Tamagotchi

We all have personal preferences - how things should be done. Good apps allow these to be changed in settings. Better apps will allow you to add functionality too. OneNote allows you to do both. OneNote allows you to change the default settings For Office365 the desktop apps have a "settings" page that offers an impressive number of options. OneNote permits addons to add new functions OneNote is built on "gardeners" model for note-taking - everything is manually changed to how you like it. Evernote has a different approach - set things how you want it and it applies to note. Some options in OneNote are therefore lacking. The way to standardise your note environment is with macros. You do not need to write them yourself. Onetastic is an addon that allows macros to be picked from a library and downloaded to OneNote. There is a macro in the library for everything. The Evernote to OneNote importer saves the notes as pages and in groups of 100 as sections of a NoteBook. As search is primarily how things are found, the order of the sections or notes is not that important. Using macros for adding and arranging In OneNote, sections are displayed in tabs across the top, and pages down the right (set under the options menu). This leaves the right of the screen for the search results. Creation and modify dates are not normally displayed in OneNote. I did not like this. This is just an example I decided for my work environment I wanted: The sections sorted alphabetically. (4 seconds) The pages sorted by modified date, descending order. (5 seconds per section) Standardise note formatting to Calbri 11 text for better reading (2 minutes per section) Standardise data format across all notes This is done with macros. Install the addon, download the macros from the library, test each macro on a test section to check it runs as expected, and run the macro on all notes. This easy to do. The only thing you need to be careful about is there is no undo button for adding text, like creation dates, to notes. Notes have histories, however. 🙂

I had to laugh when I saw @charlieedstrom reaction to the above post. I had similar reaction to tag searching in OneNote. Tag searching is limited in OneNote. 🙂 The only app I have heard of that does tags well is DevonThink - local data and native too - but only for Mac folk. All the other apps seem to leave searching to keyword searches. The good news is OneNote does not delete the tags and can import the notes. Most apps will not import the notes and of those that do, the tags are lost - at least in part. Change means doing things differently. Mostly, there is another way that suits us too.

It is worth considering how tag searches are handled in OneNote from an Evernote perspective. Here is a heads up. Three apps There are three versions of OneNote for Windows browser app desktop app Windows 10 app The search functionality common to all three was discussed in the last post. The UI for the first two is similar. The search is similar too but cannot do what somebody using Evernote would call a tag search. The Windows 10 app is the best for taggers. The Microsoft Evernote to OneNote importer adds the tags to the top of the page as a hashtag. The tag "public transport" becomes "#public transport". The browser app and the desktop app cannot search for these hashtags, but the Windows 10 app can. Preparation before importing The separator between hashtags in OneNote is space. Before using the Microsoft Evernote to OneNote importer rename all your tags including a space in Evernote. Replace the spaces with some other character - say "_" so "public transport" becomes "public_transport". The tag imported into OneNote will now be #public_transport. This tag can be used in a search. Search syntax examples Search examples for the Windows 10 app #public_transport - searches for the tag #public_transport but not the text "public transport", "public" or "transport" "public transport" - is a string search for the text "public transport" and will also find the tag #public_transport. public transport - searches for the words "public" or "transport" #"public transport" - finds the string "#" or "public transport" #public transport - finds the tag #public and the text "transport"

Legacy is an unsupported product. Internet Explorer is unsupported and many still use it. 🙂 An unsupported product is a dead product. Evernote 10 is the CURRENT SUPPORTED VERSION. Contact support about Legacy and they will say "use Evernote 10". Evernote 10 is not a beta product, even though it feels like it. The troubled child we call Evernote 10 is poor value for $10 a month. Free it has a 60MB upload limit - useless. Any startup that launched a product like Evernote 10 would have little chance of success. How painful must change be for us when Evernote 10 does not stir us from our seats.

