NewHero
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Posts posted by NewHero
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Some of my notes have four or five tags and then I'll create a new note and I want it to have those exact same tags
In the old Evernote, if you had tags set up in your search then any new notes you created in that 'context' would have the same tags. Just like how if you are 'in' a notebook and create a new note, it's obvious you want it to be 'in' that notebook.
I would settle for an option to inherit tags from a previous note
My current workaround is to multi-select notes, and then use the CTRL+ALT+T tag interface
It'll show tags which are on all notes with a tick, and tags which are on some notes with a blue box and a hyphen. So I scroll through and click the hyphens so it applies tags to all notes.
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On 10/15/2022 at 6:44 PM, eric99 said:
Yeah but the tag filters are cleared after the note creation, the context is set back to the full note list. So you can't create multiple notes in that tag context. I don't see the logic. This is different from notebooks where the notebook stays selected until you clear it explicitly. Tags are always promoted as a good alternative for notebooks, which isn't the case due to this counterintuitive behavior.
edit: as work around you could restore the tag context by navigating back ( alt ← ) after the note creation
Yeah this was the issue I had as well.
I just really like the old workflow. Tags felt 'heavier' to me somehow, and more real. There were tags and notebooks, and then things like having or not having checkboxes was just a search query/filter.
All that being said, I think I need to really explore the new features. I am dramatically under using Tasks, for example. I hope they can restore my beloved tags, but I'm still quite ready to move forward with the new direction and amend my workflows.
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I think the key selling point of Evernote is still 'Remember Everything'. I love the new editor, Tasks and other features. But there have been apps with a better editor for years. What kept me in Evernote was the fact that I just never felt like I could dump my entire life into these other tools as well. The features below will help Evernote continue to be the only real app for organizing and remembering everything, are inspired by Legacy, and need to be taken much further than legacy ever did (or could, given technological constraints).
- Mass edit for tags: Tags are special because they allow you to make deeply nested hierarchies (clean, tidy) and apply tags from various hierarchies to a note (introducing complexity). In Legacy Evernote, you can multi-select tags and move them around quite easily. That feature could be easily restored and we should go further. It should be very easy to define complex tag hierarchies, because that is the secret sauce that actually helps Evernote users remembering everything.
- Create with tags/Tags as notebooks, not filters. In Legacy, when you select a tag, it's not like applying a filter. It's more like configuring an environment - just like selecting a notebook. You can choose a notebook and some tags, and then as long as that environment is selected, every new note you create while brainstorming, reading or researching will include that environment. You don't have to then manually go back and tag everything. Tags should be more like notebooks than filters, because all other filters are intrinsic in the content and don't need to be added by the user. Tags need to be added, so restoring this feature from legacy would make it much easier to create lots of new notes which are organised neatly by default.
- Saved Search. Saved Search was always my favourite Evernote feature, and I don't think even legacy did it justice. Now that we have more powerful filters and tasks, saved search should be pushed even more to the front. I would like to see Saved Search have it's own section in the sidebar / home screen. Because it is the final level of abstraction that allows you to organise everything - you choose your notebooks (stack), your tags and your filters and then you give it all a name. I would love a pretty GUI for exploring your saved searches, much more than just adding them under Shortcuts. I would like to be able to give a description to each Saved Search, and explore the search parameters easily.
- Search Aware Tasks. By linking tasks to a specific saved search, you can bundle all relevant information together with a specific action statement. The new tasks are so amazing and I really love them. I want them to be linked back to the 'Remember Everything' agenda.
I hope these can be seen as a singular 'feature set' related to one main goal of Evernote - helping you remember everything. Tags are the most powerful features of Evernote, so I should be able to manipulate them en masse (at least a multi-select) and I should be able to create notes 'in' tags, like notebooks. Saved searches help you organize your tags (and other filters), so we should really push a nice GUI for viewing them, as the primary portal into all of your stuff.
I should be able to do this:
- Select notebook: Research.
- Select tags: Family > Daughter, Medical > Allergies, Cooking
- Pick up my phone, call people, read a book and browse the net and just keep adding more notes into this environment for an hour.
