Wanderling Reborn

Just to add.. I've been bouncing between Evernote and Onenote for years.

I went with Evernote first, because Onenote didn't have a decent mobile client.

I could never quite get used to Evernote's structure and lack of total note encryption, so I moved all of my notes to Onenote. My wife stayed with EN because she doesn't want to keep changing things that work for her (I am still the one doing most of the work

I still use Onenote for work, I really like the structured way it works - makes it great for organizing project information and having it all there arranged in a visually logical way. And the degree of integration with MS Suite is just unbeatable. E.g. I can open my meeting scheduled in Outlook, create a linked Onenote note right from within it, and as I take meeting minutes,  I can turn lines of text into Outlook tasks with a single click, and when the meeting is over, all of the action items have already been turned into Outlook tasks and assigned to people via Exchange and linked back to the note.

However, I am hesitant to keep my personal data in Onenote, because of their strategy of moving everything to the cloud and not providing an easy way of exporting notes while preserving file attachments, which I use very extensively. There are some 3rd party tools, but I don't know if they will even work 2-4 years down the road. So, all of my personal stuff is going into file folders as PDFs or Excel spreadsheets or Word docs, synced to Onedrive (which provides the same OCR functionality for text in PDFs and pictures as Onenote and paid Evernote), and can be moved to another service in half an hour. I would far rather keep it in iCloud, as I don't like MS' datamining my information, but iCloud is still  a rather clunky service and very limited on Windows. (All of the really sensitive stuff is fully encrypted anyway).

My only issue with this is that there really isn't an easy, common, and future proof way to combine text and attachments into one single note on that would work cross platform between Apple and Windows. I really like having my notes and my attachments together. There's a number of proprietary tools, and some allow easily exporting data in common formats. The tool I currently use is iThoughts mindmapper. But I'd be very open to going back to Evernote if (1) they came up with a better pricing strategy,  and (2) they provided full note encryption, or better else full notebook encryption, and (3) I was sure that they are not going anywhere anytime soon.

42 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Do you see a problem with the majority of consumers unwilling to pay for this service

Of course. This is the problem. And they have to solve this problem by making the service appealing to enough people to make it profitable. Because as difficult as it is, this would be a far easier task than trying to sell to businesses. As they have found out already.

>>Where's the money coming from to pay the bills?

Well, we know it's not coming from business accounts, because they didn't materialize.

They are not coming from new users because there doesn't seem to be enough of them.

My guess is, it's coming in part from venture capitalists who are already so deep into this company they may as well keep it afloat for a while longer, and the existing users, who are already so deep into this... you get the idea.

>>captive loyal users

>>Where does the "captive" part come from.
>>Evernote has always made it easy to export our data and leave

And yet, here you are.

Reading through the forums, it's clear that many people here are old time users so deeply entrenched into Evernote's way of doing things and so very invested into the service, they would tolerate yet another price hike because they can't stand the alternative. Seems fairly captive to me. OK, how about "deeply entrenched and dependent ?"

The gist of the article: in 2019, at the peak of the longest and most spectacular market bull run in history, while other, younger former startups are going through multi billion dollar IPOs, Evernote is cautiously confident it can, finally, stop bleeding cash and may, finally turn a small profit the first time in a decade. Hopefully. Their “pivot to business” has not worked out (I said so when it was announced, having spent over two decades somewhat involved with software and services procurement).

In the meantime, they are hoping to start fixing years old bugs,  and are kicking around the idea of hiring high morale, low pay loyal users instead of low morale, expensive industry professionals. And seem to be very proud of the fact that they are not dead yet, unlike some other startups.

The big looming question is, what happens when the bull market inevitably - and fairly soon - turns into a bear, and people and businesses start rethinking their spending. 

What they need is yet another pivot - towards consumer. A new, saner pricing strategy, directed at individuals and mom and pop shops. Something to elevate them from the free or value priced competition, that they could sell to the new users. Get away from the startup / IPO mentality, that ship had sailed, hit the iceberg, and sunk years ago. Become a boring business that makes money by selling services to consumers.

Or, just keep cutting costs, raising prices on captive loyal users, and hoping for the best.

On 6/9/2019 at 1:59 PM, Jeffsky said:

I said “Real Competitor”.   They may be viewed as competitors in a google search, but that does not make them true competitors for a large percentage of Evernote’s base. How can they compete without the ability to come close in many of the areas that make us Evernote cusomers?  (I.e. Search functionality).   

