5 Tips for Getting the Most Out of Evernote

By Ed Vawter On February 7, 2014 At 7:48 am · Add Comment

I use Evernote extensively for web clippings, research projects, taking notes at conferences, and just jotting down stuff I need to remember. Here are 5 tips for getting the most out of Evernote.

Take photos of whiteboards, business cards or other text information you want to keep. Use Evernote’s Camera function when creating a new note to take the photo. The ability to recognize handwriting and make those notes searchable is invaluable. And yes it worked on the note in the photo on the right.
Evernote can record a voice message but I prefer to use the voice-to-text on my iPhone. Just click on the microphone in the lower left by the space bar and speak. Macworld has a nice article on using this functionality.
Evernote can be used with other apps to automatically capture information. I read articles saved to Pocket and if it I want to keep it, I hit the share button and send it to Evernote. I it even lets me specify the notebook I want it to go into as well as being able to add tags. For a complete list of apps that work with Evernote see their app center.
Use Evernote’s ability to add your current location or calendar information to a note. Go to Settings > General and turn on “Suggested not titles”. I find this especially useful at conferences or when visiting a client at their workplace. I can use Evernote’s Places to see just the notes I took in a given location.
You can use Evernote’s ability to make a notebook public to share information with whomever you wish.

Bonus Tip: With Evernote’s latest update you can search using much more natural language without having to remember those special search codes such as intitle: or tag:. They call this Descriptive Search and now you can type a search phrase such as recipes tagged with vegetarian and it will give suggestions of the search using the advanced operators. Currently this is only in the Mac desktop version of Evernote but they say it will be coming to other versions.

I hope these 5 tips for getting the most out of Evernote help you to be more productive.