By the end of it, I have an entire collection of information which I don't have to go back and tag manually. I can create a nice Saved Search called "Ally's Food Requirements" which might include information from other complex tags and queries.
Then I can create a task like "Send Ally's Food Requirements to friends Parents" and attach my saved search so that when I get around to doing it, it's all there.
I still think Evernote is the only app which ever really understood that organising hundreds and hundreds of notes is more important than even have a few very beautiful notes. I think the features above will help it do that in a way that the competition can't keep up with. Tags are not filters - they are way more powerful and even more powerful than notebooks. As a first step, restoring feature and concept parity with Legacy tags will go a long way in making it easier to organise everything.
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When I am in a notebook and I create a new note, the note is created in that notebook and the view doesn't change because I am in that notebook. This makes sense.
I want this feature for tags too. It exists on the current production version of Evernote (Windows, at least).
I use tags to organize my stuff. Usually, a tag is a project. I will open the tag while I'm working on the project. When I am working on BIG_PROJECT I want to be able to quickly create note after note with BIG_PROJECT tagged, and as I create the notes they should appear in the note list without redirecting me to all notes.
Tags should be sticky.
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On 5/17/2020 at 7:11 AM, grantr said:
Hi All,
I also actively use Evernote for organising ideas fo work, home and learning. As noted above I see the tags and saved searches as key to organise ideas. My most cherished feature is the ability to save searches based on key words not tags. Looking at the competitors I also agree we don’t want Evernote to get too complex.
In the future I want Evernote to be smarter and to be able to identify keywords that I type and then show me in a saved search these as a suggestion. (Google does this with photos). I want to be able to review these topics. In a way the tool could act like a “reflection feature” you wrote down this week about “Australia, chemistry, energy etc”. Here is the collected ideas you wrote on those topics. This would help me to reflect on an idea and build on it. For those studying think of it as at the end of the week Evernote reminds you of the key topics you learnt. Evernote suddenly starts helping you learn. Eventually Evernote could use AI and know more about me than me:)
Pls like this idea if you agree...I am deliberately writing it here to get user support first.
Have you tried the context feature in Evernote. It literally recommends 'related notes' based on the content of what I'm typing. Also, in the Web Clipper, you can add a widget to your Google searches so that when you search in Google it also shows related notes...
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1 minute ago, DTLow said:
I'm also an Evernote fan, and use it for the storage and organization of all my notes/documents
I looked at TSW but converted to a Reminder based task management process
I'm a tagger with minimal notebooks.
Basically tags cover everything, but Evernote has some special notebook features (sync'd'/local, private/shared, default, offline)
For me, Evernote's most impressive organization paradigm was the elimination of folder methodologyEvernote uses an enml format; basically html. This is text based and doesn't support "inline ink"
Ink is supported via note attachments, and Evernote also implemented handwriting OCR for search indexingThe search feature is extensive
I agree full Boolean is needed, and upgrades are needed for the indexing (special characters, stop words, full phrase, ...)How do you do a reminder based process? I'd love to hear more about the workflow.
By inline ink, I just meant that I should be able to insert a handwritten drawing in a text note on desktop. In the current production version on Windows, you can only 'draw' on a separate "Ink Note" which doesn't accept text... Although on Android you can draw in a text note...
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Evernote is currently under stiff competition and lots of pressure from users to keep updating and improving UI, features etc. I wanted to write a little bit about why I love Evernote as someone who has used it for five years and has stuck with it even though I tried out competitors. I really think this stuff will be broadly applicable, even if some of it might sound particular to how I use Evernote. I hope that Evernote will be able to overcome the competition, keep adding amazing features, but keep what makes it special.
Evernote is the Secret Weapon
I knew I was hooked on Evernote when I first watched The Secret Weapon. If you aren't familiar with it, TSW was a video guide made quite a few years back which gave a step by step approach on how to implement David Allen's famous "Getting Things Done" approach with Evernote. The videos still use the old version of Evernote, which is nice to see. It would be years until I read GTD, but the secret weapon captured a few of its ideas really well. But more importantly, it helped me understand how to use Evernote: use it for everything.
