- What's up guys,
Pete Moriarty here,
great to have you,
and in this video I'm gonna be covering my case
for switching from Evernote over to Google Keep.
Now, an article was posted just recently on TechCrunch,
and I'll read the title here,
Evernote lost its CTO,
CFO, CPO and HR Head in the last month
as it's approaching its public listing,
which is pretty crazy.
Now Evernote's been around for a long time,
they're one of the first cloud companies
that really got cloud synchronization right,
now I got an iPad delivered to me
on the day of release,
and I remember the first app
that I downloaded and installed was Evernote,
and having Evernote on my iPad,
on my mobile phone and then on my computer at the same time,
with all of the synchronization
of all the notes was awesome,
and that was really the first really great cloud app
that took advantage
of a mix of local and online synchronization,
and eventually they brought out
the web interface and everything else.
But Evernote's kind if gone a bit of a wayside
over the last couple of years,
there's certainly still some diehard fans out there,
but most people that I talk to tell me
that they don't really use it all that much,
and it's a place where they dump information
and then don't often go to retrieve it that long.
Now personally I switched over
to Google Keep a couple of years ago,
and I kinda forgotten that Evernote existed,
until Dan Norris posted a thread with that article
from TechCrunch saying what's going on with Evernote.
And a lot of people commented on that post saying,
I've canceled my prescription,
I went back down to the free plan,
or there's no features
that have been released lately have been useful for me,
and I thought I should do a video on this
and share the reasons why I switched
from Evernote over to Google Keep,
and why you might wanna consider doing the same.
Okay so let's get the basics out of the way,
Google Keep is pretty much a rip-off of Evernote,
it's basic note-taking,
you can do text notes,
you can drop images in,
you can't do any of the fancy stuff like dropping in PDFs,
like you can do in the paid version of Evernote,
but it's great for things like lists,
like shopping lists,
I love using it when I'm going around,
like here I actually snap
all different stuff that I'm looking at,
into Google Keep,
and then I can just use the note archive feature
to archive those notes
when I've picked them up from the collection area.
But what Google Keep is great for
is obviously like any note-taking app,
having your notes and lists available on any device,
having a killer web interface
so you can access it from your computer
when you're sitting down on your machine,
and then when you're on the go,
even if you're off-line being able
to add and update and change notes,
and have them synchronized to everywhere that you go,
that's the great thing about something
like Evernote or something like Google Keep.
Now here's where they fall down,
and here's where I think the limit is these kind of apps,
when you're entering data into these,
and are trying to start collaborating,
Evernote had a shared note feature,
shared notebooks feature,
there's also an Evernote for Business
which I think is a bit ridiculous,
but apparently some people use it,
not that many though,
because their IPO isn't going that well.
But with that kind of data and that kind of sharing,
honestly it would be better
to have your notes in a different apps,
and that's because when data is contextual,
that means when it needs to be structured,
when it needs to be maybe connected
to other elements of data,
having in just a simple note that you share,
might not be the best place for your data,
for example,
if you have a to-do list,
and you've got a set of tasks,
and you wanna assign those tasks
to different members of staff,
then it's probably best to have a task management app,
something like Trello or Asana,
or anything else online that you can use
to make sure that you have reminders,
and context on who's assigned to something,
and everyone can see what's going on, right,
you can't really do that in a note-taking app,
unless you start putting people's names in there.
Secondly, things like reminders are pretty handy,
but if you wanna collaborate on them,
then it's hard to do it,
if it's all stuck in that one app.
Think about another scenario,
a customer list or a registration list for an event,
that's not the kind of thing
that you would put down into a note,
because that's gonna be stuck in one place,
you probably wanna have that in a CRM,
or in a spreadsheet,
or in a Google Form,
or basically anywhere else apart from notes.
So what does that leave our note-taking tools left to do?
Well they're great for shopping lists,
they're great for going around IKEA,
they're great for snapping things
like warranties into one place,
which is all searchable
and all the images are searchable as well,
so you've got a copy of your receipts and warranties,
just in case the receipt's faded.
I also use it,
I've got a list down here,
of course for my personal documents,
so I've got my passport and my license and my boat license
and all of those personal documents that I may lose,
or if I'm overseas traveling I may lose place of,
and I've got a digital copy
of all of those nice and safe and secure in my account,
so that's the kind of thing
that you wanna use note-taking tools for.
and for that I think the downfall of Evernote
will be that they were a note-taking app
which was amazing in their time,
it was before any other applications got
that cloud syncing perfect
and got that easy-to-use
brain-dump style digital notebook note-taking app
that you could just throw everything in.
Now I know there's some features that Keep doesn't have,
like audio note recording,
they've got a voice to text feature
but it's not quite the same,
like the integrations Evernote
has with third-party applications
and other cloud-based applications,
but what Keep is really, really great for,
and that's what Evernote should have stuck to,
is simple note-taking,
simple information retrieval,
simple unstructured data,
this is basically the digital version
of the bits of paper that sit on your desk
and fly around everywhere.
