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[Feature Request]Append to an Existing Note


The-Droidster

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Agree with everyone above. It's a significant feature missing from the note editor. We should be able to click the same 'Clip Full Screen' or 'Clip Rectangle or Window' right from a note. Whatever you click goes where the cursor is in the note. Audio and webcam shots are supported, but clipping isn't for some reason. I use the hack to drag clippings from the helper into an existing note all the time, and it's a pain for a product this mature.

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I would use the clipper A LOT MORE if this option existed  (easily clip a page to a pre-existing note). 

Here is how I would envisage it working:

1) When I click on the clipper it creates a note title that it derives from the html title <title>Text used for note name </title> . 
2) When I delete this text (the default title ) and I start typing letters, I would like the clipper to display autocomplete options from my preexisting note titles. e.g. Typing "m" would lead to clipper suggesting "mysql notes" in a drop down 
3) When a preexisting note title is selected/typed, web clipper would remind the user that : An existing note with this name already exists. Do you want to merge the clip with the existing note or create a new note? and the user would click the  "merge" or "create"  button.

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Appending to a file is a fundamental feature even in software in lower levels of the software stack like the operating system routinely perform. This thread has been active over 4 years and the need for the feature will not go away. On the contrary, the need will increase as Evernote is integrated with more research, authoring and knowledge storage applications and workflows.

As the head of software engineering group, I respectfully think this feature merits some updated official acknowledgment as to when it will be on the roadmap, a legitimate automated workaround or a reason why it can't be done. A lot has probably changed in the source code for Evernote and the Web Clipper since the first official response. The complexity of this feature can be greatly reduced by simply manually selecting which note to append to first and then building from there. If is it is really that expensive then make it a pro feature.

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Hi. What is the status of adding this functionality to evernote clipper? (using on windows 8.1). My use case is -- I'm comparing products and costs online. It's one session of web browsing and I want to keep everything I find during that session, and successive related sessions, in a single note.

 

Would be a big time and attention saver

- I don't have to re-select a given notebook or tag; I just do it for the one note

- when consulting my notes, I don't have to search hard, or scroll through many notes, potentially/inadvertently losing track

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Thx for the feedback. There are a lot of edge cases and added complexity around clipping / appending to existing notes. Currently we are not planning to build that in the Web Clipper. 

The programmers behind the IOS app Drafts figured it out.

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Thx for the feedback. There are a lot of edge cases and added complexity around clipping / appending to existing notes. Currently we are not planning to build that in the Web Clipper. 

 

As I just discovered on this thread about email appending, Evernote has that feature when emailing in.  Wouldn't much of the same code with regard to edge cases and appending be used for writing the append info into a note regardless of whether it was captured using the Web Clipper or via an email forward?

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Evernote Guys... this would be EXTREMELY useful when simply highlighting text.  No one wants to highlight various sentences from various websites in a research project and then merge all the notes together.  As a developer, simply appending to the last note is doable.

 

Is this something you guys could consider building?

 

Thanks.

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It's 2016 and still no append feature, which is critical when researching. Even Apple Notes has this feature now.

I'm going to trust the developers and so tomorrow I'll be renewing my premium subscription for another year, but it will be the last one if they don't add/improve basic features like this.

 

ps: if you're on iOS and have Workflow.app you can use this workflow I made to append text, images or other files to a specific note.

https://workflow.is/workflows/ddc40510eaba4b91966ea39066ac4d1d

 

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on my Mac, I use the Evernote Helper to do my clippings.  
It has a button box "Save To Evernote" but if you don't click it, the clippings just accumulate.  
When you finally click it, you get a single note.
Or you can drag the clippings from there into an existing note.

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On January 6, 2016 at 2:45 PM, DTLow said:

on my Mac, I use the helper to do my clippings.  
It has a button box "Save To Evernote" but if you don't click it, the clippings just accumulate.  
When you finally click it, you get a single note.
Or you can drag the clippings from there into an existing note.

What is this "helper" you speak of?  I have had a Mac for years and don't know what you're referring to. 

