven't noticed one in Evernote for Mac, am i right?

This would be great cause you can use it as a digital local private diary-thing.

Let me know if this gets real! And where can you post suggestions?

 

+1 agree that this is a must have. 

 

kcressy,

It is good that you are supportive of this suggestion.

 

For the future, please remember to abide by the forum code of conduct. Posting the same thing 4 times doesn't make your case any stronger, and just creates clutter.  

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Hi.

Wouldn't a lock a note-function great? I haven't noticed one in Evernote for Mac, am i right?

This would be great cause you can use it as a digital local private diary-thing.

Let me know if this gets real! And where can you post suggestions?

 

+1 agree that this is a must have. 

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Hello everyone. 

It's been some tıme I had my eye on this feature. Today I reserved some time into doing this and created a simple web app.

It works like this: you tag your notes with a tag called 'readonly' and every five minutes, the system checks your notes and makes tagged ones read-only. You can subscribe to the service via : https://ro-app.run.aws-usw02-pr.ice.predix.io/

. Plese note that this is a 2-3 hour work and I will not maintain it in terms of look etc. It simply does what it promises to do. If there's a huge interest in the project I might allocate some more time into it, though. 

Cheers,
Onat

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Hello everyone, thanks for the support and interest ! 

 

I plan to share the code via Github, it'll be done with Qt/C++, anyone who wants the code can grab it from there. I'll also share Mac and Linux executables, and we'll see about Windows:)

 

Let me give you the updates, so far. The good news is that this works. I have my own worklflow implemented on a linux server that performs automated tasks for me, I have added this readonly feature to that and it works! My method simply creates a tag called "readonly", and every 10 minutes it checks for notes with that tag and sets those notes' contentClass to something like "com.onatbas.readonly....."

As you can see in the attachment it is readonly in official clients, although there's really nothing in the api that prevents it from being edited by your api calls (which is pretty good)

 

Now the catch is, I have found out that once you set something to readonly, it's readonly forever, because you can't set the contentClass back to empty string. Documentation says it must be at least 3 characters. So I don't know what to do about that. You can copy paste the contents of it to somewhere else, but I don't like that solution. Right now, I'm marking notes that I'm %100 sure that I won't change ever again, to readonly.  

 

But, I still plan to share the app along with the source with the community, currently I'm waiting for a production API key for this application (I applied on the day I first wrote about this), I'll share a gui app once I get it.   

 

Cheers !

 

image.jpeg

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On 7/26/2016 at 9:52 PM, onatbas said:

I have found a way to make notes read-only. It appears contentClass attribute in evernote api is capable of this.

https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/read_only_notes.php#Examples

In short, I can implement a simple gui application that authenticates with evernote and simply lists you your notes and you can mark some of them read-only from there and leave it there, if people are interested?. The only catch is, you need to open-up this external tool that I'll have written to switch a note back to read-write, as evernote doesn't let you set content class from official clients.

@onatbas That would be great if you would do that. Jackolicious suggested that on page 1 of this thread but I did not/do not have the skill to create such a thing. Thank you.

Ps. It appears that Jackolicious (who was the SVP in charge of the Mac version of Evernote) has moved on to Butter.ai - looks like it could be an interesting endeavor.

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On 7/26/2016 at 9:52 PM, onatbas said:

I have found a way to make notes read-only. It appears contentClass attribute in evernote api is capable of this.

https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/read_only_notes.php#Examples

In short, I can implement a simple gui application that authenticates with evernote and simply lists you your notes and you can mark some of them read-only from there and leave it there, if people are interested?. The only catch is, you need to open-up this external tool that I'll have written to switch a note back to read-write, as evernote doesn't let you set content class from official clients.

I'm in!

maybe you can share this app via Github?

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13 hours ago, onatbas said:

I have found a way to make notes read-only. It appears contentClass attribute in evernote api is capable of this.

https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/read_only_notes.php#Examples

In short, I can implement a simple gui application that authenticates with evernote and simply lists you your notes and you can mark some of them read-only from there and leave it there, if people are interested?. The only catch is, you need to open-up this external tool that I'll have written to switch a note back to read-write, as evernote doesn't let you set content class from official clients.