We are quickly accustomed to working in ecosystems. For those with Apple this post will be irrelevant. So too for those who lives are found on an Android smartphone. However many still have Windows device of one sort or another. OneNote is then an obvious note-taking alternative. What are its merits? There are different types of note-takers. Those who want to build their own structures. Notion is interesting for these people. Those who like a clean and simple work environment. Evernote has traditionally provided this. And finally, those who regard like to garden and will shuffle around their notes until everything is where it belongs. OneNote falls into this category. Microsoft Office is so well known that its strengths are taken for granted. It has become dull from its longevity. Considering Evernotes crisis, longevity is a strength and dull acceptable if we can continue to get things done. In this forum, one person introduced the idea of immersion into an ecosystem. Immersion increases productivity with high levels of integration between apps. This is true also for the Office ecosystem. OneNote is well integrated with a suite of apps: Visio, Outlook, Word, Excel, and more. OneNote is free, fast, has OCR, no upload limits and supports ease of transfer of data from Evernote. OneDrive integration and automatic synchronisation allow us to download files and take them with us. The integration with Windows 10 means that accessing the files is straight forward. OneNote has been around since 2003 and Office even longer. Microsoft has now browser apps that work on any device, are stable, not slower than Evernote 10 and without charge, as far as I know. Native apps on Windows 10 are fast and also stable. The integration between the apps is built into Microsoft Edge browser as is a PDF reader and PDF annotation. The Evernote Clipper is an addon to the browser and has a Full Page, Region, Article and Bookmark mode. Region and Bookmark are similar to Evernote. Region is "screenshot" of the whole web page - formatting is retained in that sense but not editable. Article is a plain text version of the website and formatting is lost. Both Evernote and Nimbus do a much better job of capturing the text while retaining the formatting as rich text. OneNote´s OCR offsets this to some degree as the information is easily found. OneNote has a curious layout with notebooks down the left of the screen and sections across the top of the screen in tabs. Notes are organised in the sections. The pages (notes) in a section are displayed on the right (see below). Gardeners will like OneNote as the notebooks, sections and pages can be dragged and dropped into any order. Section tabs can be given colours. Multiselection is easy. OneNote editor is immediately familiar for anybody that has used Word. The look and feel of OneNote are consistent with other Office 365 apps. The search has been traditionally a strength of Evernote. Therefore it deserves some attention in this comparison. OneNote can search across all (open) notebooks, the currently selected notebook, the current section or the section group. The results can be sorted by modify, title or section, in ascending or descending order. Ctrl-E opens search and the results can be docked on the right of the screen with alt-O. Pages within a section have highlighted that match the search. The pages can be multi-selected, move and deleted while the search is open. Because the native apps are so responsive this works in a satisfying way. The search is quick and has enough to be functional. Ctrl-f searches with the page. The forum yesterday mentioned that tags are at the heart of how people work with Evernote note. The CEO seemed to think differently (and I have my doubts about the 2% quoted). OneNote like the vast major of note-taking apps does not support tags or the implementation of tags are poor: Nimbus fails on tag searches, Notion requires the construction of a master tag database before it will work, Notejoy only has Twitter-style hashtags, Joplin implementation of tags is poor, and so on. OneNote does not support tags either. Sure like most note-taking apps it has something call tags but these are not what Evernote calls tags. The OneNote importing tool adds all the tags from Evernote as hashtags (#text) at the top of each note. This is helpful. The importing tool protocols if there is an issue with tag import. In my case from 11k notes and some PDFs having reached the 100 tag limit, the import tool logged less than a dozen PDFs. I thought this rather impressive after seeing the tags axed by Notion. Except for DevonThink I have not heard or seen of a note-taking app that can handle Evernote tags. Leaving Evernote means searching differently. Consider the two options the Evernote users have at the moment. For no charge, the Microsoft ecosystem provides a feature-rich, long-lasting and stable work environment with OneNote. Pay about $10 per month and Office365 provides a collection of native apps with many extra features that have become ubiquitous over the last decade. In the era of Evernote uncertainty, OneNote has become a safe haven, particularly for those who work on a Windows device. The transition to life after Evernote will take time and needs to be well considered. OneNote and Office are enough for many to move on from being stuck and familiar enough to make it an easy change. No one size fits all but some sizes fit many. 🙂

