Some Ways I Use Evernote's Features - Part 2

Yesterday I started off with the intention of describing some of the ways I use Evernote’s features, but ended up writing a list of the ways that Evernote frustrates or annoys me. So today I promise to do better!

This is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to Evernote, nor a description of everything I do with it. It’s just a short selection of methods which you may not have thought of already. Several of them will work with other apps too. I’m sure you have methods I haven’t thought of too.

First of all my layout. I keep Shortcuts in the Toolbar across the top of the page, with the left panel minimized. The Note List is set to card view and I keep it wide enough to show two cards per line, which is a total of eight cards visible at full screeen. The Note Panel takes up the rest of the page.

The Star Tag

I have a tag entitled *. This tag is permanently in my Shortcuts so that it appears at the top of the screen. The number of notes that can be tagged with the * is strictly limited to eight. That means that at full screen all their Note Cards are visible at once. That is the whole point of the tag, because the idea of the star tag is to have eight notes which I want accessible immediately. They can be anything I like. At the moment they are my training schedule, my spark file, my reading list, a long letter from a correspondent, a list of possible blog subjects, the next quote for my “To Think About…” feature, an estimate for a new fence for which I’m waiting for a date, and a family picture.

I find this extremely useful, both for immediate access to important notes and as a reminder of what the important notes are.

The Spark File

I got this idea from the article linked in the title to this paragraph. I have already found it very useful, even though I’ve only got a month’s worth of sparks so far. I keep it all in one Note with each day’s entries dated (latest at the top). As I mentioned earlier it is one of the Notes marked with the * tag.

Shortcuts

As I mentioned above I keep Shortcuts displayed across the top of the screen. Apart from anything else that stops me having too many. You can shortcut to anything in Evernote, whether it’s a individual Note, a Tag, or a Notebook. This is one of the best features of Evernote because you can make a subject instantly findable across all your devices.

My own Shortcuts include Inbox, * tag, Phone Numbers, and a list of Nudgemail commands.

Full Screen of Notes

As of this moment I have 6,737 notes in Evernote. My oldest note goes back to May 2008. There’s no way in which I can leaf through the individual notes in the way I would leaf through a book.

Or is there?

If from my normal layout (see above) I close the Note Panel, I am left with a full screen of Note Cards. On my screen that’s 32 notes. I can page through the screens very rapidly using the Page Down key, or go back to a specific date or period. I can then just click on any note that looks interesting and it will come up in a separate window - you can have as many of these open as you like. Looking back through old notes is similar to the Spark File - it helps you to make connections that you otherwise wouldn’t have made.

Table of Contents

This is an amazing feature. Basically you can take any number of notes in Evernote and produce a Table of Contents from them. If you haven’t come across this before, here’s how you do it. Make sure the Note Panel is open. Then highlight the notes you want indexed in the Note List and press the button that appears in the Note Panel called “Create Table of Contents Note”.

Using this you can index a tag, a search, a notebook, or just a collection of random notes and the Table of Contents goes into a separate Note with links to all the notes you highlighted. You can even index all your Table of Contents Notes.

Table Feature

This should not be confused with the Table of Contents Note.

Tables can be inserted into Notes in much the same way they can be inserted into Word files. It’s a fairly basic feature, but is none the less very useful. Some of the things you can put into the boxes in a Table are:

• Text
• Weblinks
• Pictures
• Links to other Notes
• Other Notes
• Full text of a Table of Contents Note
• Documents

So for instance if you were planning to go on holiday, you could put all the information relating to that holiday into one Note arranged so you have an instant overview of all the contents.

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Well, the above are some of the ways in which I use Evernote. What are your favourite ways of doing things in that immensely versatile program?

Some Ways I Use Evernote's Features - Part 1

Evernote has been a staple of my on-line life (and often my real life too) very nearly from the time it first started up. Everyone has their own favourite ways of using it and I expect that among its millions of users there’s scarcely two identical set-ups.

I thought that today I’d just share a few of the ways I use it, in the hope that some of you might find one or more of them useful. I’ve thrown in a few general remarks about the app as well.

1. I use Evernote in three versions - the Android app, the online website and the Windows desktop. They each have their good points and bad points, but the most annoying thing about them is that there is no uniform interface so you basically have to learn how to do everything three different ways. I think they are working on this.

2. The one which works best is the Android app, and if wasn’t for the fact that I can’t type anything like as fast on a SmartPhone as I can on a desktop, I’d probably use it most of the time.

3. The Windows desktop version has the fullest feature set and makes the best use of the display qualities of Evernote, but suffers from being very slow. To keep any sort of speed up at all, you need to re-index at regular intervals, which is a long and tricky process. If you get it wrong you will delete all your notes over all your devices!

4. The Web version used to be unusably slow, but is now fast - much faster than the desktop. However inexplicably it doesn’t have a full feature set and has a completely different user interface. Or maybe it does have a full feature set and I just haven’t found where they keep the missing bits!

5. Another beef with Evernote is that they have a habit of removing some of the existing functionality whenever they do a major update. If they ever get round to putting back the function by which items which you’ve ticked on a to-do list can be hidden, then I would go out of my way to recommend Evernote as a time management app. As it is I don’t feel I can do that.

Well, this was going to be about how I use Evernote, but it seems to have changed more into a review of its bad points. I’ll keep my selection of the ways I use it for tomorrow.

But one thing you can do with Evernote is share a live list. Click here to see my live to-do list today (Sunday) as I use the Next Hour of My Life method.