pmbanas

Just tried Cam Card (camcard.com) per Crick's reco above. It's a fair scanner and does have output to .XLS. It can never be as good as the linkedin product which automagically corrected the scanner OCR errors. However, it does allow your data to run free rather than the walled zoo of Evernote. If anyone finds something better, please let us know. Perhaps in the 2020's, Evernote will also evolve. Cheers!

Thanks Crick! I haven't scanned a biz card in years since sticking it into the Evernote black hole was just a waste of time. I'll give Cam Card a try. It's a service I'd happily pay for if it works. I really thought the LinkedIn integration in CardMunch was genius.

Quoting them is not exactly refuting my statement. Anyway, I'm done.

Mandm is right. There's easy ("click here to export a CSV") and then there's "export 800 html pages and wrassle with the data." For me, I'm done. If I were ever open to Evernote, that day is long gone after 2 years of watching this forum for an answer. Evernote just doesn't want you to be able to take your data out. It's as simple as that. And if that's the way it is for an address book, why would I use it for anything else.

I think you're missing the point. Any database that has identified fields filled with data should easily be exportable. Even another notorious roach motel company, Intuit, allows exports of its files and also into Excel. I don't love Microsoft any more than any one else does but their format (used by Google, Apple apps and others) is very straightforward and makes it easy to turn editable spreadsheets into tab delimited records that easily can be imported into almost any database. This is not rocket science nor does it involve Apple. It involves Evernote wanting to trap as much of your data inside their database before you realize you can't get it out. Let's just call it a "barrier to exit" strategy. It's too bad because the tool they bought that imported biz card data was super-helpful for those of us needing to save hundreds of cards and then upload them to other services.

I'm done with Evernote. They had 2 years to figure out a way for people to get data out of their roach motel and never bothered to fix it. Sorry, but "allowing" me to export 100's of contacts I get at trade shows into my personal contacts database for Mac really isn't a solution. All they need is a simple export to Excel, but in the interests of keeping everything locked inside Evernote, they refuse to do it.

I'm on Mac. These are scanned-in biz cards. I'm a legacy CardMunch user brought into the Evernote fold.

Hopefully, there will eventually be a solution for Mac users (c'mon, it's 2015!), but for now, my contacts are stuck in Evernote jail. Sorry, downloading each contact from my personal Address book after a 4 day trade show, and then exporting them from that program might have seemed like a great approach circa 1999, but it's absurd in this decade.

My contacts are trapped in Evernote! Please set them free!

That is so insane. I'd think any product that purports to organize all your digital stuff in one place would make it s a bit easier to get it out. The problem with a lot of these workarounds is that you have to import all your contacts into your address book before you can use them another way. My address book is for my close personal and work contacts and not a general database.

Hope it's a success and you do one for Mac. The lack of an export feature should be a bigger issue for Evernote, but maybe we aren't a big market for them.

Has anyone heard of an update to let us export contacts to .csv or or other format. I need to put my biz contacts into a database for later updates. Thanks!

What if there was an app for all hoarders. It allowed you to put stuff forever in a sealed room. You'd never retrieve it but at least you would know it was safe. Maybe that's who it's for?

It's a notes keeper, it's a roach motel! The cards go in and they can't come out! We're all hoping this is just an oversight rather than a nefarious plan to keep their users forever. However, there is a reason the product is called Evernote, I fear. I don't know if anyone in the company reads this board - maybe we should tweet our concern.

Thanks for joining in Michelle. Only hope is that Evernote will get the idea if 100 of thousands of us join this forum and add to the comments! Otherwise, it doesn't sound hopeful. I do really like the LinkedIn part though, which was I was a big user of CardMunch. However, using two scanners, one to do LinkedIn and one so I can actually USE my contacts would be a bit much.