So what can you use Keep for?
Some of the cool features,
you can categorize by label,
it's a bit like Gmail so you've got labels,
you can archive stuff that you no longer need
but always search for it
and bring it back which is pretty cool,
you can pin note at the top,
there's a little pinning feature which is quite handy,
and you can also do reminders based on your location,
so it would use the GPS on your phone,
so if you say I wanna be reminded
about this note when I get home,
ping, it'll pop up with a push notification
and actually remind you,
that's what I really like.
You can share and collaborate on notes,
so you can create a note collaborating with someone else,
but it's nowhere near as good as something like Google Docs,
and honestly I wouldn't recommend collaborating
on much more than maybe a shopping list
inside of Google Keep,
it's just really not designed as a document processor.
But I find from time to time that I'll use
it for a very simple to-do list,
and I might share that with one other person.
Or if I'm creating content,
I might use Google Keep to start jotting down some notes,
and then with one button I can convert the Google Keep note
over to Google Document, which is really handy.
So the question you're gonna be asking me is,
Pete, how do I get my data out Evernote
and into Google Keep if I decide to make the switch?
And the bad news is,
I have not yet found a way to make that happen,
there are exporting tools
which can get semi-structured data out of Evernote,
but there is, as far as I understand,
no API to bring your data into Keep,
and I don't think there's a Zapier integration
or anything like that just yet,
I might be wrong, let me know if so.
So there's no way to get your data
out of Evernote cleanly and into Keep cleanly,
so there's not really a migration path,
and that has stopped some people from moving across,
but for me it was as simple as cutting and pasting
the most important notes out of my Evernote,
bringing those over into Keep,
then deleting any super important data out of Evernote,
things like the copy of my passport
and driver's license and other bits and pieces,
and what I left in Evernote
was all of that history of stuff,
I switched on two-factor authentication,
and I basically left the account,
I haven't logged in there for a couple of years now,
hopefully it still there.
But all of those previous notes I just left,
and I started afresh with Google Keep.
So this brings me to my final point,
if you can't import your data and you've got
to go for a bit of a fresh start that's okay,
if you're weighing up the two different solutions,
just like if you're weighing up
Microsoft Office versus Google Docs,
just like if you're weighing up
Microsoft Outlook versus Gmail,
you're gonna find some features
in the Google app that just aren't there,
there's features in Evernote
which just don't exist in Google Keep,
but like many of the Google tools,
you're gonna have 80 to 90% of what you need,
it's kind of like what Apple was 15 years ago,
if you remember when you had Outlook
and you had 10,000 different buttons,
and then if you switched over to Mac Mail,
you had five buttons,
but they were the five buttons that you wanted to use.
With Google you usually get five buttons,
and you wish you had number six
which is the feature that you're missing,
but 80% of the time you've got everything
that you need there.
And I'm a big fan of simplicity,
and so making the switch over
to Keep I would never look back to Google,
it's an absolutely fantastic application.
My one great little pointer with Keep,
is that if you're using Keep in a business account,
it is actually covered by the SLA
or Service Level Agreement with Google Keep,
which means guaranteed uptime,
it means support for data loss,
and it basically means that it's covered
under your G Suite Enterprise Agreement,
so all of the privacy policies
and enterprise data protection policies
that Google apply to their G Suite Business Accounts,
are covered in your Google Keep Account.
So there we go,
that's it if you've got any questions
about making the switch or you're unsure,
let me know,
and I'm gonna make a bold prediction now,
that in three years time Evernote is just
not gonna be useful at all for anyone in a business sense,
people will either have moved over to Keep,
or they're just be using something
like Apple Notes on their phones,
which half the population are already using now,
now that it's in there.
The sad thing for businesses like Evernote
and I wish it was different,
but it's just the way it is,
that functions and features of applications
like this which were once leaders,
once industry leaders,
have become just a feature to Google
or just a feature to Apple,
or just a feature to Amazon,
and that's sadly the way things
are going at the moment,
for you, the consumer or the business owner,
you can take advantage of it,
by using the best tool for the job for you,
and that case,
my recommendation is Google Keep
for all of your note-taking.
That's it, thanks very much guys,
we'll catch you in the next video.
Now if you would like to get access to these tips
and all of our other tips
which we release every single day on our public channels,
we only released a couple of videos a week,
but nearly every day we're answering questions in our forum,
posting up videos,
and we have fortnightly webinars where we talk
about these kinds of productivity tools
inside our Cloud Concierge Community.
If you've not already joined or considered joining,
head along to itgenius.com,
I'll post a link right below
where you can chat to the team and get started,
till next time, take care.