Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you this fine day?
Me?
I have been buried up to my neck in Evernote for the past month and a half or two months
as I have been putting on an Evernote webinar and a course on using Evernote.
I found three things in Evernote that I didn’t know about that I thought were so cool I wanted
to share them with you.
Are you up for it?
Evernote uber-cool ideas today on DottoTech.
I have been, as I say, neck-deep in Evernote for the better part of a couple of months
now as we just have completed a series of webinars showing people what Evernote is all
about.
Out of that, I also developed a ten-part course on Evernote.
When you dive in that deeply and you really spend a lot of time with apps, the cool thing
is they surprise you.
You find some things that you probably knew about but you didn’t know about.
Do you know what I mean?
So I’m going to show you sort of three little tricks that I found in Evernote that I thought
were so cool that they should have some light shone on them so that’s what we’re going
to do right now.
The first is when you’re working in Evernote notebooks, when you’ve got a collection
of notes in a notebook, occasionally you’re going to want to organize those notes and
you’re going to want to basically create some sort of table of contents because you
want a digest of what notes are in that notebook.
In the past, I would go type out what each note was and create a new note where I was
writing down where all the other notes were.
That is so old school and lame!
Let me show you the way the cool kids on the block do this.
I’ve got actually my entire course right here so if you peek right now, you can see
the course for free.
All you do is you multi-select all of the different notes in whatever you want to make
this digest of, this table of contents.
That creates an option here for you to take all of the notes and merge them into a single
note or save them as attachments.
But the thing I want to show you is this one right here that says Create a Table of Contents
Note.
Keep your eye on this because right underneath it we’re going to talk about the presentation
side in a minute because that was another really cool thing.
You have all the cool things in this one menu.
Create a Table of Contents Note, watch what happens when I click on it.
It is a thing of beauty.
It takes that entire note and it creates this table of contents.
Now it doesn’t fill out all of the note information but it does create hyperlinks
to each and every note.
So now we’ve got a table of contents that you can fill in more information in but if
you want to go to the fourth lesson, just click on the fourth lesson and it brings up
that lesson.
Isn’t that cool, creating a table of contents that quickly, that easily from all of the
notes in your notebook?
Now I should point out that you do have to logically name them, like I numbered them
all with a number at the beginning because it’s difficult to get the order correct
without some sort of logical naming in the title.
That creates the structure that you need but once you’ve got that structure in place,
you can create a table of contents note just like that.
So cool.
The next thing I wanted to show you is using Evernote for presentations and this isn’t
something that you would typically think about.
When you do presentations, you think Keynote or PowerPoint.
You think high end presentation packages.
But that is a two-edged sword because so many people when they’re making presentations
and giving PowerPoint presentations spend so much time and rely on the slides that they
forget to present the information in any compelling fashion.
They end up reading their slides, more caught in the transitions, and they just spend more
time on the format than you do on the content.
That’s a shame.
Now it is important.
I’m not saying it’s not important to present your content in the best possible light.
I believe that.
But for some types of presentations, right out of Evernote, you can do a darn good job
with its simple and elegant presentation capabilities.
When we’re working in Evernote, when you’re compiling your information in Evernote and
you’re writing a talk, if you use Evernote to deliver that talk, it’s simple, it’s
clean and the information becomes king.
It becomes the most important factor in presenting the information.
Now Evernote does not have a lot of fancy transitions.
In fact, it has no transitions but it does allow us to take the notes that we make and
as we create a document, it allows us to present it.
It’s going to be ideal for small format presentations.
I’m not saying that I will use Evernote the next time I’m giving a keynote talk
to a major conference.
I probably won’t but the next time I’m talking to my team or the next time I’m
talking to a small group of five or six people about a concept or a new idea that we’re
working on and I’ve got a lot of research and notes in Evernote, that’s the ideal
time to use Evernote for doing presentations.
It gives you some really nice tools.
Let me just show you how it kind of comes together.
You can present regular notes.
You can present different formats of notes.
I’ve got here in inbox, actually this is a PDF version of a slideshow that I used in
the webinar that I delivered about Evernote.
I’ll use that as an example because it’s prepared and it’s simple, clean information
as far as I’m concerned, and formatted.
Let me show you how I can present that in Evernote.
You can get into the presentation tool by going under the Note menu and saying Present
or you can just right-click on the note here and say Present.
When I right-click and say Present, it converts immediately into full screen format.
Now in this particular case, this is a PDF document.
It’s a multi-page PDF so I actually have to click on it in order to start it.
If I was just in a note, I could scroll or work my way through the note.
Now you can also present whole notebooks by using the arrow keys to jump from one note
to the next and then the up and down arrows to scroll down within that note.