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Hi evernote team - is there any update to this much needed feature request? The workarounds above dont meet all use cases. For instance, I want to clip a simplified article of multiple websites that I am viewing to a note that I am using to write about one particular subject. The Evernote Helper for Mac doesn't allow for simplified articles. 

For users - the only way that this works for me is to save a bunch of articles/pages that I am reading as simplified, tag them with a special tag and manually merge them later. 

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+1 on this feature!

Making the clipper select a session active note / session default note and then adding to that note would be awesome!

Actually, appending it to one note and be able to modify the way it does so, by listing pagelink etc. would be really awesome - especially for building reference lists or when simply researching a subject!

Thanks for an awesome product!

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+1 it's ridiculous that every web clip from the same page opens it's own note.  It would be a fantastic feature if it could just append to an existing note so we can read an article, clip the bits we want to remember and then later open that note and read all of our comments and images in one note.

Please enable this, enable us :)

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+1 Please add this feature - it is an enormous hassle to add clippings into existing notes again. 

As explained above this feature is critical when doing research or where one wants to add multiple sources and bits of information into one document.

Could the Evernote Team give an Update on this?

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Wow 2017 and screen clippings still go to their own note. This is horrible! A real oversight and shortcoming of what would otherwise be a great app. I don't believe for a second that the problem is "there are too many edge cases." We live in an age of software design in which if something sounds simple, it's probably no big deal to implement in code, unless of course the existing code is designed in such a way as to necessitate rewriting and restructuring to accommodate such a basic idea. Perhaps this is why Evernote has never implemented it - their existing code was not future proof enough. 

I use the Clip To Evernote extension for Chrome, and the way it should work (indeed the way I expected it to work before my rude awakening) was that I'd clip something, it would be stored in the extension, then I could go to any existing note and paste it in there. I bet this is how most people thought it would work, and I bet all of those people were shocked that it was not possible. 

I've done some extensive beta testing of other applications and have found that when some very obvious "no brainer" feature is not being implemented despite thousands of requests for it, the reason usually given by the developers (in private) is that to implement it would break existing code or that the existing code base was not designed with enough foresight to accommodate it. 

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Hi Evernote team, can we please have an update on the status of this? It's been YEARS and this is such a basic feature, I'm shocked that this is not available. If you REALLY can't figure it out, could you at least update us or offer a better workaround than merging? I'm trying to keep a collection of anchor notes ('profiles') that I started with basic info (name, contact, etc) and now I want to add info to them as I come across it or when it gets updated (posts by this person, updates on their status, etc).

The act of making new notes for each of these and then having to merge them all according to person will unnecessarily waste so much time that I'm writing this instead of starting that task and hoping and praying that you'll take notice. This is such a simple idea that it's preposterous it can't be done. Can you not simply add the option to effectively "merge" the newly created note into an existing one without the user having to do this manually? I mean you have the option to create a new notebook, create new tags versus using existing ones, why not new versus existing notes? This does not seem like it should be so difficult. It'd be appreciated if you could respond to the many inquiries about this, or get one of the other developers who have figured this out to help if you really can't sort it out :/ Either way, let us know, I'm not trying to test out new extensions and hacks and workarounds to find something that works when this should already exist in the Evernote universe.

Thanks.

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On 2017-06-01 at 10:32 PM, Jus10 said:

This is just sad.

It's sad this request only has 5933435718d6c_ScreenShot2017-06-03at4_16_22PM.png.ede5f8543dd60810a3940eaaee4ac356.png   user votes.  
It's part of the criteria used by Evernote to decide what changes are the most important

Voting buttons are in the top  left corner of the discussion

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On 6/3/2017 at 7:17 PM, DTLow said:

It's sad this request only has 5933435718d6c_ScreenShot2017-06-03at4_16_22PM.png.ede5f8543dd60810a3940eaaee4ac356.png   user votes.  
It's part of the criteria used by Evernote to decide what changes are the most important

Maybe there is something off with the way the forum voting works?  There are more comments supporting the idea than votes for the feature.  Maybe I just missed up voting, but I commented in support of this almost two years ago, and I didn't have a vote recorded. (I just rectified that now.)