That make YOU Evernote customers. What you are basically saying is that Evernote is a perfect solution for the specific user base that loves the way Evernote works. I.e. die hard EN fans. Which is fine and true. But there is real competition out there, and has been for a while now.

On 6/9/2019 at 1:59 PM, Jeffsky said:

The other apps are like college teams competing with pro teams.   Would you call them competitors?    Right now Evernote is in a league of its own.   I only wish one of the companies would step up their game to truly compete.  Or, maybe they don’t see Evernote’s market worthy to compete for - Too big of an investment, for too small of a customer base.   

Again, only when you are talking about die hard Evernote users for which, if it doesn't work like Evernote, it's not going to work.

On 7/14/2019 at 11:07 AM, DTLow said:

US NSA/courts, Chinese Government, Google data mining, ...   pick your poison  😮

Not the same poison.

US NSA wants to spy on your political views and possible terrorist connections. ("Terrorist" may be defined somewhat broadly...)

Google wants to build your profile so that they could sell you services, or perhaps down the line influence your vote.

China wants to do all of the above, plus steal your company's business secrets, your intellectual property, any bit of information that could be used for industrial espionage, plus perhaps money from your bank account because the nameless agent working in a nameless numbered spy unit is underpaid, overworked, unregulated, and wants to have something for himself, too.

2 hours ago, newbi said:

1] As I have repeatedly mentioned in this thread..i don't trust any cloud service safe enough to store my bank account details. Servers can be hacked/personal detail may be used in probably any country. Secondly..I have mentioned servers being located in China is a point of concern.

So are you going to audit every single note and bit of personal info you save on their servers? I’d rather avoid known problems, there’s plenty of possible ones already.

Quote

2] I agree, Linux is not the most popular of the desktop operating systems out there. But if you read this zd.net article you will come to know actually millions of users still prefer to use Linux. [ https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-many-linux-users-are-there-anyway/ ]

I wonder if maintaining a linux app is not financially viable for such a popular company as Evernote, how come others are doing it.

There’s not that many “others”. Plenty of open source developers supporting an open source OS, but as far as commercial software and services, the access is rather patchy. And it really depends on the individual companies’ direction, access to resources, and culture. I am running a Mint desktop on an older machine I keep in the basement, just so that I could do some work there sometimes. So I am well aware of both the possibilities and limitations.

Quote

3] As i said before, i probably store less than 1% of my 32 GB data in Evernote servers, rest are in local notebooks. As you have mentioned of Springpad, u must know Springpad before being closed gave ample time to download your notes. Anyway anyone should keep back up while using any of these services.

Oh I know that well enough, I had about two thousand notes that had to be painstakingly transfered. I was not talking about losing your data, but about the PITA and effort required to move it to another system.

In the end, it’s your decision and of course I respect it even if I am hesitant to go that route myself.

Some very subjective comments...

1) I would never trust a data collection service from China. It is *the* industrial espionage capital of the world. Even worse, with its culture of corruption and using official position for personal enrichment, your data may be misused in many different ways. At least I don’t expect NSA agents to be stealing money from my bank account.

2) The problem with developing for Linux isn’t that the users of that OS are not paying for services, it’s that there’s very few of them compared to other OS. Plus, there is already web access. The number of paying Linux users may not be enough to offset the cost of porting the service to the new platform and maintaining yet another client, especially with the service already struggling somewhat.

3) I am very cautious about moving gigabytes of data to a small and relatively new player. They tend to collapse rather suddenly and leave a mess behind for their users to sort out (does anyone remember Springpad ?)

3 hours ago, DTLow said:

Actual deadlines are also addressed using the reminder date.

I also use a title prefix to control the sequence of notes in project reviews
For example:
       -Project Master Note
       ++Task (next action)
       +Task
       +Task
       +ΩTask (completed)
       +ΩTask (completed)
       Miscellaneous note
       Miscellaneous note

That’s  a great way, too. I mainly tried to come up with a universal method that works on most systems and apps, got tired of having to change my workflow habits every time an app or service I’ve come to rely on changes, gets sold, or goes out of business. Due dates and plaintext tags work on any task manager, and alphabetical sort is common (if not universal). Everything else is icing on the cake...

I had to jump through the proverbial hoops a couple years ago when Informant got sold and the new owners jacked up the price and introduced a bug infested new version. Now that the same thing started happening with Toodledo, I decided that enough was enough, and that the only way forward was to come up with  a task managing workflow that could work with the lowest common denominator, rather than constantly trying to find a rare service that supported the extended set of features that I relied on (like Start dates). Basically, the challenge is to achieve same complex results using the simplest tools and methods possible. And the solution is usually very simple but it requires breaking old habits and adapting new concepts - easier said than done after doing this for twenty years...

