Maybe you’ve already heard of Evernote, maybe you already use and love it, or maybe you don’t understand why so many people literally “love” Evernote.
I am one of those who love this application and I always have it open when I work online when I study when I do research.
Anyway, I use this application every time I have to take all kinds of notes.
Evernote is available for Windows and Mac and also on all mobile platforms: IOS, Android, and Windows phones.
But What Is Evernote?
Let’s start by saying that Evernote is a free cross-platform application (App) (iPhone, Android, Palm, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, iPad) that serves various purposes, it can be used as a digital file, as a daily note-taking tool, as a task or project management system, to save recipes, ideas, notes and more.
Everything you do in Evernote is saved and synced in the cloud.
It’s precisely because it has so many uses and features that a lot of people like Evernote or find it overkill to others.
What Evernote Is For The 5 Most Popular Uses
- As A Sort Of Universal Inbox
As you know, inboxes are those folders where all incoming emails go, unless you filter them and send them to more specific folders.
When you open an Evernote account, the system automatically assigns you a special email account of the type “ username.e456n@m.evernote.com ” that allows you to forward email, Twitter messages, or any other type of content directly to Evernote.
Productivity tip: Create a notebook called _INBOX, right-click your mouse and select it as your default inbox. This way, the notes you send to Evernote will appear in this inbox, above your notebooks, ready for you to place in any of your other notebooks.
So Evernote becomes a kind of “inbox” for everything.
Because it’s cross-platform (desktop apps, web apps, mobile apps) you can save all your reference materials, ideas, homework ideas, or other digital items to Evernote, and never worry, when you need them you can retrieve that information from anywhere. devices (Mac, PC, Smartphone, tablets).
Evernote is a container to store all your information and also keep it synchronized between all your devices and available at all times since they are stored in “the cloud”, that is, on Evernote servers.
In other words, if when you get home it occurs to you to add something to the document you have on your office PC if it is in Evernote, it is in the cloud and you can access it from anywhere, work, and forget about it when When you return to the office, you will have all the additions or modifications you made at home synchronized with the files in your office.
Its search feature is good enough to locate all those documents quickly, but it also can tag notes and even organize them into notebooks.
2.To Scan Important Documents And Save Them In The Cloud
Some people scan their receipts, boarding passes, documents (ID card, passport, etc.), medical data, time reminders (which makes a lot of sense if you are on the street and have a Smartphone), videos, contracts, insurance, etc., and sends them to Evernote.
The interesting thing about scanning documents is that Evernote has OCR (optical character recognition, which means that it recognizes any scanned text or pdf as editable text).
In other words, Evernote is ideal for those who want to live without papers around.
3.To Take Notes
This is the most used application. A note can contain text, audio, video, or files of any type (including PDF, Word, Excel, and Powerpoint among others). You can create and store up to 100,000 notes in your account.
To save the programming scripts, I keep, for example, all the application codes that run on my website and even store contact cards.
You can also build your collection of famous phrases, save your favorite recipes, take note of a process, recommendations, shopping lists, plan a trip, etc., etc.
A note can have several labels and you can also organize the related notes in notebooks or notebooks. Also, if you already have several notebooks with a similar theme, you can put together a “stack” that is like a thematic library where you keep the notebooks.
The Evernote apps for iPhone and iPad feature a “Business Card” mode with the option to create a note with the camera. This mode allows you to take a picture of a business card to add a person’s information to our Evernote account. This way you can create a directory of contacts from the business cards you receive at a meeting.
When taking the photo, Evernote automatically detects the data on the card: the name of the person, the telephone and fax number, and the email address. You can also connect your account to the LinkedIn network, so Evernote imports more information about that person from that network. Networking on another level!
4.As A Reference System For Research
For those doing research who need to take notes, archive ideas, or save a section of a page or an entire web page (instead of just the URL) Evernote is an invaluable resource. For example, I used it to write this same note collecting ideas from other users of this app.
Material on the web can be “clipped” via Web Clipper, which is an Evernote browser extension.
I also use it to collect material to write my thesis.
But in your company, you could use Evernote to put together a training manual, or a manual of company procedures or policies.
5.As A Task Management System Or GDT
Although Evernote is not a management system and does not have any of the features of a To-Do list, it can serve as a simple manager if you incorporate the use of templates.
For those who don’t want to use too many applications or don’t need a sophisticated system, Evernote may be the solution.
But what if you are in an intermediate situation? You don’t want to have paper all over the place, or loads of applications on your PC, and your need for a task manager (GDT, David Allen’s method that we’ve talked about a lot on this site) is not very complicated.
In that case, you can combine Evernote with a work process (type of folders and labels that you have to put together) called “ The secret weapon ” or download a pdf from here.
Conclusions
Evernote is a simple computer application but at the same time very powerful that allows you to write down, save and organize all kinds of information through the use of notes to which you can add labels (Identifier or keyword of a note that is used for the user to order, classify and relate notes).
Like everything, the more you use it, the more applications you find. As we become familiar with Evernote, we can add features via extensions (such as web clipper that I mentioned before) or plugins.
To finish I want to share with you a video that I found where a company shows how it uses Evernote every day; In addition to being very useful to clarify ideas, the video is in.
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