dons-freewarecorner-2017-10-evernotefiles.html

DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - OCT 2017

IMPORTING AND EXPORTING COLLECTIONS OF FILES IN EVERNOTE
©2017 Donald R. Snow - This page was last updated 2017-10-13.
These Freeware Corner notes are published in TAGGology, our Utah Valley Technology and Genealogy Group (UVTAGG) monthly newsletter. They are also posted on my Freeware Corner Notes page on http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html where the links are active and there may be corrections and additions, as well as other related notes and articles.

EVERNOTE
EVERNOTE is a program which saves your notes "in the cloud", so they are available to you wherever you are and on various devices. It has free and commercial versions. The free version can only be installed on two devices, but your account can still be used on additional devices by using the web version in a browser on those. The commercial versions are installable on all your devices. To get either you go to https://evernote.com/ and set up and account, selecting your user name and password. You can then download the program and it will be linked to your account. With your user name and password you can get to your account on other devices and download the program there. Your notes will then be available to you everywhere you can get to the Internet with those devices. Changes in notes made on any device are transmitted to all your other devices. Even when you are not connected to the Internet, you can enter or edit a note and as soon as it detects an Internet connection, it uploads the changes and downloads any changes in your account from other machines. The free version is enough for many people in family history and I used it for several years before deciding go commercial so I could use some of the advanced features. I've been using a commercial version for several years now and have about 10,000 notes stored in various notebooks. I have written previous Freeware Corner notes about EVERNOTE and given family history classes with the note posted on my website, so this article won't repeat all the basics.
NOTES AND NOTEBOOKS
EVERNOTE has two types of notebooks for the notes, synchronized notebooks and local notebooks. The notes in sync'd notebooks are stored in the cloud on the EVERNOTE servers and, hence, are available to you on all your devices. Local notebooks are only on the computer you set them up on, but can be backed up and copied to other computers or devices yourself by using a flash drive. Because local notebooks are not sync'd over the Internet, they can be used to store private information, e.g. passwords, medical records, financial data, etc., and not have to worry that your data is "out there somewhere" where bad guys can access it. The free version of EVERNOTE allows you to form up to 250 sync'd notebooks and an unlimited number of local notebooks. The commercial versions have no restrictions on the number of either type of notebook. I use one local notebook and about 20-30 sync'd notebooks.

GETTING INFORMATION AND FILES INTO NOTES
Notes can be produced by just typing or by drag-and-dropping text or files of photos, etc. There is also an EVERNOTE Web Clipper to clip webpages into notes. In this article I want to discuss a way to get an entire collection of files into and out of EVERNOTE, without having to drag-and-drop each one. I use this in family history to form notebooks of collections of files, e.g. letters or articles, for example. If there are 200 letters, I don't want to have to drag-and-drop each one individually. That works, but is a lot of work. A simpler method is to first open the notebook you want them to go into in EVERNOTE. This could be an existing notebook or a brand new one you just set up to receive the collection. With the target notebook open in EVERNOTE, highlight all the files to import with FILE EXPLORER or any other file maintenance program, and right-click on the collection. Since EVERNOTE is installed on that computer, the right-click Context Menu there will include EVERNOTE in the Send To option. So, with the files highlighted, right-click, then click Send To and then EVERNOTE. You will see the files one after the other being imported, each into it's own note in the notebook you had open. This does not move or delete the files from where they were, but only copies them into the notebook in EVERNOTE. If the imported files are text or pdf's, EVERNOTE will index them so they are every-word searchable. For the commercial versions this indexing takes place immediately, but for the free version you have to wait for this overnight. It's still free and the files are every-word searchable in EVERNOTE.
EXPORTING FILES FROM NOTES
To export files from EVERNOTE there are several format options. You first highlight the files to export in EVERNOTE and right-click and select Export from the drop-down menu. There are 4 options to select from. The first export option is in .enex format, which is the format to import them directly into another copy of EVERNOTE on another computer, for example. This is the way you can backup or transfer a local notebook to another computer without sending it over the Internet. The fourth option is to Export as Multiple Web Pages (.html). I didn't try this for a long time, since it looked like it was only to get html format, but I recently discovered that this option sets up individual folders named for the note and containing two files, the exported file and a .png (photo format) file. This png file is a picture of what the first page of the note looked like in EVERNOTE. The exported file is the complete file that was in the note, the pdf, doc, ppt, etc., file.
EXTRACTING THE FILES FROM THEIR FOLDERS
To work on a collection of exported files it is usually easier to have them all in one larger folder and not in individual folders. They can be extracted from their individual folders easily by using the free program EVERYTHING which is available from https://www.voidtools.com/ . After installing EVERYTHING do a search on your whole computer for .pdf or .doc or whatever type files you exported. The results will be every file of that type on your entire computer in any folder and they will usually be sorted alphabetically by their titles. Sort them by their paths by clicking at the top of the path column and find where the files are in the folder you exported them into. These will all be together in the column. Highlight the top file, then hold down the Shift key while clicking on the bottom one and all the files in between will be highlighted. This will be the entire collection of exported files. Now right-click on the collection and drag to move them into some folder on your desktop. This will take each file out of its individual folder and put them into the collection folder you just moved them to. The png files will still be in the individual folders and you can highlight all those folders and delete the folders containing png files all at once. You can now work with the collection of files to add new prefixes or modify the names in other ways. Programs like BULK RENAME UTILITY can now be used on the entire collection to modify the names. If you want to re-import the files later back into EVERNOTE, just follow the steps in the earlier paragraph about Importing and each will go back into its own note.
CONCLUSIONS
EVERNOTE is a very helpful program in family history and I use it many times every day. In fact, I am writing this Freeware Corner article with EVERNOTE. The more I use it, the more uses I find for it, and this note describes a very useful tool for me. I hope you also find it helpful.
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