AK7

I think you have to aggressively use their chat to get any help. So far, I'm dissatisfied. I got a stock answer to my issue which failed to solve anything.

I am having increasing issues with Evernote of late. Tags are lost now and then. Then an important attachment to a post inexplicable vanished. (Fortunately, I had a slightly older copy of it lying around elsewhere. But it did spur me to begin deloading all my documents from Evernote to OneDrive). Then this sync happened. See the attached image comparing the web and Windows desktop version. 1) One post from the "Articles" notebook is inexplicably missing. 2) At least one tag is again missing ("6-Aspirational" from underneath ".1 - Schedule"). Since this isn't the first time a tag has vanished, I suspect this isn't the only one. 3) The order and structure of the notebook arrangement is completely different! Naturally, I have opened a support ticket. But since I've seen numerous complaints of customer service taking a long time to reply back, I would appreciate feedback here as to whether I can do anything about this. I have the latest version and made a copy of the Activity Log. PS. On a more general note: Note that I am, or at least was, a big fan of Evernote. I am a paying subscriber, and I even wrote a blog post about productivity featuring it. But for all its cool features, data integrity and sync must remain the number one, two, and three prioritities. Even as Evernote continues introducing more and more features, many of them of questionable efficacy (anyone actually use work chat?), old requests go unanswered (e.g. custom sorting for notebooks), and far more disturbingly, more and more reports appear of serious data integrity issues - reports the truth of which I have myself begun to encounter in force this past month. There are some things that Evernote does really well and I would not want to lose: The specific system of notebooks, tags, and shortcuts; the powerful search; the web clipping. It would be really hard to find a good replacement that can serve simultaneously as a diary, a GTD infrastructure, a creative space, and a repository for clipped articles and other information. But if things don't turn around for the better, I will be eventually be forced to seek an alternative.

Please do this. A contacts notebook should be organized alphabetically. A diary notebook should be organized chronologically by when the note was created. A project notebook should be organized chronologically by when the note was updated. It's a pointless bother having to do the adjustment manually and detracts from the seamless experience that Evernote, usually successfully, strives to offer.

First time I'm hearing about this! My personal impression over the course of this year was that Evernote was actually steadily getting better, more responsive. All I can say is that I didn't notice any data losses or sync problems, I don't actively follow the forums/community, so really disappointing to hear that there might be problems I haven't been noticing. Could you please post a link to some of the relevant complains/discussions with details of these problems? Are there credible plans to resolve them?

