Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I’m doing very well, thank you for asking.
This is the show where I answer the questions that you ask me.
What have you asked me this week?
You’ve asked me a lot of questions about Evernote, you brought something to my attention
about Google Maps and you’ve asked me about how I create my screencasts yet again.
So we’re going to cover all of that and a little bit more today on Ask Dotto Tech.
I have to have a big shout out to Hugh Dinwiddie who saw our video a couple of weeks ago while
I was showing you how to use Google Maps, a utility for measuring areas, things like
the surface area of a roof, that sort of stuff.
And he said that I was actually doing it the hard way.
He’d discovered the easier way to use the built-in measurement tool in Google Maps and
I probably should’ve known this myself but I didn’t.
Thank goodness, Hugh decided to share with us.
Let me show you Hugh’s technique, which seems to me to be a really good way to use
Google Maps for measuring distances and areas.
Actually, let’s switch over to the Google Earth view of Google Maps and let’s find
a location that you might be interested in doing a measurement on.
So let’s just go along here.
This is a kind of semi-industrial area along not too far away from where I live actually.
Let’s say that you were one of these properties here and you were trying to figure out, maybe
you were going to put a new parking lot or you wanted a fence.
Maybe you wanted a fence the length of this property right here so you had to measure
the distance.
Now you can do it the old-fashioned way and measure the distance but according to Hugh
if I right-click my mouse—now this only works on the desktop version--I can say Measure
distance.
If I go and I right-click my mouse again over here, it measures the distance from one point
to another and look here, it gives it to us in both feet and inches, both official measurements.
It’s about 19 meters or 62 feet.
Now if I now want to make this an area measurement, say I was looking at maybe replacing all of
the concrete from there to there and adding some to here, now I’m going to add another
point by going Distance to here.
I’m going to finish it off adding Distance to here and then close off the loop.
What it does then is it measures the total area and it gives me the actual surface area
which 2,900 sq. ft. or 207 sq. m.
That’s easier than the way that I’ve showed you so I have to give a huge shout out to
Hugh for showing me a better way of doing things.
That’s one of the things I like about this show.
People ask questions.
I give you the best answer as far as I know but then people watching the show sometimes
have better solutions and they give us better answers.
So sometimes, we will be returning to questions with better solutions.
Hugh, thanks so much for jumping in and filling me in on a better way to measure area and
distances in Google Maps.
Now let’s jump over to Larry’s question.
Larry’s asking about Evernote.
He says, “Love Evernote,” love my clear and simple explanations.
Well, thank you very much, Larry.
Question: Is there an easy way to insert the date and time into a note, automatically even?
I thought about Do button but I don’t really understand what I’m doing.
Thanks Steve.”
Well, in fact there is a dead simple way of doing that.
We are in Evernote here.
That’s where I’m reading your note, Larry, and if I just put my insertion point anywhere
in the document, if I go into the Format menu in Evernote, I can insert that date and I
can insert the time.
Isn’t that nice?
A very quick and automatic way of inserting date and time in any note.
It couldn’t be simpler.
Spend a little bit of time in Evernote, Larry.
Poke around.
Look at the different menu items.
You will find all sorts of things you didn’t know you could do.
For example, you could turn this into a checklist just by putting your cursor there and then
turning on the check box and now this becomes kind of a to-do list.
You can do that from the tool bar.
You can also do that from the format menu.
So there are lots of different ways to add some extra formatting into Evernote and automatic
processes for doing things like date and time.
So thank you, Larry.
Great question.
Good answer, I think, and one thing I like more about that answer is it was clear and
simple.
Let’s stick around in Evernote for a few moments.
It is back to school time.
It’s just the beginning of September when we’re recording this particular episode
and Brad Turner mentions that he is new to Evernote but he sees Evernote as exciting
as you do some of your videos “but I wanted to set up a shared notebook” here it is,
“between myself and my son who attends high school.”
He’s entering Grade 9 in September.
Congratulations, Brad’s son.
I hope you enjoy Grade 9.
He wants to basically set up a note for each of his classes that he can enter the homework
and what day that particular class is on, some details and share the notes with dad
so dad can help and they can sync back and forth between the notes.
He’s wondering if Evernote would be ideal for this.
In fact, Evernote is completely ideal for this.
Allow me to show you.
So again, we’re still in Evernote right here, Brad.
What I’m going to do now is I’m just going to go over into my Evernote account and I’m
going to go into the Notebooks.
This brings up all of the different notebooks that I have available to me.
I’m going to create a new notebook because what we’re going to do is we’re going
to take advantage of the sharing capabilities in Evernote and we’re actually going to
create a shared notebook for you and your son that you can share your documents back
and forth and you can both access whenever you need it.
So we’re going to call this “Brad’s Notebook.”
Let’s just fix that up.
There we go.
Now when I create that notebook, it’s right here, you see it right here, I can go in by
double-clicking on it.
I open the notebook and there are obviously no notes in it yet.
