DON'S FREEWARE CORNER -- OCT 2014
EVERNOTE: A FREE AND VERY USEFUL NOTE PROGRAM
This page was last updated 2014-10-09
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DON'S FREEWARE CORNER 2014-10
EVERNOTE: A FREE AND VERY USEFUL NOTE PROGRAM
©2014 Donald R. Snow
These Freeware Corner notes are published in TAGGology, our Utah
Valley Technology and Genealogy Group (UVTAGG) monthly
newsletter, and are posted on http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
where there may be updates, corrections, or additions.
EVERNOTE
Evernote is a free note-taking program that allows you to work
on any computer and when connected to the Internet it
synchronizes your notes on all your other computers and mobile
devices. The free version is sufficient for most people,
but I have found the additional features of the premium
(commercial) version important enough to me that I subscribe
($45/year). The program stores your notes in the cloud,
i.e. online, and these can be accessed on any computer, if you
can get to the Internet. You can save text, images, pdf's,
URL's, clips of websites, audio files, and more.
HELPS, ETC.
There are helps and video tutorials at -- http://evernote.com/getting_started/#1
and http://evernote.com/evernote/guide/windows/
. There is a helpful "Unofficial Evernote Manual" at
http://www.makeuseof.com/pages/how-to-use-evernote-the-missing-manual-full-text
and a MakeTechEasier Evernote Keyboard Shortcuts cheat sheet
at http://download.maketecheasier.com/MakeTechEasier_Evernote_cheatsheet.pdf
. There are also many tutorials on YouTube.
FEATURES OF EVERNOTE
Set up a free account and download the program from http://www.evernote.com/
.
Notes are stored in two types of notebooks: (1)
synchronized notebooks and (2) non-synchronized
notebooks. Synchronized notebooks are available to you
anywhere you can get to the Internet, e.g. in a FHC, on your
SmartPhone or tablet, or at church. You can have up to 250
synchronized notebooks in free accounts and an unlimited number
in premium accounts. Below I have listed a few example of
using EVERNOTE in family history. Synchronized notes or
notebooks can be shared by right-clicking on them and sending
the generated URL to whoever you want.
Non-synchronized (local) notebooks are stored only on the
computer you set them up on. However, you can transfer
them to other computers manually by using a flash drive,
etc. Either free or premium accounts allow an unlimited
number of these. You might want to use non-synchronized
notebooks for passwords, personal data, medical data, etc.,
since these remain private and are not sent over the Internet.
DATA ENTRY
You get information into a note by typing, copying, pasting,
etc. If you leave the title space for the note blank,
whatever you type on the first line becomes the title.
This is helpful so that when you change the first line later,
e.g. by changing the date, it automatically changes the title of
the note. For the rest of the note you can type or
copy-and-paste text, images, all or parts of a website, drag and
drop a pdf, send an email to your account, or even dictate into
a microphone and have it converted to text in the note.
Free accounts have some limitations on the drag-and-drop
procedure, while premium accounts can take any type and size of
files up to very large files.
There are many keyboard shortcuts, such as to put the date and
time into a note, set up To Do lists with check boxes, or clip
parts of a webite for saving. To dictate an audio notes
click on the pick arrow (small downward pointing triangle) on
the New Note button and select New Audio Note. The voice
recognition in EVERNOTE is not always accurate so you will
probably have to edit the text. You can tag notes with an
unlimited number of tags that you select and these make it easy
to search for all such notes later. The notes in each
notebook can be sorted in various ways. There is a Usage
button (top right) that shows how much of your free space you
have used in the 30-day cycle. The free version includes
enough space for hundreds of notes, enough for most
people. You can set a Reminder for any note by clicking on
the Reminder checkbox (upper right side) and tell it when you
want the reminder to show. At the reminder time it puts
the note at the top of the list.
PDF's
Dragging and dropping a pdf onto a note copies the pdf into the
note and you see the first page of the pdf with a box at the top
of the note to click to go to other pages or else to open the
entire pdf in your default pdf reader. In both types of
accounts pdf's are OCR'd (Optical Character Recognition) by
Evernote, so they are every-word searchable. The OCR'ing
is done immediately for premium accounts, but only late at night
for free accounts.
EDITING
Notes, titles, or text of notes or notebooks can be edited at
any time. For synchronized notebooks these edits will be
automatically transfered to your other computers. Moving
notes from one notebook to another is just drag-and-drop,
whether the notebooks are synchronized or not. For writing
and editing there is a spell checker. Editing has an undo
feature so that deleting part of a note is recoverable, but
deleting an entire note can only be recovered by copying the
note from a backup file. The premium version keeps track
of all earlier versions of the notes you write and by going to
your web account and clicking on Note Info > History you can
see all earlier versions of that note and bring back any part
you want from an earlier version. This feature is not
available with the free version of Evernote.
SEARCHES IN NOTES
Details of Evernote's search operators are at -- http://evernote.com/contact/support/kb/#/article/23245321
and http://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/search_grammar.php
. You can set it to search through all notebooks or only
selected ones. Some search tools are: "+[term]"
which means that [term] must be in the note; "-[term]" means the
[term] must not be there; "[terms]" (include quote marks) means
you want exactly those terms in that order. Search terms
are highlighted in the results. Searching for "win" (no
quotes) brings up results with "Win", "Windows", "wind",
etc.. Searching for "Utah Valley" (with the quote marks)
searches for that exact string. Searching by tags brings
up all notes with that tag and you can then search for other
tags within that result set. The search term "todo:"
brings up all notes with checkboxes, "todo:true" brings up those
with completed checkboxes and "todo:false" brings up those
with uncompleted checkboxes. There is a search-and-replace
feature within a note, but there doesn't seem to be one to
search-and-replace globally in all notes in a notebook and this
would be a very useful tool.
WEB VERSION OF EVERNOTE
Go to http://www.evernote.com/
and log in with your user name and password. The web
version looks almost the same as the desktop version. The
mobile versions for Android, iPad, etc., look different, but do
the same things.
EXPORTING
Any set of notes or notebooks can be saved (exported) in several
formats including Evernote format, text, html. I usually
save notebooks in Evernote format which allows me to back up my
notes and notebooks apart from my online account, and allows me
to transfer anything without going through the Internet. I
use this approach to copy my non-sync'd notebooks to another
computer, for example those with personal data that I don't want
sent over the Internet.
IDEAS FOR USING EVERNOTE IN FAMILY HISTORY
* Keep track of websites with data
* Research logs for your FH research
* Store articles and documents, e.g. pdf's at
a conference so you have them available on a mobile device
* Write articles or notes so you have an
easily accessible copy on other computers. I write these
Free Corner articles in EVERNOTE so I can work on them on any
computer where I can access the Internet.
* Save technology instructions about
operating systems, programs, websites, databases, hardware, etc.
* Make ToDo/Contact/phone/email lists
* Save sources and references for families
* Save text collections so they are
searchable, e.g. letter collections or emails on a topic
* Save photo collections, but there are other
free programs better designed for this
CONCLUSIONS
Evernote has many features that we haven't discussed and there
are many 3rd party programs to help. Many are listed on
the EVERNOTE TRUNK -- http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2012/08/24/the-totally-redesigned-evernote-trunk/
, http://appcenter.evernote.com
, http://trunk.evernote.com/ , and http://blog.evernote.com/
EVERNOTE is a very useful program for family history and many
other uses and I use in many times every day.
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