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Building tables in Evernote drives me crazy!  I'm not able to cut and paste and I end up losing work if I try to move a row.  I now have a complicated workaround which involves pasting it somewhere else, then pasting field by field.  Infuriating.

Please make this a better user experience

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Hi.  This is kind've a 'down off an Elephant' issue - (How'd you get down off an Elephant? - You don't;  you get down off a duck.  Sorry.)

IME simple tables are OK - you can add lines and columns and edit contents.  Anything more complex and I use Word - copy paste the whole table into Word,  change the table around as you wish,  then copy/ paste back.  Maybe even save the original table into a Word document and attach that file to the note;  then you can avoid the initial copy/ paste by just opening the Word file.  The content of the table is searchable (if you;re not a premium user) from the content saved in the note;  and layout is preserved thanks to Word.

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On 11/1/2016 at 4:29 PM, LindseyMac said:

Building tables in Evernote drives me crazy!  I'm not able to cut and paste and I end up losing work if I try to move a row.  I now have a complicated workaround which involves pasting it somewhere else, then pasting field by field.  Infuriating.

Please make this a better user experience

I've been involved in a bunch of threads and a support ticket involving Evernote tables. The response I got in the support ticket was the standard "Yes, we know that copy/paste/undo/add rows/add columns/delete row/delete column/etc. don't work in tables and maybe we'll fix it one day."

Searching through the forums, you'll find many other users have been bringing up the same table issues since Evernote was founded, so I think you can assume that tables in Evernote are Everbroken.

If you need a lot of tables, as Gazumped says, use MS Word, Google Docs, OneNote, etc.

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2 hours ago, LindseyMac said:

I know, seriously.  I am most likely going to back to OneNote and adding Dropbox so I can access anywhere.  Formatting in Evernote is shameful compared to OneNote.

I think Evernote formatting is uniquely poor compared to literally every other editor I've ever used. I used many other word processors for most of my life and never experienced bugs at Evernote frequency. MS Word, Word Perfect, Google Docs, OneNote, SimpleNote, NimbusNote, Libre Office, Open Office, Pages, etc. all seem to handle formatting just fine. Not perfectly, but I could, by default, trust undo, tables, font sizing, copy/paste, etc.

The high rate of formatting problems is, IME, unique to Evernote.

 

12 hours ago, CdnHoser said:

I still wonder why Evernote's grand new upgrade was a coloured sidebar. Wow, big deal. Get the bloody tables right...

I think that adding new features is relatively fun and easy to do. It's also better for marketing.

Fixing bugs, on the other hand, can be, in both relative and absolute terms, incredibly slow, expensive, and painful. It's not so great for marketing, either. What would an ad's narrator say? "After 8 years of infuriating tables, our table functionality has caught up to 1990's expectations!"

 

 

Has anyone else tried Dropbox Paper? I fiddled around with it a little yesterday and formatting, including tables, was incredible. It just worked. I don't know if there's an offline version of it, though. I think Windows 10 users can only access Dropbox Paper through a browser. Not sure about the degree of cross-platform uniformity either.

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On 04/11/2016 at 5:05 PM, WeCanLearnAnything said:

Has anyone else tried Dropbox Paper? I fiddled around with it a little yesterday and formatting, including tables, was incredible. It just worked. I don't know if there's an offline version of it, though. I think Windows 10 users can only access Dropbox Paper through a browser. Not sure about the degree of cross-platform uniformity either.

Wow, that is nice. Even the code formatter seems genuinely useful.

Sigh... perhaps in a million years Evernote will get some of those formatting features.

It looks like there's more and more competition for Evernote, they really need to up their game if they want to survive. If Google takes them over I'd expect some improvements but I'd be very nervous as Google has a terrible track record of abandoning useful services and leaving their users in the lurch.

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19 hours ago, Liam Gretton said:

...

It looks like there's more and more competition for Evernote, they really need to up their game if they want to survive. If Google takes them over I'd expect some improvements but I'd be very nervous as Google has a terrible track record of abandoning useful services and leaving their users in the lurch.

Would Google really abandon a service as popular as Evernote? I think they'd be reviled for it.

I can't back this up with evidence, but I think a bigger threat is users abandoning Evernote because they're off-put by the feature complexity and formatting bugs.

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1 hour ago, WeCanLearnAnything said:

Would Google really abandon a service as popular as Evernote? I think they'd be reviled for it

I'd hope not, but I could see their version of Evernote becoming mobile only, with PC and Mac clients being dropped as too bothersome to maintain. That's what they did with Picasa despite howls of protest.

Anyway this is complete speculation. Coming back on-topic I'm as frustrated as everyone else with the state of the editor in EN.

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6 hours ago, Liam Gretton said:

I'd hope not, but I could see their version of Evernote becoming mobile only, with PC and Mac clients being dropped as too bothersome to maintain. That's what they did with Picasa despite howls of protest.

Anyway this is complete speculation. Coming back on-topic I'm as frustrated as everyone else with the state of the editor in EN.

Here's some more speculation. :)

Evernote is supposed to be a modern note-taking program, yet basic functions taken for granted decades ago - tables, backspace, font sizing - have been awful for many years. If it were possible to fix those bugs, I think they would have been fixed by now. Perhaps Everbugs are just so technically entrenched that they will literally never be fixed. Perhaps with billions of notes in the cloud and complex interdependencies among so many parts and platforms of Evernote, there is simply no path to making, say, tables work properly without wrecking either billions of old notes or even more basic functions.

Does anyone from Evernote care to clarify?

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8 hours ago, WeCanLearnAnything said:

Does anyone from Evernote care to clarify?

Evernote doesn't (usually) clarify development work,  so I guess the speculation will have to continue,  though we already know they've just completed introducing an updated common editor in all OS's.  Now they can apply a fix to multiple OS's in one hit,  maybe there will be more progress...

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On 11/8/2016 at 4:38 PM, gazumped said:

Evernote doesn't (usually) clarify development work,  so I guess the speculation will have to continue,  though we already know they've just completed introducing an updated common editor in all OS's.  Now they can apply a fix to multiple OS's in one hit,  maybe there will be more progress...

What I really want to hear is their side of the story regrading why they haven't fixed basic editor functions in the past and why fixes in the future are more likely.

Regarding the future, I still expect to leave Evernote and its bug-ridden formatting. My guess is that the common editor will make it easier to fix bugs... but also easier to add new features to the editor instead of fixing features. Thus, in overall terms, it is still vastly easier to add features, revamp the UI, iterate WorkChat or Presentation mode, etc. than it is to fix the editor. Ergo, I expect Evernote to focus on new features, UI redesigns, color changes, etc. instead of, say, fixing their uniquely infuriating tables.

I sure hope/wish/want to be proven wrong!

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