I can add new notes to the notebook.
You might be wanting to add a new note, different notes for every class that your son is taking
so we’ll add Science here and we’ll add another new notebook and we’ll add Math.
Go through all the subjects because what I’m thinking about having is we might have a working
document here where your son goes in and enters all of his different homework and assignments.
Hey, he could also use that automatic date feature to add the date so you know what day
it was when he had the assignment and then he could add whatever assignments he has.
Now that’s all fine that it’s saved into a notebook but here’s a key.
You go into the Share menu and there you choose to share the entire notebook.
When you choose to share the notebook, a little dialog box will come up warning you that you’re
about to share it and then allowing you to enter the email address of said person who
you wish to share with.
So if I wanted to share it with myself with my demo account, I’d enter the email address
and then I’d tell it to share.
Now the magic thing that happens when you do that is you have the opportunity to do
one of three things: you allow the person sharing the notebook to view the documents,
to edit them or to edit and invite.
So what’s the difference?
Well obviously view, they can just view and they can’t make any changes.
Edit, you can make changes to any note within the notebook.
Inviting means that you can bring a third person into the group.
So for example, maybe there’s a peer tutor that’s working with your child and you wanted
to give them access.
You can give them access to individual notes or to the entire notebook this way as well.
So this can be a collaborative tool for you all.
The net result is if your son is being good about things and he is entering all of the
different information that he needs to in the notebook, you will be able to view the
same notebook up to date as fast as he’s entering any information from your mobile
device or from your computer and whenever you make changes or add suggestions into the
notebook, he will be able to see it from whatever device he’s accessing Evernote on.
This does mean from a computer.
It can be from a tablet.
It can be from a phone.
It’s nice and flexible.
So I think your question of using this for supporting your child’s homework is an awesome
use of Evernote.
So I have to thank you for very much for that, Brad.
Great question.
Let’s move on.
Before we leave Evernote, Jim has one last question about Evernote.
Now he’s looking about using the Evernote Web Clipper and the screenshot function but
he wants to be able to capture a screen area that’s larger than say the website that
he’s looking at individually.
So he’s wondering about using the Evernote Web Clipper for capturing a larger area.
Now the Evernote Web Clipper indeed actually does do that.
So let me just jump over back into the web browser and let’s take a look at that.
Here’s a typical webpage that you might want to be capturing.
There’s plenty of information what we call “below the fold” that you have to scroll
down to.
So if you were using a standard screen capture tool where you’re marking the screen, you
wouldn’t be able to capture the whole screen.
Now you could do that a little bit by reducing the size of the window.
But that’s not really going to help you in all cases and it’s certainly not going
to allow to capture larger pages that scroll down quite a ways.
But if we use the Evernote Web Clipper, and we’ve got plenty of videos here on the channel
on how to use the Evernote Web Clipper, this is it right here on my toolbar of my browser.
When I click on that, it launches the Evernote Web Clipper and it gives me several different
options: to save an article, a simplified article which strips out extraneous information;
but this is the one we want.
We want to save the full page because then it will clip the entire page that we’re
on.
When we do that and click Save, what will happen is it will then sync it to our Evernote
account.
We’ll give it just a second to do that.
Let’s jump back over there.
There it is.
It’s syncing right now.
We can see that happening.
So when we jump back over into Evernote, if I go into my notes here in Evernote, we should
see the new document here.
There it is right there.
So there’s the webpage that I just clipped.
Now there’s the information that we saw above the fold but as I scroll down, there’s
the rest of the page.
So all of the extra information that we wanted to capture from that page has indeed been
captured in this note.
So using the Evernote Web Clipper, telling it to capture the full page is the way that
you capture a screen area which is larger than the window of your computer.
I hope that helps a lot.
So let’s see what Laura—we have one other question.
What’s our other question?
Oh, we’ve done the Google Maps.
We’ve done the Evernote Web Clipper.
Oh, William Wilkins asks again, “How do you create a video with you in front of your
computer screen?
It’s cool.
I’d love to see a video on for my website.”
You know something?
Here’s it is.
I will teach you exactly how I create these videos.
If you just go to DottoTech.com, if you drop by our website right now, right here at the
top of the page is Screencasting Secrets, how I create my videos.
Click on that link and you’ll be sent to a page where you give me your email address
and I will send you a one-hour webinar where I teach you chapter and verse everything that
I do in order to create my videos.
Now what could be easier?
Thanks so much for that question, William.
There we go.
That is all the time that we have for this week’s show.
I want to remind you if you do have questions, please post them right here in YouTube in
the Comments area.
I will reply to everyone I can and if it makes for a good video, I will include it in the
Ask Dotto Tech videos here.
And if you prefer, you could also go to our Facebook page, Facebook.com/DottoTech and
there you can enter question as well.
I monitor both places for questions and I’m happy to answer as many as I can here on Ask
Dotto Tech.
That is all the time that we have for today.
Until next time, I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.