But in this particular case when I click here, it will launch full screen as if it’s a
slideshow, which it is, the PDF document that I saved all of my slides into.
Here I’ve got my content ready to present and if I hit the space bar, it moves from
one slide the next slide.
Now the interesting thing is there are a few extra tools.
If we move our cursor up to the top, we see that we have a tool that they call the Laserpointer.
You can choose what color you want the pointer to be.
You can choose blue or the pink that you have.
You can use that as you’re working to highlight and to point out exactly what it is you’re
talking about.
Now in this particular case, just hitting the space bar I can move through my slides
but you can see there are no transitions, no fancy dissolves.
There’s nothing like that.
It’s just the content.
This is perfect for pure, simple content that you want to deliver elegantly and simply.
That is the concept of doing presentations in Evernote.
By the way, these tools also work in the mobility space so both on the iPhone and on the Android
phone, you can do presentations right from your phone to a projector and you can give
again this kind of simple presentation.
It’s not PowerPoint, it’s not Keynote but it is a tool that’s going to allow you
to present content.
The last thing that I wanted to talk to you about is completely in a different space and
that’s talking about security using Evernote.
One of the questions that came up in every one of our webinars was people asked me how
secure I thought Evernote was because it’s a cloud-based service where we’ve got our
notes living on our computer and then we sync them to our other devices like our mobile
devices or notebooks or any other computers through their cloud services.
The beauty of Evernote is having access to all of your information, all of your data
wherever you are.
That’s the strength.
But there’s the weakness there as well because now if we’ve got it all synced, it means
that we have a version of it living on the cloud.
Just how secure is it on the cloud?
If you do have sensitive information in your Evernote account, you have to think twice
about whether or not you should be syncing that to the cloud because you just don’t
know what could happen.
There are two levels of security that Evernote gives us.
This is actually probably an area that I think Evernote comes under the most criticism and
justifiably so because there should be a third and a fourth level of security, I believe.
The two levels that we have, first of all, any time that we create a notebook in Evernote,
we can make it a local notebook.
See right here, we can say Local Notebook meaning it’s just going to be stored on
our local system.
It’s not going to be synced to the internet.
So as long as you’re local, the information is secure.
Your data should be safe.
People can’t just hack in.
They can’t access it through the web, for example, the way once it’s stored on the
cloud, not that I’m expecting it could happen but the potential of your information being
compromised online.
So anything that’s of a sensitive nature, you might want to keep in a local notebook.
What I can do is within a note, I can choose any section of text within that note, I can
highlight it, right-click on it and I can choose to encrypt the selected text.
When I do that, a dialog box pops up that allows me to put in an encryption passphrase.
This is a password for the encryption but this is something that you want to be very
careful if you’re going to do.
While it will make that information virtually unhackable living online, it also makes it
unrecoverable if you forget this password because this isn’t like a password to an
account.
Evernote doesn’t have this information anywhere on their servers.
The only place that this password will live is in your melon so if you lose that information
then the content that’s in that note can never be unencrypted because it’s just brute
force that will unencrypt it.
There’s no system in place that will allow us to recover this passphrase—not password
but passphrase—should we lose it and it doesn’t work with any of my password management
tools.
So you’ve got to be very, very careful about encrypting your notes this way in Evernote.
I’ll editorialize here for a moment in Evernote.
There are lots of conversations in the Evernote forums where people have been requesting this
level of encryption to be extended beyond the note level.
This only works within a note.
You can’t encrypt an entire note this way unless you select all the text in the note
to encrypt it.
You can’t automatically select an entire note and have it encrypted nor can you select
an entire notebook and have the entire notebook encrypted.
A lot of conversation is that that would be a feature that people think that they should
have because they’re entrusting so much information to Evernote.
For now, it’s not there so we have to be very judicious about how we store information
in Evernote.
I hope that you found this video today to be useful, three different features in Evernote
that just blew me away, that I hadn’t really thought about much before I started preparing
all of this information for the course.
There are three ways for you to stay in touch with us if you want to kind of join the DottoTech
community.
The first is I ask you to subscribe to this channel.
That way you’ll be notified of all our new videos as soon as they’re released.
You can also sign up for our newsletter.
Then you’ll get a weekly newsletter that will tell you about all of the new videos
we create as well as let you know about things like these webinars which we produce on a
regular basis.
Finally, this is a community-funded channel through the crowd-funding site Patreon.
If you want to know how to become a DottoTech supporter where for as little as a dollar
a month you can ensure that I can continue to produce this kind of content, then I encourage
you visit my Patreon site and have a look.
Till next time, have fun storming the castle!