In case it's significant to the project managers, I moved from OneNote to Evernote 8 years ago (according to my oldest note) and have been paying for it for over half that time. (I don't remember when I first subscribed.)  I use all of the following applications regularly: Mac OS client, Evernote Web Clipper in Chrome, Android client, and iOS client. I've also regularly advocated for and presented it to others as a reference system for keeping notes and archiving content from other sources especially getting useful information out of email.  (However, I work in education so I've backed off on that a bit when talking to teachers due to the cost for features such as emailing in notes.)

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+1 x 1,000

I'm building a curriculum for a course. It'd be super awesome if Evernote's Chrome web clipper enabled me to place clips into my curriculum note, and not create dozens of individual new notes. 

Wish I could up-vote this 1,000 times. 

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On 1/6/2016 at 2:36 PM, DontDuckWithMe said:

It's 2016 and still no append feature, which is critical when researching. Even Apple Notes has this feature now.

I'm going to trust the developers and so tomorrow I'll be renewing my premium subscription for another year, but it will be the last one if they don't add/improve basic features like this.

 

ps: if you're on iOS and have Workflow.app you can use this workflow I made to append text, images or other files to a specific note.

https://workflow.is/workflows/ddc40510eaba4b91966ea39066ac4d1d

 

I love this idea! Would you mind to elaborate on the actions to complete this workflow. I am new to using Workflow and do find it a bit confusing so any help would be much appreciated!!

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Many professionals have above worded this needed/ required feature much better than I could have.  It is WAY too much work the work it is and I'm not even using Evernote in a business application!?  In my everyday research I question the sanity of paying for this when I am not even able to then look at my research in any organized, cohesive manner.  All along now I have believed it was a lack on my part, a learning curve.  I don't even yet know how to manually go in and reorg. all these separate notes (100's) into a couple dozen Topic Notes w/all individual notes finally being together!   This truly makes the hours of hard research work almost done for nothing.  Like, I would have been further ahead with a topic notebook and a pen!!!

To say that this feature would be helpful is a total understatement.

 

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@DTLow

Regardless of how many upvotes there are on feature requests over a certain time (sometimes years) I cannot help thinking by now  that even the most obvious requests are either ignored or if they finally do get implemented still leave a lot to be desired. Evernote is a law onto itself. There can't be many users left who are not aware of that.

With your years of experience and your grade of intelligence you are able to accept that merging notes will often not satisfy needs. So why try and 'belittle' requests/complaints by telling people how you manage? 

Years ago I knew a team leader who thought nothing wrong by telling his staff to use Excel also as their text writing app. 

Lately a local guru tried to squirm out of the apparent Evernote printing 'deficiences' by waffling over the paper-free office. Coindence or not, that group is losing members. 

 

 

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17 hours ago, JohnLongney said:

So why try and 'belittle' requests/complaints by telling people how you manage? 

I encouraged the user to add their vote to the request.  
The user reported the problem with “reorg. all these separate notes”, and I offered a suggestion

I’m not into   Boohoo, Evernote’s so bad    posts (take that as ‘belittle’)
I’m more interested in how to make this product work for me.  

>>There can't be many users left who are not aware of that......Coindence or not, that group is losing members. 

I haven't seen the latest numbers.  The last count I heard was over 200 million accounts

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Its second half of 2017. I am still waiting for this feature. I have now abandoned the web clipper for those tasks involving screenshots and have switched to Windows Snipping tool (oh the horror!) which I later paste to my existing note. Horrible workflow.

 

 

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I would love to be able to append clips to a particular note. Some possibilities could be collecting quotes, or math equations, or bibliographic references, or several photos, or, as I am doing now, gathering short suggestions about computer parts (so exciting!).  FYI right now Google Keep will put consecutive clips in the most recent note, but I would prefer to use Evernote for other reasons. I'll probably be juggling both products unless I can find another web-based solution that goes to all my devices.

By the way, if you don't need/want to clip to the web, I am pretty sure the NoteTab editor for Windows will do this offline.

I just agree that this would be a great feature to add to a quality clipping system, so I wanted to chime in.  