I'm interested. How do you share your tool? Thanks.

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5 minutes ago, onatbas said:

In short, I can implement a simple gui application that authenticates with evernote and simply lists you your notes and you can mark some of them read-only from there and leave it there, if people are interested?. The only catch is, you need to open-up this external tool that I'll have written to switch a note back to read-write, as evernote doesn't let you set content class from official clients.

>>Read Only Notes

Thats cool. I'd like to be able to that in AppleScript, however we don't have access to that attribute

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I have found a way to make notes read-only. It appears contentClass attribute in evernote api is capable of this.

https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/read_only_notes.php#Examples

In short, I can implement a simple gui application that authenticates with evernote and simply lists you your notes and you can mark some of them read-only from there and leave it there, if people are interested?. The only catch is, you need to open-up this external tool that I'll have written to switch a note back to read-write, as evernote doesn't let you set content class from official clients.

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19 hours ago, Viv Ilo Veith said:

Pat, I can see that the "Modified Date" changes every time a note is used. But the Creation Date should remain the same. Are you having trouble with that getting corrupted?

BTW, if anyone read/remembers my earlier posts regarding the song book use . . . I did flee Evernote for that use. Two good digital songbooks are OnSong (which is only an iOS app but does have a Console that can be used on Windows or Mac) and Songbook by LinkeSOFT. Both have their pros and cons but I think OnSong is a little better than Songbook.

Thank you for the idea. The Modified date is the key important handle on some notes as we have items that are supposed to updated based on specific periods. Notes like "January Sales Data" and "Last Year Results" should not show up as modified in July. They should be locked so they can be trusted as long as they are posted and remain relevant.  Imagine reading a blog, news story, or email where every time you clicked on the words to highlight or copy an important piece the story "updates" itself. No two people reading the piece would ever be certain they are looking at the same data. In general though, the date handle is secondary.

The bigger issue is that simply clicking to copy data in a note (on iOS) causes the actual data to change and be resynced. A mobile devices don't always have good connections and multiple people are often getting shared data at the same time this is VERY frequently leading to "Conflicts" (multiple versions of the same note) being spawned for no valid reasons. In a modern app, there is no reason a read-only view of data is not the norm. With Evernote, we have a case where auto-edit-only-mode is the ONLY way to actively access data.

As an active note taking tool, I get the idea of auto-edit-only-mode. That's a big part of things like twitter and such as they always writing content in a forward-the-conversation sort of way. But even they let you copy a previous tweet and retweet it without destroying or changing the original tweet. Not the case with Evernote.

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6 hours ago, Patrix47 said:

  On Mobile devices, simply clicking on messages to copy text out of them is changing the date of notes and leading to data corruptions.  Without locking, Evernote is not useful for frequently used reference information as it only works for frequently changed information.

 

...pat

Pat, I can see that the "Modified Date" changes every time a note is used. But the Creation Date should remain the same. Are you having trouble with that getting corrupted?

BTW, if anyone read/remembers my earlier posts regarding the song book use . . . I did flee Evernote for that use. Two good digital songbooks are OnSong (which is only an iOS app but does have a Console that can be used on Windows or Mac) and Songbook by LinkeSOFT. Both have their pros and cons but I think OnSong is a little better than Songbook.

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We are still waiting for some response on this.  The need continues and is a reason we have had to move some of our teams to other software.  On Mobile devices, simply clicking on messages to copy text out of them is changing the date of notes and leading to data corruptions.  Without locking, Evernote is not useful for frequently used reference information as it only works for frequently changed information.

 

...pat

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I've been evaluating Quiver for the Mac and I like that it has an icon in the toolbar to switch a note between preview mode and edit mode, adding something like that to Evernote would be appreciated greatly.  As it is I am considering switching all my code snippets over to Quiver.

Thanks

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1 hour ago, JayF said:

Read only notes would be useful in educational settings, as teachers share notebooks with their classes, it would be nice if some notes could be read-only to prevent accidental modification/deletes.

 

jay

Workaround, In this setting perhaps creating a PDF of the notes would work.  FWIW.