Microsoft has updated the webpage for their importing tool for OneNote. It has this rather nice little table comparing the two. Here is what you get for free. https://www.onenote.com/import-evernote-to-onenote Feature OneNote Evernote Available on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and web Sync notes across your devices Limited to 2 devices for Evernote Basic. Requires Evernote Premium to sync across your devices. Offline access to notes on mobile Requires Evernote Premium Unlimited monthly uploads 60 MB/month (Free) Write anywhere on the page with free-form canvas Share content with others Clip content from the web Save email into your notes Requires Evernote Plus or Premium Digitize business cards Requires Evernote Premium

Yes, I read it thank you.

Nimbus: the search grinds to a halt between 9:00 to 12:00 UTC. The search is a weak point. Breaking the content into many folders does not help. 😕

One final comment. With 11k plus notes loaded, Nimbus Notes desktop is slower than Nimbus Notes in a browser tab. I dumped the desktop app, as I did for EN10 desktop, in preference for the browser tab. With Nimbus Notes, the functionality of the desktop and Chrome browser app is the same, including right-click menus. They look identical too. There is no loss of functionality moving to the browser with Nimbus Notes and only benefits. The Android app is good too with a familiar UI but I have yet to find an option to download the notes. The default is a snippet for each note which is download automatically.

Thank you 🙂

I posted issues on moving data to Evernote alternatives. The data is the most important thing. The elephant is nice but the data essential. There is no perfect app and the transition is fraught with compromise - as Evernotes odyssey from Legacy to EN10 shows. This post serves to: highlight how smooth the transition has been to date note the two platforms have common performance issues I would really like a heads up on Nimbus experience on a Mac as I am considering one. The general discussion forum is well suited to this. Competition It is instructional to compare Nimbus and Evernote back to back. Nimbus and Evernote 10 are quite similar. Nimbus has head start and spent two years taking the best of note-taking apps, building on a green field. The app has targeted essential things and the editor excels where Evernote has always been weak. The apps - desktop and browser - are stable and hard to tell apart. The addons for Chrome and Gmail are stable too. It works like a dream. Nimbus is missing features, but there is something very satisfying to see the solid engineering behind this thing. Everything about the website, apps and company leaves the impression. After the Evernote neglect, it feels like a breath of fresh air. A smooth transition The goal was to import all notes into Nimbus, done in steps, first 46 notes, then 2200 notes and finally today all 11,000. I did not delete anything out of Nimbus but rather just created a new folder and import the next run into that. Everything works with Nimbus and the importing has proved this. Follow the instructions and it works first time. A 2GB enex file can take as long as 8.5 hours to process. Uploading is only a few clicks and the rest is waiting Uploading enex is not included in the usage limits for the month with Nimbus. Uploading all your notes is just a matter of waiting for the batched jobs to be processed. “For Nimbus Note Free account users, there's a limit to the number of notes you can create. For every workspace, you can create up to 50 notes. This includes notes made via Nimbus Clipper, in addition to desktop, mobile, and web apps. Notes created through Nimbus Capture (for example, screenshots and screencasts) aren't counted and can be created in any quantity. Also, notes imported from Evernote are not counted.” The notes take up to 30 seconds each to convert and are automatically synchronised with the browser app once converted. The notes are immediately available. Uploading multiple enex one after the other might work. The desktop app, multiple browser tabs and the batch process run together without obvious conflicts. The whole system seems robust. Evernote comparison I have had everything open together. Evernote - Legacy, and both EN10 browser and Windows 10 app. Additionally, I have Google all the services in Chrome and work 90% of the time in the browser. Legacy is good. EN10 in a Chrome browser tabs is stable for me but has limited functionality. EN10 for Windows 10 would not even start early this week. After the update, the app starts how but the synchronisation fails consistently with an error message. I have uninstalled for the second time. Comparing side by side I capture interesting pages with both Evernote and Nimbus clipper. Evernote is still ahead with the capture but not by much. The clipper on Evernote is one of its best features. For a complex, modern marketing website (Apple iPad Air 2020 launch) Nimbus was ahead. Both do well on news websites. Shared problems This forum warns: "these apps all use Electron". The performance of Evernote 10 (browser version), Notion and Nimbus is similar. All apps with fresh and free accounts and no data are fast. Loaded with GBs of data and they do less well. Only Legacy has local data and the rest need to download/refresh with irritating frequency. A simple test: change the sort for all notes from ascending to descending and jump back to the top of the list. There is a long delay before anything appears. Notion too, with 11k records in a table and multiple views, performs similarly. Legacy is instantaneous. Local data and native apps Nimbus is a good Evernote alternative with local folders, browser and mail add ons, stable, works on all devices and all OS, screen capture, page capture, video capture, inexpensive, team cable, mail forwarding address, good help and chat support, a forum, easy to use, OCR of all attachments, and editor that has good tables and database and excel-like functions to add things up in the columns. Performance is an issue. Are in the habit of working pretty quickly on the desktop with lots of short cut keys and will hammer out something in rush? With Electron apps, shortcut keys are for the dogs as any head start is lost waiting for the app to respond. With these new apps work flow is significantly throttled. Request The forum has echoed that "Apple is the last place where the support native apps" and a place where the support the native. @pinkelephant has mentioned Devonthink. I am considering looking at Apple desktop setup with Devonthink. For those out there who use Devonthink what would you recommend?