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I just discovered that this is not available in the web clipper and would like to add to the opinions expressed above that this would be EXTREMELY helpful. I just switched from OneNote to Evernote because annotating was easier for my lecture notes, but only to discover that clipping notes is a pain. Many of my lectures are in online modules, and I have to basically screenshot each page separately (20-30 pages each time), and then merge all the notes. I cannot begin to describe how inconvenient this is. Please, please consider adding this functionality.

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17 hours ago, Jackk said:

Appending to a file is a fundamental feature even in software in lower levels of the software stack like the operating system routinely perform.

Hmmm. I looked for this in Windows Explorer, and couldn't find any such option. It's probably because appending to particular formats cannot be accomplished by mindless smushing together of files. I.e., this is not an OS-level option for a reason, because the OS doesn't know how to deal with different formats. Since Evernote notes are XML-based, this won't work for Evernote notes anyways. So citing the OS is kind of pointless for this case.

That being said, sure, this would be a useful feature for some Evernote users, and similar what they already do with email (https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005347-How-to-save-email-into-Evernote), where you need to specify the title of an existing note.  That bit of UI would need to be added to the clipper, and proceed from there. I can tell you that "manually selecting which note to append to" oversimplifies the task, if you have thousands of notes, so some form of filtering on what's been typed vs. existing note titles would almost certainly be a necessity.

17 hours ago, Jackk said:

As the head of software engineering group, I respectfully think this feature merits some updated official acknowledgment as to when it will be on the roadmap

They generally don't publish feature roadmaps, to heads of SE groups or even general users like me. That's just how they roll... *shrug*

In the meantime, while you're waiting, there are workarounds, as noted by DTLow and others.

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Append is essential. I use an append function with Google Keep and Apple Notes (iOS).  Without this function on Evernote, Evernote will cease to be my note-taking app, and will become merely a storage space for me. 

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Agree!!! This is a great feature of Bear. I am considering switching over because it is better for collecting notes in this way. 

Ideally Evernote would have an 'append' option in the iOS/Safari share feature .. in the exact same way as Bear 

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On 1/9/2014 at 10:16 AM, jbignert said:

here are a lot of edge cases and added complexity around clipping / appending to existing notes. Currently we are not planning to build that in the Web Clipper. 

Apple notes does that seamlessly, by default. It's incomprehensible to have add each time a clipping or a link or a quottion to a NEW note, then cut paste to an old one. Really a shame.

 

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On 5/22/2019 at 7:36 PM, Tim R. said:

Append is essential. I use an append function with Google Keep and Apple Notes (iOS).  Without this function on Evernote, Evernote will cease to be my note-taking app, and will become merely a storage space for me. 

I agree w.you. Evernote should really listen to this customer feedback. Why can't you, while Google Keep and Apple do that ?

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I just googled for this feature, couldn't believe that something such essential is not part of the basic feature set. No I have to face that this is not even on the roadmap.

By Evernote. Back to OneNote is my personal solution. OneNote can paste into existing notes.

Rainer

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The general idea of EN is not to create THAT monster note. It is different in this aspect from for example OneNote.

The idea with clipping today is to make one clip and create one new note from it. By settings it can go to the same notebook as the one clipped before. So when clipping a series of articles they can end up in the same place, if wanted. Easy to define, easy to follow up once clipping is done.

Note organisation is easy from there: Select them all or a part, create links and put them into a note as TOC. Or select a bunch of notes and merge them together. Merging has the additional advantage that the sequence can be chosen. Content clipped later can go to the top position, if it should be there.

No, I don’t think putting append or merge into the web clipper itself is a good idea.

 

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22 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

The general idea of EN is not to create THAT monster note. It is different in this aspect from for example OneNote.

The idea with clipping today is to make one clip and create one new note from it. By settings it can go to the same notebook as the one clipped before. So when clipping a series of articles they can end up in the same place, if wanted. Easy to define, easy to follow up once clipping is done.

Note organisation is easy from there: Select them all or a part, create links and put them into a note as TOC. Or select a bunch of notes and merge them together. Merging has the additional advantage that the sequence can be chosen. Content clipped later can go to the top position, if it should be there.

No, I don’t think putting append or merge into the web clipper itself is a good idea.