Evernote gets better the more stuff you put in it. Evernote is inherently an everything bucket. The old company tagline was "Remember everything" and that was exactly right. In GTD David Allen speaks about the importance of capturing everything and why you should try to do that:
QuoteYour head is for having ideas, not holding them
A software which comes along promising that you will be able to do that is a software which can help you radically change your approach to productivity. Allen includes lots of promises as to what happens when you become properly organized (starting by capturing everything):
- Productivity becomes stress free
- Your relationships improve because you become good at keeping commitments
- You achieve your goals - starting with small ones which emboldens you to achieve bigger ones
- You become more creative because you have space in your head to think, and a desire to note it all down
For me this is what Evernote is about as a productivity tool. It's the only note taking tool which takes this idea seriously, whether or not it was built for GTD. The underlying principle is self-evident once you get it - only by really noting everything down in a system you can trust, can you have any hope of properly dealing with everything you have to. And Evernote is that system.
Tags and Notebooks Make Deep Organization Possible
Evernote has this dual structure system: tags and notebooks. Like everything on the internet there is debate about how these should work. But what I value about Evernote is the fact that it has two systems for organizing which can be almost completely independent of each other. Mathematically, it means you can search for things in two dimensions. Whichever you prefer (notebooks or tags), the fact that you have both makes it super easy to locate and organize things. But I want to make the case for the form of using Evernote which I think is most effective.
Tags are for subjects, projects, tasks and topics... There isn't any limit on how many tags you can have. You can nest them together and give them interesting names. Notebooks are for workflows. Look across all your tasks and you will see that there are common elements any project: brainstorming, planning, to-do lists, deferred, extra resources... These things are agnostic to the specific topic. If you are a novelist, every book and every chapter has character development, setting, plot elements and styling to it. If you're a scientist, the scientific method asks you to develop an aim, a hypothesis, literature review, a method, collect results and discuss... for whatever specific project. These 'workflows' are finite, fixed steps which help you get through a project.
If you use Evernote just for school, then you probably have a few workflows: one for essays, one for practicals, one for exam prep... these would be stacks and in each stack you'd have notebooks. For 'essays' you would have notebooks like 'Research and Referencing', 'Outlining and Arguments', 'Main Draft'... That would cut across all your subjects (tags are history, English, sociology...) Of course, if you use Evernote for multiple roles like I do, then I just have a generic project management workflow as my notebooks (see image above). I have one or two other workflows that are particularly important to me (Studying and Journalling) so I separate it out from the generic project management stuff.
The secret to really narrowing down the role of your notebooks is that absolutely everything else goes in tags.You can have hundreds of tags and with very little work nest them neatly together, showing how all your projects and tasks relate to each other. Tags are much simpler than notebooks, but they are the heart of what allows you to 'capture everything'.
What really matters is that notebooks and tags are perpendicular. You can use one, or the other, or both... But they don't overlap. The key idea is to have two dimensional search. Even with 1000s of notes, if your notebooks and tags are well defined, you can usually narrow it down by just choosing a tag (or sub-tag) and then selecting the specific notebook. It's actually such a simple idea - tags are for topics, notebooks are for workflows - but none of Evernote's competitor's implement a similar system convincingly. Everything is, in one way or another, just notebooks.
The final secret is Evernote's 'list' view. It gives you a flat list and shows your notes, their notebooks and tags which you can sort and filter rapidly. If you give descriptive titles, you can narrow down an enormous number of notes by selecting a notebook and a tag (or tags) as appropriate, and then just eyeball it to see which note you're interested in. I usually open the specific note in its own window - this lets me keep Evernote in the list view, minimize the editor to get speed, and focus on one single note when I'm busy with it.
Search - Evernote's Power Tool
Evernote's most unique feature, at first, was Saved Search. Tags and Notebooks allow you to store 1000s of notes in a neat and organized way. Saved Search brings that organization to life. You can filter on tags and notebooks to define a specific kind of 'thing' you're looking for - maybe all your brainstorming relating to a geography project you have - and then save it. That's not really that amazing - you could just do the search manually (as long as you didn't tag a note with like 15 tags). But the power of saved search is that it enables Evernote's search grammar.