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Read only notes would be useful in educational settings, as teachers share notebooks with their classes, it would be nice if some notes could be read-only to prevent accidental modification/deletes.

 

jay

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8 hours ago, onatbas said:

I agree that this is a very beneficial feature to have. Some notes are just archived and won't be changing, ever again. I would lock half of my notes if I had this.

I don't necessarily agree with this being a "Mac feature". This should be available for all devices, don't you think?

Best

Hey @onatbas,

I agree that this is more global than Mac, I just moved the thread to this forum because it started in the Mac Help forum. You can create a similar thread under other Product Feedback forums for other devices, but there isn't a general Product Feedback forum where we could place something like this. Thanks for the feedback!

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I agree that this is a very beneficial feature to have. Some notes are just archived and won't be changing, ever again. I would lock half of my notes if I had this.

I don't necessarily agree with this being a "Mac feature". This should be available for all devices, don't you think?

Best

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eMax123 - Thank you for adding your voice.

Other readers please add yours if you would like this feature added! Or suggest what we can do to get it added.

thx

Felix

As users, the best we can do is make a case here on the forums for why the developers should devote time and resources to providing this feature, and doing so across every client. When you look at it this way, it doesn't seem quite so compelling, in my opinion. However, I would certainly like to have it.

Alternatively, I propose that if Evernote goes ahead with something like this, they create an archive. It can be toggled to stay online (no download to your desktop), nothing in it can be changed, and we can set our preferences so that the content is neither included in searches nor indexed (if we want). This would (in my opinion) considerably lighten the load on Evernote servers, because an account of 10,000 + notes might have 9,000 or so archived, so it effectively functions (with API calls and the like) as an account of only 1,000 notes. Our searches would be faster, our local drives would have more space, and we would be able to prevent boneheaded mistakes that make unwanted changes to our notes.

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Any movement on this suggestion?  Can an Evernote employee chime in on status?

 

I have taught a workshop a few times on Using Evernote as a Digital Songbook but I have to admit that I am now looking for an alternative for that purpose.  (I am not looking for an alternative to Evernote in general; just looking for something better to use as a digital songbook.)  

 

The sole reason for fleeing Evernote is that it is too easy to go into edit mode.  I will be in the middle of singing a song at a song circle and move my finger on the iphone to see the next verse and Poof! the keyboard pops up and takes over half the screen and I can no longer see the lyrics.  Very upsetting.

 

Has anyone come up with a Hack to lock a note?

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I hope that the good folks at Evernote are keeping an eye on this issue. We might not be generating some of the traffic of other bugs, but this request is substantial and greatly affects the capabilities of Evernote as a tool. Lock notes would allow for a significant number of features, uses, and techniques not currently available.

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+1 for "ReadOnly".

Like others have said, getting into Edit mode is a bit too easy (especially in Metro version and iPad) and no "cancel" option....

And frankly, I would like ReadOnly to be default. 99% of my notes are created (or clipped) once and remain unchanged. I don't want to touch them ever again. And if I do, an Unlock step is simple enough. I have several notes that I edit quite constantly - I'll leave those Unlocked :-)

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+1 for the locking feature. Being that it is the beginning of the year, let me expand this idea and make the following suggestion/case for its use:

A the beginning of a year (or other period) it is common to want to "lock" the notes from the previous year (period) and start with either a fresh set or continue from the existing but in a new note/notebook. This allows us to track progress and evolution rather than the current format of Evernote which only allows to relate the current state....

Yep. I was thinking EXACTLY the same thing last night. I really wish I could lock all of this up.

What I really liked about your suggestions was the idea of adding another function to tags, so that they would not only identify notes for organizational and navigational purposes, but also define how they act. I have long wanted to see shared tags that act like shared notebooks (in other words, you could tag ten notes and share those instead of having to move the ten notes out of their current position, into a notebook, and then share that). Locking tags would be great, as would Private tags. These functions could help us manage our accounts a lot more easily, and as you said, they would prevent the inadvertent mixing of private and public information. I recently posted a bunch of private information on accident, and even though it was a clear case of user error, the ease with which you can make the mistake is a little disconcerting.

Thanks for the great suggestions!

