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(Archived) What's your Evernote workflow with handwritten notes?


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Hi there,

I'm using Evernote quite for a while, but I never managed to use it at work for taking notes at business meetings and stuff. Those notes I just take with a normal paperbased notebook (I tried that on my iPad, but the feeling is just not the same).

My idea would be to get all those handwritten notes into Evernote, but i've never really managed to get a good workflow for that. How are you guys doing that? Are you using some handwriting App for the iPad or are you just getting pictures of your notes and attach them? The issues with pictures i have is, that i cannot really search for that Evernote. It's not recognizing my handwriting at all.

Thanks for some idead and cheers

hubutz

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Hi and welcome, @hubutz! I am getting better at taking notes directly into EN with my BlackBerry, but when this is not practical, I still make handwritten notes. I scan them as a jpg if single sheet, or a pdf for multiple pages and add them to EN. I then create a descriptive title (including the meeting subject) and tag appropriately, sometimes putting a two-line summary above the attachment listing anything else that might help me to find the notes later, whether it be the attendees, venue or meeting purpose, in the event my handwriting is not recognised.

If I remember beforehand, I use clear block capitals for the meeting title before regressing to my usual scribble, so at least that part is accurately OCR'd!

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  • Level 5*

Hi there,

I'm using Evernote quite for a while, but I never managed to use it at work for taking notes at business meetings and stuff. Those notes I just take with a normal paperbased notebook (I tried that on my iPad, but the feeling is just not the same).

My idea would be to get all those handwritten notes into Evernote, but i've never really managed to get a good workflow for that. How are you guys doing that? Are you using some handwriting App for the iPad or are you just getting pictures of your notes and attach them? The issues with pictures i have is, that i cannot really search for that Evernote. It's not recognizing my handwriting at all.

Thanks for some idead and cheers

hubutz

Hi. Welcome to the forums!

I guess there are all sorts of ways to get handwritten notes into Evernote.

1) I used to use regular paper and scan it with ScanSnap. Evernote does OK with the OCR, but my handwriting is embarrassingly bad, so I am not surprised that it misses some things, and my notes are often a hodgepodge of English and Japanese.

2) Now I use GoodNotes on the iPad. Writing on the iPad with a stylus is not as nice as writing with a pen or pencil on paper, but the convenience of pressing a button and sending it directly into Evernote before I even leave the meeting room makes it worthwhile. When Penultimate is updated (Evernote purchased it) I am hoping it will have a zoom function (a necessity for notetaking) and I will probably switch over to it.

3) I think ShotNote would be a cool way to get handwritten notes into Evernote, because it is made for the process of writing, photographing, and putting into Evernote without the need of a separate device like ScanSnap. I have only ever seen these in Japan, though :(

http://www.wired.com...nned-by-iphone/

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Hi there,

thanks for your replys. I'll already tried to write on the iPad itself but it's just not the same. Going to try some scan app (JotNot Pro) and seeing if that's working for me.

The thing with Shot Note looks interessting. I'm going to see if i can manage to get one of that blocks in germany :)

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I use the "livescribe" pen and notebook system. It allows for handwritten notes, along with sync'd audio, of meetings. The live scribe software can then save the notes and audio in a PDF which I drop into evernote.

It works well for my purposes...the one big "want" for me is to have the same type of a system that can be used to markup meeting handouts and have my notes and audio overlaid....the iPad app "audionote" comes close, but it doesn't export in a PDF format - which works well for sharing such notes.

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  • Level 5*

I use the "livescribe" pen and notebook system. It allows for handwritten notes, along with sync'd audio, of meetings. The live scribe software can then save the notes and audio in a PDF which I drop into evernote.

It works well for my purposes...the one big "want" for me is to have the same type of a system that can be used to markup meeting handouts and have my notes and audio overlaid....the iPad app "audionote" comes close, but it doesn't export in a PDF format - which works well for sharing such notes.

Livescribe seems really nice, and I have heard good things about it. I don't use it myself, though.

For meeting notes, what I do is snap a photo, open it in a notetaking app, and mark on it with the iPad/stylus.

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  • Level 5

Back in 1999, I started bringing my laptop to all my meetings.

No paper meeting notes at all for the past dozen years.

Everything was digital at the point of origin.

Made a huge difference in my search abilities.

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Grumpy,

When you say you snap a photo of meeting notes and open it in a note taking app, is that what you use GoodNotes for? Or do you use that only for writing notes from a blank convas? I'm looking for the best way to do the former.

Pete

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Grumpy,

When you say you snap a photo of meeting notes and open it in a note taking app, is that what you use GoodNotes for? Or do you use that only for writing notes from a blank convas? I'm looking for the best way to do the former.

Pete

Hi Pete. The answer is: both. I use GoodNotes in place of blank pieces of paper, and as a way to annotate meeting notes. I highly recommend it. They have a free version, so you can easily give it a try. There are a few ways of doing it, depending on how much time and effort you want to put into it.

(1) The fastest way is to open the app, snap a photo, and start writing. If you have the iPad3, this will work brilliantly. The iPad2? Not so well (low resolution).

(2) Snap a photo and open it in GoodNotes.

(3) The best (?) way is to snap a photo, process it in JotNot (in Evernote Trunk) or ScannerPro, and then import the document. This will enable you to significantly reduce the size of the image and clean it up a bit by making it black/white. It doesn't take long, but it is an extra step.

What do I do?

(1) I take a photo with the iPhone (higher resolution, so good quality),

(2) process it with ScannerPro,

(3) open it ("send") in my Evernote account (great integration),

(4) sync Evernote on my iPad, open the image, and save it to the Camera roll,

(5) open the image in GoodNotes,

(6) send the GoodNotes PDF to Evernote to Evernote when I am finished.

It doesn't take too long (with practice, maybe a minute to get it into GoodNotes) and this gives me two copies (an original and an annotated one) in my Evernote account. The only problem with this might be if you want to make use of Evernote's excellent image recognition capabilities. GoodNotes only exports in PDF or its own proprietary format. Other notetaker programs can do the same thing and send it to Evernote as an image.

If all of these steps turn you off, or you don't like the results, you could do it the old-fashioned way: write on the document and scan it (I recommend ScanSnap) when you get home.

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Great! Thanks for your help. I will probably do something similar to your process as I have an iPad2 so I will utilize my iPhone camera. Thanks again.

Glad I could help. Good luck, and let us know how it goes!

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