Monday, November 22, 2010

6 reasons to use Evernote

Evernote is just an amazing note-taking tool. It's not so popular just like that. I've been using it for quite a long time now (I'm using the free version, which though sounds very limited, isn't!). There are tons of reasons you should too. I'll list out a few of them here.


If you stick around or even subscribe, you won't miss my future articles on creative ways to use Evernote.

Access from anywhere:
This is a big one. Evernote is really connected. Much better than pen and paper. And oh yes, if you are living in the 21st century, you should slowly stop using pen and paper for notes anyway. Evernote syncs between all your devices. Install it on any computer Windows or Mac (no support for Linux, oops), and it will sync completely with your account. Moreover, you can even access all your notes, create new ones and essentially do everything else from the web using Evernote Web.

With the new Evernote 4.0.2 that was released just a couple of days ago, you can even import notes from Microsoft OneNote 2007 and up. Evernote also has extensions for Google Chrome and Firefox, so you can take notes as you browse the web.

Evernote in any browser, anywhere in the world!
Evernote even works with mobile devices, but I'll go into that later.

Easy to use:
It's idiot proof!
After a while of playing around with it, even non-geeks will be able to use it. You just select the kind of note you want to create, type it out or snap it, whatever. Optionally, you can add tags, a URL to refer to, and maybe your location. Everything's really simple. It syncs automatically too. You don't need to worry about absolutely anything except creating notes. You will be able to access anything from anywhere!

Mobile access:
Evernote has iPhone and iPad versions, plus Android, Windows Mobile and now, in a pre-release, even Symbian's touchscreen versions. All the notes synchronize, and you can even use your phone to snap photos of handwritten notes, labels and everything else. The great thing is that Evernote detects the writing in the photos and makes them searchable too. Disclaimer: It's not an OCR tool and you cannot copy paste the detected text, though that would be awesome. In most cases, it even detects the writing from your handwritten notes that you snap with your phone.

Note that the Symbian version doesn't have all these features yet, though it's pretty great.

Organized and searchable:
With tags, locations and other attributes, Evernote is so organized and really easily searchable. you have a 0% chance of actually losing a note from your notebooks. Your notes are organized in notebooks. A new account comes with a General Notebook, which can be later renamed. And you can add new notebooks and add unlimited notes to them. UPDATE: Looks like it's not unlimited notes. Commenter Doug has explained that there's a limit of 100,000 notes per notebook.

When you search Evernote, it searches for your terms in notes, their titles, tags and as mentioned before, it even searches text in your photos.

Documents can be imported:
In any note, you can even add documents, spreadsheets and other things, though you require a premium account to do that. With a free account, you can drag and drop PDFs, though. With this, you can keep your documents organized with your notes. You can refer to a PDF ebook when looking at your notes for someting, maybe.

Not resource hungry:
People may tell you that Evernote takes a lot of memory and is sluggish, and even makes your computer crash. That was true, with the older versions of Evernote. With the newly released Evernote 4, they have created a totally new program from the ground up. It is really light, unobstrusive and never makes your computer crash. You can always keep it running in the background and take notes anytime.


Now before you change your mind, go start using Evernote and enjoy a better, more organized life!


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