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Search for texts in documents attached to Notes


Rev.Bob Smith

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Dear Friends:

 

I am a graduate school librarian with substantial research interests. I've begun to scan texts to put in Evernote Premium. I create a note in the Windows 7 app, give it a title related to the source, drag-and-drop the file into the note and then synchronize it. When I search for text within the attached docs, however, it doesn't seem to find the text. How do I get it to work?

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Hi Bob,

 

What documents are you popping into Evernote? PDFs? How long of an interval are you waiting before you try to search your documents? Remember that it may take more than a couple of minutes, because Evernote needs to index and OCR your documents to recognize words within images, which is what your scanned documents are.

 

Also, how are you searching? Are you using the Ctrl + F keyboard shortcut on desktop or the search within a note icon on mobile? That will not yield any results. Your search needs to be from within the Evernote search bar. More about isolating notes (and the attached documents) to search for text within them/ test the searchability later once we have more specifics :-)

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Thanks for the reply, Frank! I'm using the search box with the greyed out text: search all notes which is in the upper right corner. I am using mostly PDFs and have already OCRed them in Adobe Acrobat Professional. It has been at least a day since they were added to Evernote notes.

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To check if note attachments have been indexed, hit the Information icon in the note panel toolbar above an individual note (in between the presentation mode icon and the Work Chat icon). The last item should give you your attachment status.

 

If the note has not been indexed, you can force it to index by holding down Ctrl and hitting the help menu in the uppermost toolbar... and then "Fix Current note". See if that works.

 

One frustrating problem we have with the Windows client is that whenever you edit a note in any way, including the title, adding tags, changing the notebook, etc., any attachments that were already indexed are subsequently shown to not be indexed. The problem lies with the Windows client... not the Evernote servers. If you've synced to the EN servers, most likely your attachments will be searchable online (Web client) and on mobile device, even if not currently searchable on Desktop.

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  • Level 5*

If you have indexed the PDFs with Acrobat I don't think you have to wait for the EN server to index them.  For example I just downloaded my Amex statement to a local notebook and the info icon says it has not been indexed, yet it is searchable in EN.  I think the indexed value is set based upon the EN server doing something.

 

Do you have anything else in the search bar other than the text you are seeking in the PDF?  Can you Ctrl-F find the text if you open the PDF in Acrobat?

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  • Level 5*

Hi.  Are you using the installed desktop version of Evernote for your searches,  or the server version,  accessed via a browser?  If you add a new note to the desktop version it should be searchable immediately.  If you add it to the browser,  it may take a short while to be processed - we're talking seconds or minutes here.  If you're saving your searches to the desktop version and then searching online  you'd have to make sure the two copies of Evernote have synced to share the details...

 

Could you give us an example of the sort of search query you use?  If you click in the Evernote window and hit Ctrl-F10 you'll see how Evernote interprets that query which might be helpful...

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Thanks, everyone! It turns out the app was searching the full text. What fooled me was it doesn't open the PDF and jump to the first hit. You have to open it and do a search within it to locate the information. I'm grateful for the shortcuts you all showed me as well. 

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