Moving data from Evernote is not as easy as it would first seem. In the last years, many note taking apps have entered the market but few permit Evernote data to be imported. NoteApps.info list six that do: Bear, Notion, OneNote, Joplin, AmpleNote, StandardNotes. Another not mentioned is Nimbus (an app with a wonderful editor). Even with these, success depends on: the number of notes you have the amount of data this represents now much time you are prepared to invest Of the seven, here is a test of five: Notion, OneNote, Joplin, StandardNotes and Nimbus. Method of data transfer: upload enex file to service: StandardNotes and Nimbus API direct from Evernote: Notion transcribe the local files directly: OneNote and Joplin OneNote: a clear winner Microsoft has produced a very nice import tool that reads the local Evernote files and creates local notes in OneNote that are synchronised with OneDrive. This tool can be download and is no longer support, but it had finished the job no time of transcribing 11,000 notes in about 20 minutes. The result looks very nice in OneNote. Tags are added to the notes as hashtags. The notes and attachments are all searchable. Joplin: may work The Evernote Legacy is a legend and exports all contents into a file of type enex. The export is broken up into files of 2GB in size. Joplin is native and once installed can import the enex files - you point it at the first and it finds the rest. I have done this in 2018 and completed with some errors but most went through: approximately 10,000 notes and 100,000 tags. Unfortunately, this pushed the Joplin database to its synchronisation limits. These problems are discussed in the Joplin forum - which is very good and the community great. In 2020, the import failed and Joplin crashed. I cannot say why. Notion: simple with limitations Importing from Evernote to Notion is simple but with limitations due to the nature of how Notion works. In this forum, Notion was described a beautiful software, and it is, but the concept behind Notion is quite different from Evernote. In other words, the user will be required to change how they think. More about the process in this forum. Tags may be lost in the transfer. StandardNotes: possible but tedious StandardNotes, give them credit, warn you upfront not to try to upload an enex file of greater than 250MB due to browser limitations. One user in this forum said they have 150k notes or 14GB of data. This is an extreme example perhaps but repeating the upload process 56 times is not going to be fun. I broke the test off at this point. Nimbus: the editing wonder If you have seen Nimbus you will know this was designed for an Evernote user. Take everything that is a mess with the Evernote Legacy editor and Nimbus does it better (and better than Evernote 10 too). Having installed the native client the files can be upload to the service and then the background. When the process is finished you will be sent an email. Click on the synchronisation button on the app (and browser too) to watch the progress as the finished notes appear. The initial test with a 13k file and 46 notes showed that the conversion is not all that fast. The second test with a year of notes (2000) in a 2GB file has not concluded but the process has started without errors. It has completed about 120 notes in the time that I wrote this. I will provide an update of the conclusion of this test.