I am a long-time premium user and let me just say from the outset that Evernote is an extremely useful program for storing all kinds of data and planning your life. That said, while there are some things at which there is nothing better, there are other things that other apps and programs (Google Calendar, cloud storage, etc) do better. I'm trying to identify which ones as I try to reorganize and optimize my workflow for the coming year. I will lay out my current thinking below - please argue against (or for!) them. Basic Life Organization Task Planning - The GTD/Secret Weapon system is a brilliant productivity concept and performs very well with Evernote. Calendar - Despite the introduction of reminders, the inexplicable lack of custom note sorting means that something like Google Calendar is still by far the better option for keeping track of specific events. Unless I'm missing something. Diary - Evernote is completely suitable for this. Projects - E.g., writing a book, creating a website, learning a new skill. I have a rather intricate but more or less effective system that works with Evernote. Don't see a major need for change. Storage Documents - Evernote very good for this (paperless, etc). Just create a separate notebook for it and organize via tags. Contacts - In principle good, but very time-consuming to input all the relevant data. But can in principle be very powerful in conjunction with the GTD/Secret Weapon system. It would be awesome if there was an app that allowed you to sync your Google, Facebook, and phone contacts and dump them all into a dedicated Notebook. What I currently do is keep a "profile note" on my ~two dozen most important contacts. (Evernote Hello doesn't quite fulfill these conditions and is bugridden to boot). Book Excerpts - Evernote is great for that. 1) Read e-book; 2) Do highlights; 3) Copy highlights; 4) Transfer to note in relevant notebook; 5) tag, label, etc as appropraite. Articles - Useful/interesting articles that I find on the web. Advantage - Makes them easily searchable, can build up a formidable database of research on the subjects that interest you. Downside - Will eventually come to take up a lot of space and become unwieldy. Also I have some issues with the way Evernote Clipper works (the resulting font of clipped articles is uncomfortable small). I am debating whether to continue using Evernote Clipper --> dedicated Articles notebook on my Evernote, or start converting interesting articles I find on the web into PDFs and keeping them in cloud storage like OneDrive, organized by thematic folders. So far I am leaning towards sticking with Evernote for this. Studies/PDFs - My current project involves having to familiarize myself with and keep track of a substantial number of scientific studies. I have most of them as PDFs and they are thematically organized in a folder on OneDrive. Do I keep them there, or should I make the effort to transfer them over to a dedicated "Studies" notebook on Evernote? Plus side: Evernote has better search capabilities, easy to transfer PDFs straight from the Internet via the web clipper; and, best of all, you can take notes on those studies right from within the note to which the relevant PDFs are attached to. Negative side: These studies occupy a fair bit of space (2GB and counting) and transferring them will take up a fair bit of time and be very dull. For the referencing side of things, the best tool I've found is Zotero. Websites - Presumably, bookmarks. Though I find Chrome's bookmarks to be somewhat buggy (changes don't immediately register and sometimes revert) and not very convenient to use. Is there anything better? Videos (from YouTube, Liveleak, etc) - Downloading them and hosting them on Evernote or cloud storage is of course unrealistic except for a very few exceptions. Again, bookmarks? But problem with bookmarks is that they are quite primitive, with no embedded way to assign tags, ratings, etc. E-Books, Music, Pictures - Far too big to effectively store in Evernote; it's not what it is designed for, after all. Conventional storage on hard drive, I assume...? My Photos - This is a puzzle. It's easy and very convenient to do with cloud storage nowadays because camera phones can automatically sync with OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. On the other hand, they consequently require a fair bit of custom organization (by date, event, etc) to avoid becoming an undecipherable mishmash. I suspect the cloud storage solution is best, but select photos can be exported and used to illustrate the Diary. "Portfolio" - A comprehensive collection of all the work you yourself have done so that it is all on hand in one convenient place (e.g. articles, books/book chapters, video appearances, programs, musical compositions, podcasts, blog posts, artistic pieces, etc). What's better for this - a folder on cloud storage, or a notebook in Evernote? I am leaning towards cloud storage. Anyhow, please feel free to chime in with your own solutions to these various organizational issues. I am generally interested in finding out how other people do things. PS. As you might guess from the above, I suffer from a bit of a compulsive-obsessive disorder when it comes to organization. I recognize that some people effectively just organize more or less on the fly, in an ad hoc manner. That's fine, of course. But I want to figure out a comprehensive/optimal system in terms of ease (it should be natural to operate, not be a chore), accessibility (can be accessed across multiple devices with access to the Internet), and security (of said data). This is what this post is about.

When I use the Evernote Web Clipper for Chrome - and I use it a lot - the default note font appears to be Helvetica, Arial size 8. That is far too small, I would prefer it to be at 12 or 13. How do I change this? And is there a way to automatically resize the fonts in previous texts upwards? Thanks. PS. I should add that this happens when I use the Simplified Article format, which is what I typically do to save space.

I'm looking for some centralized way to organize and manage my contacts which area all over the place: On the phone, on Google, Skype, Facebook, etc. The app Hello certainly isn't what I'm looking for. Apart from not being a very good app, it's centered around meetings and business cards. Business card contacts acount for maybe 10% of my total contacts, whereas I'm interested in managing all of them. Please feel free to say Evernote is not suited for this and recommend an alternative app. In fact, I strongly suspect Evernote isn't cut out for this anyway. Thanks in advance.

Thanks a bunch! It works again.

+1 Would greatly appreciate it if Evernote could look into this.

