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(Archived) REQUEST: Better/more printing, merging, and exporting options


floid

Idea

I'm preparing for a lawsuit, and have used Evernote to organize a large stack of scanned PDF documents. All the notes are stored in a single notebook, with tags separating the source of records (e.g. Personal records, Company X records, Company Y records, etc.). So far, so good. The notes have title convention:

YYYYMMDD - doc title

Which works really great to sort the notes by date. It has been easy to grab the note links and create an Index page. So far so good. Now, I need to share this with the lawyers in printed and electronic format. They don't use Evernote. Evernote falls apart when using content with people that don't use evernote. Ugh...very frustrating.

How about merging the notes?

Ok - in the MAC version of Evernote, I create a copy of the notes to a new local notebook, then merged them into a single note. Ok - that works. Now export to a single PDF? Nope. How about printing the note to a PDF? No, only the ugly merged note headers and the first PDF print. Not useful at all.

Let's try export the notes:

Nothing useful there, just proprietary or HTML format. On the MAC version, I can't select multiple notes and export the attachments. But I can do this one note at a time. Makes me wish I would have just stored the notes in Dropbox or something and skip Evernote all together.

Let's try Windows version of Evernote:

I didn't realize how different the features of the two versions are (I'm primarily a MAC user). In Windows, I can't grab multiple notes and make a copy in a local notebook. You can only copy individual notes. Ugh. I tried to copy a few notes individually, then merge & print. A little better result, except I can't turn off the printing the note meta data, which throws off the pagination. Then the ugly merged note headers print on their own page, and the embedded PDF documents print looking like a screen capture rather than actually printing the PDF natively. I could manually delete the ugly merged note title, but there are hundreds, and the embedded PDF still doesn't print full size.

Different from the MAC version, I can select multiple notes and "Save attachments" in bulk. But of course, the resultant files do not inherit the note title and instead have the scanned document (cryptic) names. Now I need to manually rename all the files.

Summary

Bottom line - evernote is really great for personal use, but then when you want to do something useful with all the information, it quickly becomes frustrating and not so useful. Am I missing something? After spending many hours scanning, tagging, titling, and organizing, I'm left with the only option of manually processing each note individually AGAIN in order to produce something useful to share with the attorneys. I've been using Evernote for about 3 years, but never realized this HUGE gap in functionality. I'm hoping I'm missing something as this is really bothersome and frustrating. :angry::(:angry::(:angry:

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Just wanted to followup on this...

After spending hours scanning, tagging, titling, and organizing notes in evernote, then spending at least an hour or two trying to figure out how to export (or print) in an acceptable way, the only way I found was to spend more hours going through each individual note/PDF, right-clicking, save-as, and renaming the file to match the note title.

Moral of the story...do not use evernote if you intend on using the collected information for anything other than personal reference, and you never will need the information outside of Evernote.

Its a shame because Evernote makes a very good PDF library, easy to collect, organize, find, tag, and title pdf documents. But it stops there and you can't do anything with the note after that point. One thing comes to mind here. I understand that Evernote team wants to keep things very simplified. I don't think there is any "secret sauce" in the client tools...perhaps Evernote could open source the client code, or provide an area on this site for developers to share scripts and easy way to add items to the right-click menu within Evernote. If I have to do this again, I'll spend some time writing something to use the API and export attachments.

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Just wondering if you tried the HTML export. It DOES export the original attachments as well (the html pages it exports includes links to the exported attachments.) If I had been in your shoes and needed to pull out a bunch of PDFs, I would:

1. Export the notes to HTML

2. Go into the folder containing the exported data

3. For each note there is an HTML page and a matching folder containing the "resources" (attachments) for the note. Go into those folders and move the attachments to a single folder that I could zip up and send to whoever needs it.

In my very brief test, the html pages and the resource folders are named after the notes they came from. So you should be able to sort them due to your naming convention. I'm not sure what names the PDFs get - I'm guessing they get their original names from before they were added to EN, but in my test the PDF filenames matched the note names. But I think that is because those were the original PDF document names.