Evernote/ Onenote and any other type of information manages are great for high level project planning and task generation (and for me, a mindmap type app is even better),  but to actively manage tasks without missing important deadlines, you really need to use a dedicated task manager. There are gazillion of them out there.

My approach to not letting tasks to end up in a forgotten pile is to assign a Due date to every task, then re-access that task on that date. I may start working on that task, postpone it to another date, or even delete it if no longer relevant; but this system will not allow me to just forget about it.  Every morning I go through the list of tasks with today’s date and re-assign new dates (using my best judgment) until the only tasks left are the ones I will work on. It takes me a whopping five minutes

And for project tasks that have actual real deadlines which need to be tracked, I add them to the title using “YY MM DD” format, so I can arrange them alphabetically if needed.

Well, Onenote Desktop is supported for the next seven years, the dumbed down (for now) App version isn’t even getting installed on our machines. And the features are getting migrated over, e.g. it now supports collapsible outlines .

But that’s not the point. Whatever the seasoned users of similar services think of Onenote doesn’t matter, they are a minority. The majority of users haven’t practiced any data management system outside of individual files and folders,  but now are being exposed to Onenote at work via MS’ aggressive marketing and IT departments starting to implement and promote that software, which they have already been paying for anyway as part of MS Office.  And when people are using Onenote at work on a daily basis, they naturally start using it at home as well - it’s free and familiar and they can use the same workflow and techniques they learned at work. It’s the browser wars all over again - it’s not the best browser that wins, it’s the one with best exposure to the masses.

To counter that kind of exposure, you need money and a large established user base, and a competitive product. Google has both money and users, but they lack product capable of completing with Onenote (Keep is just glorified sticky notes). Evernote has product but no money or market pressense.  Seems like a no brainer to me...

The post quoted at the bottom of my reply.

It doesn’t really matter how the individual features of Onenote compare to Evernote (it’s a mixed bag either way); what matters is the massive push for integration of Onenote into OS and business workflow, that has been happening in the past couple of years. Evernote doesn’t have the resources to counter that, and Google doesn’t have adequate tools to offer. So the latest developments seem interesting...

It doesn’t really matter.

What does matter is that Onenote is (a) integrated in Windows and Office and (b) there has been a tremendous push in the last couple of years to actually entice the corporate users to actually *use* it. At least that’s what I see. I work for a major corporation and we used to have Onenote installed with Office for ever, yet very few people even knew what it was. But in the past couple of years we started to get bombarded with free seminars, classes, workflow examples, and now there’s a fairly high percentage of people and teams using it for project tracking. The same thing is happening all across the industry, especially as IT departments are slowly rolling out Windows 10. Onenote is rapidly becoming a staple in the workplace, and this means people are more likely to start using it at home.

To stay competitive, Google really needs a corresponding tool for businesses that use Google services instead of Microsoft, and all they have now is Keep... and Evernote doesn’t have the resources to break into the corporate market.

Just thinking out loud...

On 11/4/2018 at 12:03 AM, The Ubiquitou sAnomaly said:

Omg .. I can't handle this . This is so true.

5 hours ago, DTLow said:

Is this an ON or Evernote comment?

I use tables for my Evernote notes; multi column, combined cells, colour background
This provides a great layout for the note.  The default note layout is sequential, top to bottom.

Also the size of pdfs and images is constrained by the cell width.

It was an ON comment but this probably applies to Evernote as well... it’s been a while since I used the Tables in EN, so I am not sure what features it supports. 

Here’s an example... it’s a template I made for engineering proposal layout review meetings. The meeting notes are on the left, the drawing files and comments are saved in the table on the right.  It’s positioned in such a way that when I print it to a PDF, the notes are on one page and the table on another, so I can send just the meeting notes out without the proposal comments that I may want to keep to myself. The todo and follow up items are tagged with built-in tags (although I may use plaintext tags for that when I feel like it). I may have more than one table, sometimes I use a project-wide ToDo list table that can be sorted by Start date / Due date / Priority / assignee ... it all depends on scope of a particular project, and just how involved and organized I want this to be. 

Tables are one of my favorite features for organizing data. They make it so much easier to work with records.

The biggest advantage of the way it handles PDFs - from my perspective - is the ability to neatly place related PDFs inside a table. Really helps to visually organize project data while keeping it somewhat compact.

But, it's web clipper isn't nearly as good as Evernote's.

In the end, it's all about what makes sense to you... both are great tools.