Though I'm aware that Evernote isn't meant for writing books, especially books requiring references - though I do wish it were otherwise! - I am finding it more convenient than either Word or Scrivener for this purpose. How so? The elegant, minimalistic simplicity and high responsiveness of the single note screen.The ease of linking to other documents in Scrivener.No corkboard feature as in Scrivener, but chapters can still be easily shuffled around by keeping a "parent" note showing all the separate notes (i.e. chapters) as a list.My parent note has this, with tick boxes next to the separate chapters. These tick marks are filled in when I finish the first draft, the second draft, complete the final draft, etc.The killer advantage is Evernote's integration across platforms, which allows one to work on a PC at home, then seamlessly transition to a laptop or tablet at a cafe/while traveling. This is much clunkier with Scrivener (to say nothing of separate Word docs) where you have to take manual care of updates across all devices.The only weakness (and a pretty serious one, unfortunately) is the aforementioned lack of reference/citation support, or even of an exceedingly simple "Link to location on single note" that is accomplished in two lines in HTML. So my ad hoc solution is to link to either the Internet link, or just insert a symbol (*) if it is a footnote. On the other hand, with journalistic books - my book is a journalistic (non-academic) non-fiction book - having too many footnotes is a bad habit anyway. So I suppose that's the silver lining. Anybody else using Evernote to write stuff more substantial than just articles and blog posts? Any particular tips you wish to share?

I am interested in being an Evernote Ambassador. My street cred.

That's quite a handful! Let me explain the logic behind each one. Don't get me wrong, Evernote is a wonderful piece of software, a solid 9/10 in my view. Just that with these additions - at least for me - it would become a 10/10. (1) Custom taxonomies In Evernote, you are just limited to Notebooks and Tags as a means of organization. Since I'm a heavy tags user, I end up having to come up with intricate and not very efficient means of organizing them. So, I put a $- prefix for document classifications; a q- prefix for note types (e.g. article; image; video; book review; interview; etc); a # prefix for people; a numeric prefix for time classifications; an @ prefix for places; etc, etc. It would be much easier if I could just create separate custom taxonomies of a tag-like form for each of those. This could be made even more effective by enabling different post taxonomies (e.g. for books reviews vs. recipes vs. wine reviews vs. "vanilla" standard notes) and custom meta boxes that could be associated with each post type, but maybe I'm going off the reservation by now. In other words, basically make it like WordPress where creating custom taxonomies (in addition to default Categories and Tags) and custom post types (in addition to Posts and Pages) is quite easy. (2) Easier Tags Management * When you select two tags, you can also choose to show notes that either have an AND relationship or an OR relationship with them. (Current default is AND). * Add combinations of Notebook/Tag to short-cuts (currently you can only add a notebook or a tag individually). But what if I want to only have a shortcut for a particular tag in one particular notebook? * When you select a tag and start scrolling up to take it to its desired parent, the scrolling speed can be frustratingly slow... problem if you've accumulated a hundred or so tags that need to be organized into parents! (3) Reference/citation Support With this one stroke it would basically make Scrivener redundant. Though I'm aware writers are a niche market, nonetheless I don't imagine it would be very hard to implement and the absolute numbers of those who'll benefit (and use the software more!) are large.

Just a quick question, thanks in advance for the answer. Don't want to delete a note and then have a big attachment uselessly floating around in perpetuity, consuming local hard drive space.

Check out The Secret Weapon, and/or my (related) Paperless Ninja concept. Personally, I use it for pretty much everything: Research; diary; goal setting; tasks; even writing books.

Hello. Was wondering if there are methods/systems of simplifying notes in standard categories, such as Contacts. So, for instance, when you're adding a new contact, have something like this already be pre-filled: Name: Phone: Email: About: [a space for a photograph] Or if you were to create a custom form for, say Wines, featuring pre-filled slots for winery, country, grapes, year, etc. Is this possible? Secondary question: Is it possible to set up synchronization of Contacts data on Evernote with Google, and/or your cell phone? Thanks in advance.