I also tested exporting a note with multiple attachments and you get all the attachments in a single folder. So you could go back to your giant merged note and export just that. Then the Resource folder would contain all your attachments.

I realize this is probably too late to help you, and perhaps you already tried the HTML export and the fact that it did output the PDFs didn't help you for some reason. But I thought I'd throw it out there in case anyone else is ever in a similar spot.

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  • Level 5

The solution is rather simple - I put all the appropriate notes into a dedicated Notebook

I shared the Notebook with my lawyer (who does not have Evernote)

It was a piece of cake for me to share my Evernote notes with my lawyer. Accomplished in seconds.

After the issue was resolved, I cancelled the sharing of the notebook.

https://support.ever...5+1&docID=16076

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Just wondering if you tried the HTML export. It DOES export the original attachments as well (the html pages it exports includes links to the exported attachments.) If I had been in your shoes

Thanks for the tip...I did try that and noticed that the attachments are exported. However, I then need to rename the PDF attachments anyway to get them in chronological order (by title). I found it easier to select the note title text, copy to clip board, right-click on the attachments, save-as, then past the new name, repeat a few hundred times. Its been mentioned elsewhere, but if Evernote had an export option where the attachments could be renamed to match the note title, this would have been a good option.

The solution is rather simple - I put all the appropriate notes into a dedicated Notebook

I shared the Notebook with my lawyer (who does not have Evernote)

It was a piece of cake for me to share my Evernote notes with my lawyer. Accomplished in seconds.

After the issue was resolved, I cancelled the sharing of the notebook.

https://support.ever...5+1&docID=16076

Thank you. I offered this to the attorney, but he did not use Evernote or want to deal with it. They would just have their paralegal do what I did, manually exporting the content, and then charge me for it. I'm dealing with a mid-size firm so they are probably a little less flexible.

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  • Level 5

The solution is rather simple - I put all the appropriate notes into a dedicated Notebook

I shared the Notebook with my lawyer (who does not have Evernote)

It was a piece of cake for me to share my Evernote notes with my lawyer. Accomplished in seconds.

After the issue was resolved, I cancelled the sharing of the notebook.

https://support.ever...5+1&docID=16076

Thank you. I offered this to the attorney, but he did not use Evernote or want to deal with it. They would just have their paralegal do what I did, manually exporting the content, and then charge me for it. I'm dealing with a mid-size firm so they are probably a little less flexible.

Evernote is not required at the lawyer's side.

I had the same situation with my lawyer, He asked me to share with his paralegal. She does not use Evernote either.

I toggled off the "Require Log On to Evernote" option.

She confirmed all she did was click on the link to see all the notes, copy them and print them for their files.

I cancelled the share option after she confirmed she had everything.

.

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  • Level 5*

The solution is rather simple - I put all the appropriate notes into a dedicated Notebook

I shared the Notebook with my lawyer (who does not have Evernote)

It was a piece of cake for me to share my Evernote notes with my lawyer. Accomplished in seconds.

After the issue was resolved, I cancelled the sharing of the notebook.

https://support.ever...5+1&docID=16076

While quick and easy, this process does have considerable security risk, IMO.

Whoever clicks first on the share link sent via email will have access.

Evernote does not provide you with any confirmation that the recipient email was sent/received, or that your NB has been accessed.

One approach to mitigate some of the security risk is to start with ONLY one TEST note in the NB.

The Note would instruct your attorney to email and call you to verify proper access.

Then you could add the real Notes.

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  • Level 5

While quick and easy, this process does have considerable security risk, IMO.

I agree with the security issue and I did exactly the same thing.

I tested it with the secretary while I was on the phone. She confirmed it worked.

After the paralegal printed out hard copies, I cancelled the share a couple hours later.

Why didn't I use simple email to send all the PDF's?

Because they were already in Evernote.

And because the time line of events was important, I was able to review, edit, and sort them (in a temporary Notebook).

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