15 minutes ago, TK0047 said:

I agree, that is a huge advantage. I am trying to use more Microsoft Teams with my team and I just added the OneNote tab to a channel. I can easily see the benefit there by itself. You can have project notes that everybody can see and edit etc. 

I used to use OneNote and I think it is a great note taking app but I think it falls short for storing documents and tagging for my use at least. I will continue to play with it under the Microsoft Teams tab to see if it has changed a lot since my times back in 2013ish.

You see, everyone's tastes are different

I think that for storing documents (attachments), Onenote is actually better than most other similar apps. They can be placed anywhere, accompanied with notes, etc. You're not being forced into a particular layout. And I use plaintext in-line tags, so finding them works the same in any system (I generally dislike having to assign pre-canned tags from a menu).

What irritates me about Onenote are other things, slow sync (although it's been improving lately), no built-in alerts (I am not going to create an Outlook tasks for every reminder, besides I can't do it on iOS anyway), the whole concept of "Printouts", the fact that if I annotate a screenshot or a PDF printout inside Onenote the ink isn't grouped with underlying image so I better not move it accidentally,  and many other small annoyances.

But as I said.. I am no longer looking at it as the ultimate single tool, but something that supports my overall workflow. If I was using Google ecosystem on a daily basis at work, I'd use it for personal stuff as well and make it work. Makes things significantly easier.

5 hours ago, Mr Jumbo Guy said:

Could be but I like to get into my notes and constantly add stuff. So everytime when I want to add stuff, it gets boring to first unlock the PDF file with the pass and then do this and that, right?

Also, does evernote have local saving option only? 

I will still say I like it more than OneNote but the company decided to...

And that’s the key... Office and Exchange are very deeply entrenched in the business world, and Onenote is very deeply integrated into MS ecosystem. I can join a meeting on Skype via Outlook and with a single click start a new note with entire meeting information (and attachments) already embedded into it and linked to the meeting in Calendar. That is very convenient. 

Six months ago, very few people at my company even knew of Onenote. It was installed with Office and never used. Now, pretty much everyone’s on it - and starting to use it for their personal stuff (I had to explain to four co-workers over two days how MS HUP program works). The deep integration into the key components of the business process and accessibility from everywhere is the key.

Evernote can certainly get there, too. They have a great framework already. The issue is with getting their foot at the door in the business world, and enticing employees into getting a personal account via some kind of a discount program of their own.

I actually went back to Onenote. Just after I made my original comment, our company finally implemented the ability to access Onenote project notebooks from mobile devices, and this was a game changer.

Onenote’s tight integration with Exchange, Skype, Teams, Outlook Tasks etc. just makes it too valuable of a project tool.  Now that we can finally access our data from our phones and tablets, we’ve fully embraced Onenote at work and have developed a project workflow around it.

 Using it for hours daily for the past two months and having it on my phone and tablet  forced me to go back to using it for my personal data as well, the advantages of applying the same habits, workflow and software tools for both work and personal stuff far outweigh the issues I had with it. I also made some key changes to the way I organize the data, basically simplifying the entire process as much as I can. I have the full version of Office 2016 through HUP program, so I should be all set for the next several years, hopefully by then MS will migrate enough features over to UWP.

Could I use Evernote instead to achieve the same end result ? Very possibly.

In the end, if I learned anything, it’s that the tool is not as important as the methods and workflow, as long as that tool is “good enough”.

On 6/24/2018 at 11:43 PM, Don Dz said:

Currently the only somewhat reasonable substitute I find to be an intelligent use of files together with Windows Explorer, plus a few Autohotkey scripts.  I have been surprised how fast Explorer can be, especially if you know how to set the indexing service correctly, search is nearly instantaneous (on my fast Windows computer anyways).  Theoretically one could sync with Dropbox to other devices. 

The only issue I would not be satisfied about is note (file) linking, I heavily depend on linking, and while html can handle file linking just fine, creating it and maintaining could be a bit burdensome, though browser bookmarks exports could help with this.

One advantage (or disadvantage depending on how you look at it) is that the responsibility for file protection against corruption is yours.  This limits the extent of any damage, but makes it very hard to detect hidden problems.

While this system would probably work best with text files, it can work with any file supported by Explorer (text, PDF, Office, etc), that is, as far as file content, Explorer can of course find any file name.

I've been using this solution for a year or so. It works excellent if you primarily use desktops. Where it is starting to run into issues is mobile. There's no quick way to take notes complete with images and links without getting into some proprietary software.  Not a single Office suite app on iOS is optimized for quick on-the-fly notetaking. Not to say that it can't be done, it's just not superfast as they all ask you if you want to save the previously used file. So I am using Apple Notes or Notability for quick notes & exporting them later.