Search is Evernote's power tool. The search grammar is the drill bit itself and saved search is like electric wiring that brings it to life. The search grammar allows you to slice and dice your notes based on metadata besides just notebooks and tags. You can define dates and the type of content (e.g. checkboxes, reminders) that your notes should have. Of course, you can also search for keywords in the note body.
Search does to notebooks and tags what notebooks and tags do to notes. Tags (with notebooks) let you turn 100 notes into a 1000. Saved search lets you turn 100 tags into 1000 if you really want. Saved search works very well together with normal search: you can save a search template and then add to it incrementally in the search bar.
The Everything Box
Evernote is a box. You're supposed to put things in it. Evernote has been consistently leading when it comes to that. The Web Clipper was a beautiful idea which turned the internet into something you could simply save into Evernote. Web pages are the source of so much of our information today - any note taking app has to have some kind of interface to get things from the web. And Evernote built the best one first.
Some people talk about Evernote's development as if it lacks features. But there are some really powerful features that a lot of people are probably not using:
- You can email things right into Evernote. Not only does Evernote have an email address for your account, it can tag and send emails straight to a notebook, and each note created by email has a searchable attribute for source:email. A lot of our daily tasks appear in the form of email - Evernote's got you covered.
- You can create a folder on your computer and set it up so that when you drop something in it, that file is attached to a new note in Evernote. Many people are unaware of this feature, but it's a hidden gem.
- Evernote's image recognition is to mobile what the web clipper was to web: mobile is the new platform we are all on, and when you save images from your smartphone camera to Evernote, you can search for text within those images directly. If you take a picture of an informative poster, or screenshot something cool you see on your phone, you can easily send it to Evernote and search it later.
- On mobile, you can save voice notes into Evernote and use a stylus to draw with ink right inside normal notes.
- But the grand daddy of all minor features: CTRL+SHIFT+V. Paste directly into Evernote. You can copy any image or text anywhere and paste it straight into evernote. I take so many screenshots on my computer or come across so many passages which I will send straight to Evernote to rediscover later. Images are searchable so I could screenshot a Tweet and send it to Evernote in less than three seconds... this is my favourite feature...
The value of these tools goes back to the original point. Evernote lets you capture everything - images, audio, ink, text, email... And capturing everything is that start of clearing your mind, seeing what you have to do, and getting organized. And everything is synced across all its devices.
What About OneNote and Notion?
OneNote has the most beautiful experience using ink. Evernote's doesn't compare - on the Windows desktop app, we don't even have inline ink.
Notion has the most beautiful and powerful editor in the game. Evernote recently added more attractive tables - Notion allows you to basically create a database inside of it.
But if you go back and look at everything I wrote, you'll understand something. Evernote's strength is not as an editor - whether of ink, or tables or whatever. Its UI is not that attractive either and it doesn't have to be. I'd happily take the UI from the TSW video so long as that program could really help me really organize my life and never forget anything.
What Evernote does uniquely is it helps you organize everything. For five years I've searched for a competitor on this and I haven't found one. Because everyone is missing the key idea here: creating and organizing are two very distinct functionalities that all note-taking apps have to have, and organizing is more important. OneNote and Notion beat Evernote in terms of note creation and editing. But Evernote is not primarily a tool for editing and formatting notes. It's not even really a to-do list app. It's a tool for creating your own, personalized system for being organized, from scratch. Evernote's killer feature is that it lets you get organized and stay organized. Nothing else comes close on that front for me.
Evernote Moving Forward
I'm sticking with Evernote.
Evernote does need to improve, like any other software or business. And I do think there are some basic features that, in the short term, would help it at least cover the same ground as OneNote and Notion.
- We do need inline ink, at long last - visual thinking by drawing is different to writing things out, and it's something you can't do without once you get into it
- We could do with more colours and easier formatting options
- The UI could be a little bit more slick...
- Better image insertion to make Evernote more visual - header images for notes, choosing the image to preview in snippet views or card views
Some of the most recent improvements in Evernote have been in this vein - like Present and Templates.
