(Archived) Import Format

[mikea144 36]

Hi,

 

I want to import about 1,700 notes from my Tungsten T5 PDA into Evernote on my Win 7 PC for access from my Android Nexus 4 phone.  I have the Palm Desktop files on my PC, and I've used a different product to extract the notes into text files.  There's a file for each note, with the file name (as well as the first line of each file) indicating the title of the note. 

 

I can find no documentation whatsoever on Evernote web site indicating the format Evernote expects on import.  In particular I need to know what character set is used, what is assumed re file names (is 1 note per file acceptable?  Does the file name have any effect or is it ignored?), how to represent the tags for each note, and how to specify the Notebook a note resides in. 

 

Thanks,

Mike

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

Hi,

I want to import about 1,700 notes from my Tungsten T5 PDA into Evernote on my Win 7 PC for access from my Android Nexus 4 phone. I have the Palm Desktop files on my PC, and I've used a different product to extract the notes into text files. There's a file for each note, with the file name (as well as the first line of each file) indicating the title of the note.

I can find no documentation whatsoever on Evernote web site indicating the format Evernote expects on import. In particular I need to know what character set is used, what is assumed re file names (is 1 note per file acceptable? Does the file name have any effect or is it ignored?), how to represent the tags for each note, and how to specify the Notebook a note resides in.

Thanks,

Mike

Evernote only "imports" its own enex files. To get the text files into EN, you can put them into an import folder. (Please search the board on import folders). For text files, I think the note title is defaulted to the first line in the file. For other files, the note title is defaulted to the file name. You cannot auto assign tags, but the import folder allows you to specify a destination notebook.

[jefito 5,589]

Hi,

 

I want to import about 1,700 notes from my Tungsten T5 PDA into Evernote on my Win 7 PC for access from my Android Nexus 4 phone.  I have the Palm Desktop files on my PC, and I've used a different product to extract the notes into text files.  There's a file for each note, with the file name (as well as the first line of each file) indicating the title of the note. 

 

I can find no documentation whatsoever on Evernote web site indicating the format Evernote expects on import.  In particular I need to know what character set is used, what is assumed re file names (is 1 note per file acceptable?  Does the file name have any effect or is it ignored?), how to represent the tags for each note, and how to specify the Notebook a note resides in. 

 

Thanks,

Mike

This web page may help out: http://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/enml.php, and possibly examining the DTD linked from there. In addition, just exporting notes and examining them in a text editor should be helpful. It's easy to see how tags are represented doing that.

One note per file is perfectly acceptable.

The name of the import file doesn't appear to be used anywhere in the note. One good reason why is that multiple notes may reside in a single Evernote export file.

Notebook is nowhere encoded in an Evernote format file.

Not sure what you mean by character set; you should be able to use Unicode.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Hi,

 

I want to import about 1,700 notes from my Tungsten T5 PDA into Evernote on my Win 7 PC for access from my Android Nexus 4 phone.  I have the Palm Desktop files on my PC, and I've used a different product to extract the notes into text files.  There's a file for each note, with the file name (as well as the first line of each file) indicating the title of the note. 

 

I can find no documentation whatsoever on Evernote web site indicating the format Evernote expects on import.  In particular I need to know what character set is used, what is assumed re file names (is 1 note per file acceptable?  Does the file name have any effect or is it ignored?), how to represent the tags for each note, and how to specify the Notebook a note resides in. 

 

Thanks,

Mike

 

Mike, Evernote documentation is scarce, hard to find, and is rarely up-to-date.  But I believe that you can import files of any type into Evernote.

HTML, TXT, and RTF files should import directly as Note text, whereas all other file type will import as attachments.  Image files (JPG, GIF, PNG, etc) will import a images directly displayed in the Note.

 

For more info see How to import from other note apps into Evernote

 

You may also want to do a Google search on "Evernote import".

 

Since you have so many files to import, you may want to put the files into Windows folders that will correspond to Evernote Notebooks.

Then you can import the files from each folder into a specific EN Notebook.  You could then assign EN tags to these EN Notes if you'd prefer to use a tag strategy rather than a NB strategy.  After applying one or more tags to all of the Notes you just imported to a specific NB, you could then move all of these Notes to more general NB.

 

Before you attempt import of all 1700 files, I'd suggest that you run a few test cases with just a few files/notes to make sure it will work as expected.

 

Good luck, and welcome to the wonderful world of Evernote.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Mike, since you have Palm Desktop files, you might be interested in this:

Palm Desktop memo importer for Evernote

[mikea144 36]

Everyone,

 

Thanks so much for your help.  I must say that your responses have been more helpful and complete than any I've received from queries I've posted on other support forums.  Even though Evernote's documentation appears to be completely inadequate, the help that's availble here should more than make for that.  I'm sure there's enough information in your responses that I'll be able to complete my conversion successfully. 

 

Regards to all,

Mike

[mikea144 36]

Hi,

 

For anyone who stumbles on this topic in the future, I used the converter suggested by JMichael and it worked fine.  Since I used MemoLeaf keywords on my T5, I wrote an awk script to pick the most important MemoLeaf keyword and make it an Evernote tag.  I also converted the non-unique MemoLeaf keywords to unique ones (e.g. 2005 => 2005K, Jack => JackK) so I could search on the keywords without getting other cruft.  I've just completed the conversion to Evernote and am very happy with the results. 

 

Mike