Onenote is a great tool in it's own way. Just like Evernote, it has it's drawbacks.

Advantages:

- Free, up to the limits of Onedrive free storage. Not sure what it's stands at now, I think 5 GB ?

- Excellent attachment handling. You pretty much can position any attachment anywhere, which makes it great for keeping project notes.

- Excellent table function

- Full section encryption.

- Fantastic editor.

Disadvantages:

- Once you run out of 5GB free space in your Onedrive, you can't upload any more notes unless you buy more space. For the record, all of my notes collected over many years were at about 4 GB (I had 30 GB Onedrive space total, due to several  "free space' deals). So for many users, this is going to suffice for a while

- It's sync engine is slooow and clunky. While I never lost any data, I periodically ran into sync conflicts. MS way to make sure no data is lost during sync conflicts is to keep a copy of both versions. It's probably a good approach, but does require a bit of extra maintenance.

- MS is doing away with Desktop version, and concentrating on Metro app version of Onenote. This means, no more ability to store your database locally, you're being forced to keep it in Onedrive. AFAIK no way to backup Onenote data locally either, you have to back it up from Onedrive. 

In the end, I stopped using Onenote, and only use Evernote for my wife's recipies (she doesn't want to learn any new apps).

58 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Evernote has an export feature on the Mac and Windows platforms.

There are also third party cloud services, for example cloudHQ.

Sorry, there was a misunderstanding.

My original message was about getting data out of Apple Notes if one doesn't have access to a Mac and wants to retain images and attachments. Which seems pretty difficult to do and requires buying an expensive converter program that may or may not work as expected.

I was replying to this

" There is a a way to migrate from Evernote to Apple Notes. From there it should be easy to share or export notes to whatever platform you want."

I don't think it's easy, and may not even be possible without losing some data. That's why I am not using Apple Notes for anything other than quick notes I don't intend to keep.

Evernote export tools are solid, no question about that.

1 hour ago, chronistin said:

There are import tools for a number of other systems, and for those that don't have them, you can always export to html and work from there.

How do I export to HTML if I don’t have a Mac ? Or are you talking about Evernote ?

I was referring to Apple Notes. There’s a couple of $40 or so utilities that claim they can export Apple Notes, but otherwise there’s no way that I know of to use Apple Notes with PC without major loss of functionality.

On 6/5/2018 at 1:01 PM, dudeman313 said:

There is a a way to migrate from Evernote to Apple Notes. From there it should be easy to share or export notes to whatever platform you want. 

I too think I want to move away from Evernote.

https://9to5mac.com/2016/02/09/how-to-export-notes-evernote-apple-notes/

Perhaps if you are on a Mac. But it's practically impossible on Windows unless you want to export them one by one.

The single biggest challenge for me is taking quick notes on the fly and have them auto save and sync to all devices. This is where Evernote and Onenote shine. The problem I ran into is that there's no way to quickly start a new word document on mobile without multiple taps, and have it automatically save.

For now, I am using Notability on iOS, and have it set up to automatically back up all notes to a predefined cloud location in PDF format. This works well for one time quick notes.

I did look at Simplenote but I often use images in my notes.

20 hours ago, DTLow said:

 

From a Linux perspective, what are the advantages of giving up the Evernote storage?

 

None, if you can make it work and are happy with the results and limitations. Looking at this thread though, not all users are.

There's four heavy technology users in our family. We have two desktops (running W10 and Mint), three personal laptops (W10, W7 and Evolution), three iPads, one Android tablet, two iPhones and two Android phones. We also have kids' school issued Chromebooks, my work laptop running W7, and share some files with my in-laws.

When we tried to standardize on one tool to capture and share all data, it was a pain in the rear. Too much compromise and jumping through hoops. Instead, I decided that for this to work the best, data must be platform and tool independent, as long as it's 1)searchable 2) sharable 3) accessible. So, saving in common file formats, especially PDF, using whatever indexing utility exists on each system, using cross platform encryption for documents that need to be protected. My wife still uses Evernote because she doesn't want to move her cookbook database. Everything else is PDF, doc, excel or jpg.

19 hours ago, gazumped said:

If you check around the forums,  there are several posts from linux users who seem to be doing that quite successfully.

This must depend on the individual setup... afaik for Onenote, it only works with 2007 and even then not for everyone. And not sure about Evernote.

I tried and it didn't work for me.