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+1 for the locking feature. Being that it is the beginning of the year, let me expand this idea and make the following suggestion/case for its use:

A the beginning of a year (or other period) it is common to want to "lock" the notes from the previous year (period) and start with either a fresh set or continue from the existing but in a new note/notebook. This allows us to track progress and evolution rather than the current format of Evernote which only allows to relate the current state.

Now I have gone through several forum posts on this topic as well as the obviously related "Duplicate a Notebook" and seen the engineering and design concerns and I would suggest there a couple of simple things that could make this work. First, there does not need to be an issue with raising havoc in terms of database search returns because the resultant notes/notebooks are inherently different. This difference can be manifest in several ways:

- First, inherently the "second" notebook has a different internal ID and this could be leveraged in the search routines.

- Second, when duplicating notebooks there "should" be an option to "lock" the previous notebooks or set their "status" to "archive" (or something similar). This would help all of us who want to lock/archive notebooks/notes based on real-world criteria so that we can work with Evernote's very efficient "current state" presentation method, and yet have the ability to "dig deep" to find something we may have left in the virtual "way back machine".

- Another way this can be accomplished is through the use of tags. This is something both Evernote could do internally and us users could do on our own. For Evernote, they could allow a set of tags to be automatically applied to Notes/Notebooks upon creation (such as a "lock" or "archive" tag), then when searching, they simply have to allow us to be able to automatically include those tags as part of the search. The action and presentation of this is similar to the way OSX Spotlight currently searches with a keyword/search term and allows the user to specify if it is "contained in" or "part of the name", etc. If the user opts that all searches by default would be on "current items" then they would then have the option to click on their search term and specify that the query should be across all notes, not just their default filter.

There are additional benefits to this process as I have recently helped a business begin to use Evernote for multiple employees who all share some common notebooks. Now one of our biggest problems so far has been the inability to separate personal and professional data. If you are allowed to see one of the group notebooks, then those results ALWAYS show whenever you search for personal items. And, unfortunately, and VERY VERY VERY embarrassingly, the reverse is also true. As a result employees are currently instructed to only use their Evernote account for business use because of several instances where personal information "popped up" when users searched through notes during meetings. Now I can tell you this has been a deal breaker for using Evernote in more than 3 other large deploys. Of course, it is possible to search within a single notebook, but obviously this is not adequate when businesses make use of multiple Notebooks for activities. So far, we have tried to apply tags to our notebooks so those that do use Evernote can search all of their business notes by referring to a single tag for all Business Notebooks/Notes. However, most of the time users don't enter tag data in before they enter search terms (this is normal: search for what you want then refine the scope). This still result in embarrassing returns, but can be quickly modified by adding the tag to the search.

The simplest answer would be to allow users to define a profile (or multiple profiles for advanced users) for their standard search/search patterns. This way, be default they can search in only a "current-business" world, or in a "current-personal" world, or an "archived notes" world, or maybe just "search everywhere". But the user is in charge, not the UI and they get the results they want immediately, not after fighting with extraneous returns produced by the instantaneous nature of the search engine.

Evernote is powerful in the way that it allows us to capture the details of our world in a clear and useful manner. What I am suggesting is that the same level of design effort be applied to the returns of data that Evernote presents to users – as a blunt search return can deliver not only too much data, but can actually produce embarrassingly "wrong" (for the user-situation, not for the search-engine) data.

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+1 for this feature, having just accidentally changed a note that I didn't want to. By the way, the combination of Auto Title and a Ctrl-Z undo feature that doesn't work make it too easy to accidentally modify a note inadvertently. Definitely a read-only attribute that we can turn on or off for specific notes would be a big help.

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Yes, I agree with the OP. It would be wonderful to have a feature which could make notes 'Read only'. Having the 'encrypt' feature is useful of course but often, I want to keep something in a frozen state so that I don't accidentally change the data in a note.

Please add this feature!

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My interpretation -- quite possibly mistaken -- is that BurnThatGloom means a different feature: make a note read-only. Once locked, a note could not be altered or deleted, unless you unlock it. Nothing to do with encryption, everything to do with volatility.