But long term, I think Evernote can continue to fend off competitors not by trying to compete with them on UI or editing features or whatever, but by continuing to outcompete them in creating a tool which can help you get organized flexibly. And the features we need should lean heavily on the organization aspect:
- If we get inline ink, then we should make ink handwriting searchable
- With AI developing as it is, voice notes should be directly searchable, with speech-to-text auto-generated and available in every voice note. Either searchable using text-speech matching, or you should be able to speak into the search bar. There should be parity between speech and text for recording notes and searching them.
- Better faster linking between notes, with an improved and smarter 'Context' recommender
- Image recognition and searching should be even smarter. I should be able to for image_of:building and get pictures of buildings, and then filter it by location or date as per normal search.
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A dedicated 'Search in Evernote' tool outside of the app's search bar. So if I'm looking at a document or web-page, I should be able to click something that says 'Find Related Notes in Evernote'... I used to use a tool called Word Web which let you highlight a word and click a keyboard shortcut to open a dictionary defining that word. Evernote could make a tool that lets you highlight a paragraph or click on an image and then hit a shortcut to search for notes related to that.
- This might sound like a lot but we already have something very close to this! The web clipper will recommend related notes to you as soon as you clip a web page. If you allow it, it will also recommend related notes when you do a Google Search which is really cool.
- Full-Text Search with full Boolean options - remember, this is Evernote's power tool.
- Smart import folders. This is a hidden gem feature in Evernote which can be built up. Lots of people use Evernote as a filing cabinet, and that's perfect.
- More powerful reminders - recurring reminders, location-based reminders like in Google Keep, better syncing with calendar apps and tools
- Smarter template notes - auto templating options for chosen notebooks and tags (if I create a new note in tag A/notebook B, it should create it with that template and have a non-intrusive "revert to blank note / choose different template" dialog box on the side
This is a wishlist of some out there ideas. But the point for me is just to say that these kind of features - organization enhancers - should be the bulk of Evernote's concentration. Not editing (although it is important to have solid competencies there too).
Conclusion
I love Evernote. It's been my secret weapon for 5 years now. What I've found is that you can go off and try other note taking tools with nicer editing features and UI, but Evernote is incomparable in helping you get organized. It gets better the more you use it - 1000 notes is better than 100 notes. And so I wrote this piece just to share my favourite features, how I think about and use Evernote, and what I hope to see going forward. I hope it was useful to someone.
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On 4/21/2020 at 1:23 AM, DTLow said:
Yes, save the web clipping as a pdf or image
The annotate feature is really really great in a way that isn't evident till you use it. Here's what I do:
I am on Windows and use the WIN+SHIFT+S shortcut to screenshot a section of the screen and it copies to the clipboard
I have CTRL+SHIFT+V as my global shortcut to paste to Evernote
I have asked Evernote to immediately open Annotate when I save an image...
I use Annotate's arrows, boxes, highlights, symbols and ink to augment the image.
It's a really powerful workflow. Visual is very important.
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Evernote and the productivity community have really helped me think through how I organize everything I have to do. Actually building up my internal system has been really useful, and I've gotten to a point where it's functional in every sense and not just nice to look at like many productivity systems.
Evernote's powerful tags and searching features are indispensable.
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So I'm out of university but I love carrying on with learning. Here are some tools I use to facilitate my learning which might be useful to you life long learners, as well as how I integrate the whole system with Evernote.
1. Mindmapping
I use SimpleMind, which has a free version and pro version. It's a very visual tool and its easy to create super attractive mindmaps. SimpleMind has a great notes tool which means each 'bubble' on a mindmap can actually store note text.
2. Wiki System
I use ZimWiki but I've used WikidPad in the past and some people prefer TiddlyWiki.
These tools allow you to create a personal Wiki where pages all link to each other. The apps mostly use plain text formats and what the app itself does is provide easy access to formatting tools, rendering for the formatting and it organizes the hierarchy/tree view for all your notes. Zim is amazing.3. Anki
Hardest tool to use but potentially the most rewarding. It's used to make digital flashcards and syncs with your phone (free on Android, paid on iPhone). It uses spaced repetition to test you on your cards, but remember you have to set up each card. Two easiest ways to make a card: enter a question in the question field, and an answer in the answer field; or write a sentence and use the 'cloze' feature to comment out the answer. The second method is called a cloze deletion and gives you 'dot dot dot' questions like you might have had in school: "Nelson Mandela was the first democratic President of ..."
