I'm preparing for a lawsuit, and have used Evernote to organize a large stack of scanned PDF documents. All the notes are stored in a single notebook, with tags separating the source of records (e.g. Personal records, Company X records, Company Y records, etc.). So far, so good. The notes have title convention:
YYYYMMDD - doc title
Which works really great to sort the notes by date. It has been easy to grab the note links and create an Index page. So far so good. Now, I need to share this with the lawyers in printed and electronic format. They don't use Evernote. Evernote falls apart when using content with people that don't use evernote. Ugh...very frustrating.
How about merging the notes?
Ok - in the MAC version of Evernote, I create a copy of the notes to a new local notebook, then merged them into a single note. Ok - that works. Now export to a single PDF? Nope. How about printing the note to a PDF? No, only the ugly merged note headers and the first PDF print. Not useful at all.
Let's try export the notes:
Nothing useful there, just proprietary or HTML format. On the MAC version, I can't select multiple notes and export the attachments. But I can do this one note at a time. Makes me wish I would have just stored the notes in Dropbox or something and skip Evernote all together.
Let's try Windows version of Evernote:
I didn't realize how different the features of the two versions are (I'm primarily a MAC user). In Windows, I can't grab multiple notes and make a copy in a local notebook. You can only copy individual notes. Ugh. I tried to copy a few notes individually, then merge & print. A little better result, except I can't turn off the printing the note meta data, which throws off the pagination. Then the ugly merged note headers print on their own page, and the embedded PDF documents print looking like a screen capture rather than actually printing the PDF natively. I could manually delete the ugly merged note title, but there are hundreds, and the embedded PDF still doesn't print full size.
Different from the MAC version, I can select multiple notes and "Save attachments" in bulk. But of course, the resultant files do not inherit the note title and instead have the scanned document (cryptic) names. Now I need to manually rename all the files.
Summary
Bottom line - evernote is really great for personal use, but then when you want to do something useful with all the information, it quickly becomes frustrating and not so useful. Am I missing something? After spending many hours scanning, tagging, titling, and organizing, I'm left with the only option of manually processing each note individually AGAIN in order to produce something useful to share with the attorneys. I've been using Evernote for about 3 years, but never realized this HUGE gap in functionality. I'm hoping I'm missing something as this is really bothersome and frustrating.
Idea
floid 8
I'm preparing for a lawsuit, and have used Evernote to organize a large stack of scanned PDF documents. All the notes are stored in a single notebook, with tags separating the source of records (e.g. Personal records, Company X records, Company Y records, etc.). So far, so good. The notes have title convention:
YYYYMMDD - doc title
Which works really great to sort the notes by date. It has been easy to grab the note links and create an Index page. So far so good. Now, I need to share this with the lawyers in printed and electronic format. They don't use Evernote. Evernote falls apart when using content with people that don't use evernote. Ugh...very frustrating.
How about merging the notes?
Ok - in the MAC version of Evernote, I create a copy of the notes to a new local notebook, then merged them into a single note. Ok - that works. Now export to a single PDF? Nope. How about printing the note to a PDF? No, only the ugly merged note headers and the first PDF print. Not useful at all.
Let's try export the notes:
Nothing useful there, just proprietary or HTML format. On the MAC version, I can't select multiple notes and export the attachments. But I can do this one note at a time. Makes me wish I would have just stored the notes in Dropbox or something and skip Evernote all together.
Let's try Windows version of Evernote:
I didn't realize how different the features of the two versions are (I'm primarily a MAC user). In Windows, I can't grab multiple notes and make a copy in a local notebook. You can only copy individual notes. Ugh. I tried to copy a few notes individually, then merge & print. A little better result, except I can't turn off the printing the note meta data, which throws off the pagination. Then the ugly merged note headers print on their own page, and the embedded PDF documents print looking like a screen capture rather than actually printing the PDF natively. I could manually delete the ugly merged note title, but there are hundreds, and the embedded PDF still doesn't print full size.
Different from the MAC version, I can select multiple notes and "Save attachments" in bulk. But of course, the resultant files do not inherit the note title and instead have the scanned document (cryptic) names. Now I need to manually rename all the files.
Summary
Bottom line - evernote is really great for personal use, but then when you want to do something useful with all the information, it quickly becomes frustrating and not so useful. Am I missing something? After spending many hours scanning, tagging, titling, and organizing, I'm left with the only option of manually processing each note individually AGAIN in order to produce something useful to share with the attorneys. I've been using Evernote for about 3 years, but never realized this HUGE gap in functionality. I'm hoping I'm missing something as this is really bothersome and frustrating.
7 replies to this idea
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.