Murkywaters

Like many who have contributed to this string, I have been an enthusiastic and loyal Evernote user for nearly 10 years with most of those as a premium user. Also, as many have reported, v10 is a complete and utter disaster that is simply unusable. I didn’t install it. I simply opened Evernote this week and it was just there (I have the windows desktop version). But it is much worse than that, being much more than just a loss of major features and functions (e.g. denigration of tags, no sync button, no preferences, no more uploading books and articles, no way to customize the interface, slower response…). I have over 11,000 notes and over 2000 tags. I trusted in Evernote to keep my data safe. This version is an outright betrayal of that trust. Let me explain… I am a researcher. I search the web for articles, clip them and then mark them up with highlights, text colors and comments. I tag them (and also group the tags), so I can organize them by concepts and chapters for books. However, in this new version, clipped notes are no longer editable! If I click the option above the web clip to “Simplify and Make Editable” not only do clips explode into many unusable pieces which must be re-arranged, edited or deleted, but incredibly enough, I lose all of my formatting, highlighting, text coloring and other edits that I had previously made. That includes current highlights I perform on the article just prior to clipping them. This renders my entire database useless. If I want to make edits to a prior note, I must first make a copy of it, make the original version editable and then look at them side by side to manually re-do all of my formatting in the editable version and then delete the copy. To do this for all of my 11,000 plus notes would literally take years. I have not tried to revert back to a “legacy version” yet, but if it can be done, my plan is to attempt to find an alternative that features editable web clips and tags. It must also be capable of importing my Evernote notes with tags and formatting intact. I will then cancel my premium subscription and never use Evernote again. However, I’m not confident that there is another app that will do these things (if anyone has ideas, let me know). I know Bear is good for macs, but I’m a windows user. If I can’t find an alternative, I’ve literally lost 10 years of work. This is simply unconscionable for Evernote to do something like this to their loyal supporters. I am no longer one. Regarding tags that I’ve seen come up repeatedly in this discussion, the use of tags is a no brainer. I have been involved with knowledge management and organization of information most of my long career. It’s very difficult to find things in folders because everyone has different ideas of how to organize information that they regard as “logical” to them. Perhaps unsurprisingly that includes the same individual over time. Therefore, the more ways you can find a path to the information you are looking for (such as the use of multiple tags) that more likely you are to find it - plain and simple. And there are many other reasons to use tags as well which I won’t go into because this post is already long.