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So the way I use all these tools is almost sequential:
I use mindmapping when I'm trying to learn everything I can about a new field entirely. Fresh knowledge - it helps me organize my knowledge. Imagine if you were trying to absorb a standard, introductory textbook on the topic.
I use Wikis for accumulating extra knowledge and personal knowledge. You don't want to create a second Wikipedia, where you write long wiki articles about things like 'the internal combustion engine'. Instead all my articles are things I've synthesized together from information which is more disparate: either new information, trivia, hidden information or information which is specific and might only be found in one corner of the internet or the other. It's about combining tidbits of new and useful information into a greater whole. If I wanted to learn South African history in general I'd use a mindmap. In my wiki I'd take for granted that I know who Nelson Mandela is and would rather create more unique pages like honing in on Mandela's views on the Iraq War.
Anki is where everything ends up. If I use my mindmap to learn general information and my wiki to store specific, newer information, I ultimately put what's in my Wiki into a flashcard deck. Things I want to remember. I much prefer cloze deletions to question-answer type cards. Then I review on my phone.
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Evernote
Evernote's role is pretty simple. I have a notebook stack called Learning and under it I have notebooks like: Add to Mindmap, Add to Wiki, Add to Anki. Any time I come across some new cool tidbit of information, it'll go into one of these notebooks as relevant. When I make the note, I specify where exactly and how to add the information. It might sit in my notebook for a while as I clean up the info before insertion. Then I review each notebook to see how to update my relevant resources.
I use tags to organize by type of information. A Question is something I still need to read more about. A diagram is a picture I like which might need some annotation. A drawing is something I have to draw and clean up myself (I have a drawing pad which is super useful). A paper/attachment is something I will need to attach with key extracts. Database is something I will need to tabulate attractively before attaching... and so on
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The key idea with life long learning is that you're going to be doing it incrementally. Like depositing little pieces of knowledge in your savings account. Evernote helps me coordinate that process - I can write down questions, save diagrams or articles snips I like and then accumulate them, edit them and deposit them in one of my main learning tools (mindmap, wiki, flashcard decks). I don't use Evernote as a lifelong store - both the Wiki and the mindmap have decent search. Instead I use Evernote to coordinate the process of storing the information in more useful forms which I can actually use directly.
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On 5/9/2019 at 3:51 PM, t87699 said:
Thanks for the information.
I dont use MACI can try this in Windows, would this work in Android too?
tanks
This is a year late but something I used to love doing was this:
1. Create a windows shortcut for notepad (I created a shortcut with CTRL+ALT+Z) which would automatically open notepad
2. Create an evernote import folder (Tools > Import Folders... > Add...) and set it to auto import your note.
3. Everytime you want to create a plain text note, open up notepad with your shortcut and then write and save it to the import folder.
I got so quick at it because I was having issues with the Evernote note editor. You don't even have to save the note - once you have written your plain text you could even just use CTRL+A to select everything you just wrote and CTRL+ALT+V to paste to evernote.
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If it comes to creating a new note the windows shortcut CTRL+ALT+N creates a new note window.
CTRL+ALT+V will paste whatever is copied on your clipboard into evernote. I find it really really useful for images and screenshots - I just take a screenshot in windows using WIN+SHIFT+S to get the snipper then as soon as I've snipped what I want I paste to Evernote with CTRL+ALT+V.
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When I paste directly from a SQL query to a code block in Evernote, it introduces spaces in some places
So a term like 'Special Formula' will become 'Special Formula' with two spaces between the words
Unfortunately, this has a big effect if the space is introduced between terms in a string you are looking for. SQL wouldn't match 'Special Formula' with two spaces.
So you can't copy back and forth between SQL and Evernote code block text.
The normal text seems to not make that error, so I've switched back to using tables to store my code snippets (or saving text files/query files as attachments)
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Inconsistent Checklist Boxes
in Evernote for Windows Issues (Versions 10.0 and above)
Posted
The first checklist box in a horizontal list like this looks different.