At least that's what I'd mean by lock a note. And it would be very useful indeed. :D

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Since you specified local (for a digital local private diary-thing), just create a local non-sync'd notebook.

It does not go to the cloud or to your mobile devices. Just be sure to back it up yourself.

Where to post suggestions? On this forum. It is seen by several Evernote employees.

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The work around that I am using which works pretty well, is as follows:

 

  1. I made a second Evernote account - a free one.  
  2. I share my Songs notebook with the second account with full rights.
  3. Then logged into the second account via the Share email.
  4. I copied the shared notes into another notebook which I then shared back as view-only with my main Evernote account.
  5. I can now open the Shared View-Only book in my regular account and scroll through a note without the keyboard popping up.  Yahoo!

On the Mac version of Evernote there is now a Presenter Mode. I think they are planning to push something like that out to all the versions of Evernote.  However, unless they radically change it, I am not sure if it will be real usable.  Right now on the Mac they make the title of the note GARGANTUAN and there is no way to hide it.  Why they think everyone is that proud of their note titles completely escapes me!  But until they fix that glitch I am not sure presentation mode will solve the lack of Read-Only issue.

 

 

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Any news on this? This could very well be a key feature for people who take their journaling seriously. 

Even though I love Evernote, the fact that ones notes are so "fragile" and can easily (read by accident) be erased takes the experience one notch down. I really hope you guys at Evernote take note of this :-) and make it happen. 

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I've been asking for read-only notes since the early days of EN. They ask for great ideas but have paid no mind to this one. I am constantly copying text from notes to my clipboard and sometimes inadvertently cut. Luckily I'm a premium customer and can rely on the History feature to recover unintentional mods to notes. Very annoying when a simple read-only note feature can prevent this.

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+1 on a note locking feature built into the native application, to prevent accidental deletions and edits.

 

If a Content.Class already exists, I'm sure that a button to apply said class to a note is a 3-5 point job in your next developer scrum, no?

 

 

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That is not currently a feature of Evernote.

Evernote staff do read these posts, even though they don't always reply. So, you can consider your suggestion made. If you wish, you can also register your suggestion by submitting a support request. The link is in my signature.

Best of luck.

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Hi all, I did some searching on Google and it looks like this was a planned feature from 2012, but I can't find any recent answers.

 

I just want to make a note 'READ-ONLY' so I can't accidentally alter it.

 

Thanks!

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+1 for:  "prevent changes/deletion of this note"

I need this feature.

 

Need this feature badly.

 

 

I have occasionally deleted notes or emptied the selected lines  many times. The worst thing is that it often happens and you don't notice it (especially when you have a portion of text selected — just press space and you lose it).

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Ditto on the locking feature!!

 

I use Evernote for many many things, and I recommend it to my college students.   One of my notebooks has some of my grading notes and it would be really helpful if I could lock it so that I can copy from it but not edit the note if it is locked up tight. 

 

Thanks!  

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I have manager to create a read only note, it is very much a hack but it works fine.

1. Use an app like Evernote Hello, or Evernote Food to create a new note

2. Copy the new Note's Link

3. Paste it into the site here and press edit (Note: The more popular ENML Editor at ping13.net does NOT work for this)

4. Leaving that page open, create a new note in Evernote with the contents which you want to be read only.

5. Copy this Note's Link and paste it into the same site as above but in a new tab/window

6. Copy Everything from the Content Note to the Read Only Note and press save

Now you will have a read-only note :)

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Thank you @Jackolicious!  That is almost exactly what I needed. However, I am not sure I understand where to set the Note.attributes.contentClass.

 

Is that something I can actually set on a note by note basis? Or preferably on a Notebook basis?  Like to have a notebook where all the notes added to it would convert to Read Only. The links I followed all talk about building it into an app api.  

 

Thanks for any help you can give me.  

 

You know, there is a real app opportunity for someone here.  EvernoteSong would fly!  Especially if there were a few types of notes so you could have a note charting cords & lyrics both, a note that could be lyrics only, and a note type that would actually be sheet music.  Having a teleprompter type of scrolling for lyrics (on the ipad) would be a phenomenal addition.  I know many performing musicians that are using a scrolling teleprompter for lyrics during their performances.

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