 

Since merging after the fact is supported (as mentioned above) as is appending to a note via email, someone on Evernote's team thought there was value in allowing the appending to notes those two ways many years ago as I've used those features for many years. Therefore, it's not a big leap to include that ability in the web clipper if you are talking about Evernote's philosophy. (What the developers have time to do and what is a priority is a different argument.) Evernote is a fairly blank slate tool that seems designed to support different workflows for different people. Clipping a note into an existing note is obviously a workflow that is useful to some customers given the age of and activity on this thread. Obviously, no one for whom that's not part of their workflow would be required to append notes. However, those folks shouldn't dictate what's an appropriate workflow for others.

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Appending an e-mail send into EN to an existing note only works when it has the exact same title as an existing note. This may be simple with an e-mail from an existing, ongoing conversation (after you manually removed all that Re: / Fwd: / Apnd: etc), but sort of a feat if you need to remember and type that information by yourself.

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2 hours ago, kyledonbaker said:

2021 checking in and reminding Evernote that this is still a great idea. I'm new to the forums, so not sure if this bumps the thread, but hopefully. 

If you vote it up, it adds your vote to the request. To do so, go to the very top of the thread and click on that arrow symbol with a counter to left.

When it changes to green, your vote was counted.

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1 hour ago, PinkElephant said:

If you vote it up, it adds your vote to the request. To do so, go to the very top of the thread and click on that arrow symbol with a counter to left.

When it changes to green, your vote was counted.

Oh cool. Thank you for the information. 

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Hi,

Just stated using Evernote and chiming in that this would be a game changer.

I realize that using windows snip and save to copy paste screen caps to notes is a more direct workflow then Evernote's own screen clipping is ridiculous.
 

I'd suggest a check box on the Evernote helper interface to toggle between creating a new note for each screen clipping and clipping directly into selected note.

I won't even complain if this is purely for the desktop version. :_)

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Clip it into a new note, look up the note you want to add it to, merge both notes. You can even decide which part shows in which sequence.

The Problem with that „add to another note“ business from a clipping tool is always the effort to pick the note to which you want to add. Once you passed a hundred notes, it gets clumsy.

Merging makes use of the full interface, which makes finding this other note n the haystack much more straightforward..

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17 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

Clip it into a new note, look up the note you want to add it to, merge both notes. You can even decide which part shows in which sequence.

The Problem with that „add to another note“ business from a clipping tool is always the effort to pick the note to which you want to add. Once you passed a hundred notes, it gets clumsy.

Merging makes use of the full interface, which makes finding this other note n the haystack much more straightforward..

One way to partially address this would be for the interface to show the last few modified notes. Some of the compelling use cases for merging that I've seen folks post are when someone wants to collect a bunch of things together as part of an online research process. That would involve a bunch of frequent clips over and over again. However, the target notes would be getting modified each time so would stay on the recent list.

I will concede that the way merging notes works now (as opposed to how it worked when I supported this suggestion over four years ago) does make it more reasonable to merge after the fact when not needing to do this a lot. However, it's still often very inconvenient (and kind of slow) to come up with a search that will get both notes to appear in the results so they can both be selected for merging.

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It can be a challenge to get stuff back together after a while, no doubt. But knowing this if it is done right away, it is much easier. And based on the creation date it really is no problem to get all notes in one place that were created by a "clipping session". But yes, it is an additional step.

The "legacy" EN Helper had a good way to solve the conflict: You could clip several clips into the helper, and then click on "Create a note". It did it with all the collected content - you could even write some short text in between of the clips, and everything showed up in the note.

The helper can still be installed and used by getting the legacy client, and activate the Helper in settings.

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19 hours ago, cochi said:

To say that this feature would be helpful is a total understatement.

You are certainly welcome to add your vote to this request; there are currently 12 votes
Voting buttons are in the top left corner of the discussion

Personally I have  no problem with the individual clipping notes

>>I don't even yet know how to manually go in and reorg. all these separate notes (100's) into a couple dozen Topic Notes w/all individual notes finally being together!  

I leave all the notes intact, tied together with a tag.  I copy/paste critical info into a master note, with links to the research clippings.  The master note could include a link to each of the clippings  (Table of Contents)

On my Mac, I could select the notes (100’s) and do a merge, but I wouldn’t find the result too useful

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